Sue Monk Kidd's God's Joyful Surprise: A Road Well Traveled

Sue Monk Kidd's 1989 memoir God's Joyful Surprise: Finding Yourself Loved is in that pantheon of works whose titles tell you all you need to know, like Snakes on a Plane and Saw III. From the opening memory of her stress-induced heart trouble, we can identify. We know where this book is going, and so it goes.

Along the way, Monk Kidd strews some precious nuggets, experiences and quotations to enrich our own store of memories.

The book is assigned reading this year in Education for Ministry (EfM), an extension program of the School of Theology at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN.

A mom, teacher, and inspirational writer, Monk Kidd asks herself in chapter 3, "Have I written about God more than I've experienced Him?" Yes, her images of her life tell us. It's "algebra pie," a circle of life sub-sub-divided where God is "just another slice." It's spinning like a centrifuge, nothing left at its center. Pruning the rose bushes helps her to see how her life is overgrown with empty activity. She's obsessed with her failure to find the drawing of a light bulb that's supposed to be in her child's "find-me" puzzle. When she glances at the page upside-down, she sees it in plain sight, so large that it encompasses other objects, and a lightbulb goes off for her.

Central to her message is the idea that any event can startle us into some kind of epiphany. It's also a premise of the EfM program. She mentions the burning bush and the potter's wheel from the Bible, those roses and that lightbulb, and also her daughter's game of knocking on doors and opening them: they are all striking events that God can use to speak to us, provided that we listen for his knocks on our doors.

For a retired teacher like me, her best illustration may be an evening worship service for children when a firefly came in through a window, distracting the children. Instead of calling for attention, she turned out the lights. The children's awe was worth more than the lesson (148).

We may need silence to hear God. She tells how, stressed and sick, she retreats to an abbey for a couple of weeks. She immediately makes a list of objectives and a schedule. Healing comes only when she lays all that aside. She learns -- over and over -- "not to do battle with each distraction as it comes" (197). [I recently heard amusing advice on how to calm our own wayward thoughts. Ask, "I wonder what my next thought will be?"]

Looking for ways to "pray without ceasing," she cites inspiration bits from some great sources:

• Thomas Merton - "We already possess what we need, [but] we don't experience it." He says you need to find "your grateful center" (202).
• Paul - "Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God" (1 Cor. 10:31). She gives the example of worker on an assembly-line at a farm equipment factory who learned to see her repetitive work as feeding the world (218).
• Meister Eckhart - Wordless prayer is possible when "God laughs into you, and you into God."
• Karl Rahner - (appropos the light bulb anecdote) We "can and must always re-learn how to see." [My church's interim rector Pat Miller observed that Jesus seldom tells us how to behave, but often tells us how to see.]
• Madeleine L'Engle - "Nothing is so secular that it can't be sacred" (117).
• Morton Kelsey - "Conceptual thought does not have the same power as...images" (176).

That last quotation about images is central to Monk Kidd's approach, and to our EfM program as well. I see why our EfM editors chose this book. I found advice for EfM participants in Monk Kidd, both best practices and common pitfalls:

• Think of the Bible as "a person," not just a book. I agree: the Bible has personality, moods, self-conflicts, and evidence of growth.
• Role-playing when you read Scripture can open you up to seeing more than you're used to seeing in a familiar story. Monk Kidd demonstrates when she gets "into" the mind of a leper healed by Jesus (178).
• If you visit Paris in Spring expecting to experience Paris in Spring, you may not be open to appreciating the things you don't expect.
• Treat a passage of Scripture like a statue: walk all the way around it (181).
• Study in a small community. There are limits to what we can get alone.
• Monk Kidd is floored by the idea, "What if conversion happens, not all at once, but continuously ?" So Episcopalian, so EfM!

My favorite of all her anecdotes may be one about her son, on his way to play his first Little League game. No, he said, he did not believe that his team could win, "but I'll practice believing until I do."