Isabel Anders: Awaiting the Child
“If the roles between man and woman are more a dance than a drill (ideally, as joyful lovers can attest), the relationship between the soul and God is also more of a flow in which grace and human choice, unmerited favor, and our own will, act together in concert: in coinciding channels rather than separate connections. Gregory of Nyssa writes: ‘When righteousness of works and the grace of the Spirit come together at the same time in the same soul, together, they are able to fill it with blessed life.’”— Isabel Anders in Awaiting the Child (Cowley 1987, 2005).
I give Awaiting the Child to every friend I know who is pregnant during Advent, but it is for the rest of us as well, who are beyond the “awaiting” stage in life. Anders shares a journal she kept for the four weeks of Advent during her first pregnancy. I often put in a book the date I start reading it. In Awaiting the Child, it is 1987, the year it was first published. Mrs. Anders was for three decades the managing editor for Synthesis, a monthly sermon preparation magazine based on the revised common lectionary. She now is the author with Paula Franck of Circle Of Days, a three-part series celebrating the Sunday lectionary readings.
I will always be grateful to Mrs. Anders for her help when I began writing, encouraging me, and suggesting places to send my writing. Phyllis Tickle was also a similar mentor. I can never thank them enough for what they did, but I can resolve to “pay it forward” to do the same for other writers who come to me. There are no words to describe how rewarding it is to have a relationship with a good mentor. The same is true for spiritual friends. A spiritual director also mentors, encourages, and cares for the soul of a friend. I suggest people also find an exemplary mentor. This is someone they admire, who also has talents and gifts they hope to develop. Jungian psychologists and spiritual gifts leaders would tell us that the characteristics and skills we admire in others are also in us, but we are not as aware of their presence. Simply knowing this is very reassuring. See if this fits you.
Tomorrow we have an Advent treat to hear from Mrs. Anders, over thirty years after she first wrote Awaiting the Child. Below is about her recent book on the Sunday lectionary, Circles of Days.
Joanna joannaseibert.com https://www.joannaseibert.com/
Book Signing St. Mark’s, Sunday December 4th
After 8 and 10:30 service
Letters from my Grandfather: A History of Two Decades of Unconditional Love. by Joanna Seibert
A pediatric physician, an Episcopal deacon, a mother, grandmother, and author of ten other books on spirituality, shares letters from her grandfather after she left home. She responds to his letters in the present time, giving insight into two decades of unconditional love. $20 all proceeds go to Camp Mitchell.
Advance Praise. Letters from my Grandfather: A History of Two Decades of Unconditional Love.
I love this book, which began as a collection but became a correspondence. Dr. Joanna Seibert, a distinguished Professor (and practitioner) of Pediatric Radiology at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, had treasured a fourteen-year stream of letters from her grandfather and saved them all for more than sixty years. Lately, she decided to publish them, so that her own five grandchildren, among others, might someday enjoy and profit from them. Joanna’s re-reading of the letters now prompted fresh reflections, resulting in her writing a new reply for each epistle (there were sixty-six)! Both sets ––his to her back then, and hers to him this year–– are picturesque and full of detail in the lives that each of them has led. The yield to us is two biographies, his and hers: from one side, a World War I soldier, born in 1888, a Southern Baptist who made his living repairing watches in a one-man shop; and from the other, his beloved grandchild, a distinguished Arkansan on the leading cusp of the women’s movement, who taught and practiced medicine through a time of rapid change in that––and, it has often felt, in everything. He knew life in 1888, she in 2022. So here they are writing forth and back across that historical divide––and breathing gratitude and love on every page. Three times, Joanna says, in three different ways, “you saved my life.” But, above it all, “you taught me how to love.” She wants to pass it on.
The Rev. Dr. Christoph Keller, III