NBC’s relentless flogging of Parenthood during the Olympics totally worked on us; we watched from episode one and never missed seeing it in real time. It’s not a flawless show, but between the phenomenal cast and great writing and the fact that it does not feature police or medical procedure, and is actually sincere and not all winky-winky ironic and is on regular free broadcast TV, I’m a happy camper. The showrunner, Jason Katims, is also a force behind Friday Night Lights and you know how I feel about that. (Jason! I love your work! Have your people call my people!) The season finale aired last night, but if you want to catch up before fall you can watch online. (I just found out on IMDB that Maura Tierney was originally cast in Lauren Graham’s role, and then her breast cancer treatment forced her to quit. Which makes me sad, because as much as I love Graham, I also adore Tierney and think she would have been great.) (P.S. according to Wikipedia, her treatment is going well.)

Last night’s episode especially made me think of a book I recently read—Paula Huston’s Forgiveness: Following Jesus into Radical Loving. I picked it up because I’ve been a fan of Huston, not for the topic, though I figured there’s always something new to learn. Despite the subtitle (which reminds me of every Christian book I read in college—everything was “radical”…hospitality, evangelism, quiet times, worship, time management, you name it), it was a powerful read. It’s published by Paraclete Press, whose “what are doing” info includes this statement: “Although Benedictine spirituality is at the heart of all that we do, we publish books that reflect the Christian experience across many cultures, time periods, and houses of worship.”

Huston is very, very thorough in her look at this topic, which is discussed incessantly in churches but rarely grasped by any of us. She starts with the wide-angle “the problem of evil” (oh, that), gradually narrowing focus throughout the book with sections like the need for truth before reconciliation can begin, how to tell a real hurt from a wounded ego, and spiritual disciplines of the Desert Fathers (and Mothers) that help prepare you for forgiveness, until finally on page 150 of 288 we get into the forgiving of other actual people. If I’m making it sound long, dense, or dry, it’s not. At a small trim size—about the size of a prayer book—the pages are not long, and I read it more or less in one afternoon. My point is there’s a careful foundation laid in the book so that when the rubber meets the hard road of reconciliation, we’re ready. A little bit ready.

The very first actual people Huston writes about are our parents, who we often find ourselves needing to forgive even if they haven’t done anything overtly wrong to us. Simply by virtue of being our parents, they rack up a lot of offenses, perceived or actual. Huston sums it up pretty well and universally, I think, when she writes about her own parents:

“What had they done that was so hurtful? The answer is easy: with all their efforts, they had not managed to produce a perfect person—and I found ways to resent that.”

In the final sections of the book, we get to how to receive forgiveness, which may be hardest of all. The book deals with demanding material, but Huston’s humility and honesty and gentleness—along with the intellectual and theological rigor she applies—make it all seem possible. (That said, if you’re not already of the Jesusy persuasion, this book may not be for you. It is written firmly from a Christian worldview in which one’s ability to give and receive forgiveness is directly tied to and dependent on the Christian gospel.)

But, even if you don’t read Huston’s book, you can watch Parenthood. The whole season has basically been a stew of intertwined people—parents, children, cousins, friends, spouses, siblings—needing forgiveness, grace, and compassion from each other. There are real hurts, wounded egos, the necessity of truth and the difficulty of that, of making even small turns by degree toward each other when there is History. If you’ve read any of my books, you know this is all stuff in my writer DNA, and any piece of art or culture probing the same soft spots of life is speaking my language.

Watch Parenthood online
Order Forgiveness straight from Paraclete (available in all kinds of formats and on sale until May 31).

Or:

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…for the Murray Library Deseret Voices series.

Murray Library

166 E. 5300 S.

7 p.m.

I’ll be talking a bit about what it means to me to be a writer whose stories are shaped by living in the west, and doing some reading, Q&A, and signing.

Hope to see you!

“The creative writer is compulsively concrete—that is, he is bound to the things of experience. However strongly he holds his ideas, he cannot express them in the way a philosopher or a social scientist does. He does not deal in concepts, in formulated patterns of thought, but in iconic ways, in the way of images and imitations; he is concerned with people, places, actions, feelings, sensations. His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the window after dark, not fill the rooms.”

“The prayer of anyone hoping to make himself into a writer should be ‘Lord let me grow into such a man as has something to say! Let me be one of those that Henry James speaks of, one of those upon whom nothing is lost. Let understanding and wisdom be engraved on my mind as deep as the lines of living on a wise and weathered face. Teach me to love and teach me to be humble and let me learn to respect human differences, human privacy, human dignity, human pain. And then let me find the words to say it so it can’t be overlooked and can’t be forgotten.’”