The Streets Around Here Tell You Exactly Where You Are

Abstract

This is a series of reflections on pain, meaning making, memory, the body, and God. Through an exploration of significant personal encounter and the ways it intersects with global or distant calamity, I ask questions about how to locate God in a world full of ambiguity, chaos, and apparent senselessness. I search for Him in tsunamis, in war, in homelessness, in trauma. I interrogate the relationship between a loving sustaining force and the body’s fragility, and what that fragility means in the context of redemption and eternal life. Above all, embedded in each essay is the question, “What can writing do?” In a world where suffering is all around us, why write? In what ways can words draw people to live more fully, bring them into closer communion with others and the divine? Can writing give us any answers? Should it?