Attending the Wendell Berry Reading Group gathering last month, I discovered I may have stumbled into unintentional profanity.
While enjoying some amazing homemade guacamole, a friend randomly mentioned the word "bejeebers" is a euphemism for bejesus. I took notice because Lisa Graham McMinn and I had just received page proofs for our forthcoming book, An Invitation to Slow. Guess what word shows up in the Very First sentence and three times in the first paragraph?
While it is undoubtedly true that smoke detectors save lives, far more often they scare the bejeebers out of people. If you’re not entirely sure what bejeebers are, they have something to do with hearing the shrill, pulsing sound of all the smoke detectors in your entire house going off at 3:30 in the morning because your Airbnb guests burned a bagel before their early flight. That’s when you discover what bejeebers are, just as they are being scared out of you.
It's a good beginning, right? Who knew we risked a profane introduction to an inspirational trade book? Not us. Apparently not our editor or publisher either.
Words are tricky. (That we call it the Wendell Berry Reading Group is itself quite strange because we finished reading Berry's fiction several years ago).
Before you judge us, keep in mind that An Invitation to Slow is about noticing how much and how often our fight-or-flight nervous systems get activated in contemporary life. Our rush to judge others happens so quickly these days. How do we slow down the fear and vitriol?
Yesterday someone tried to kill a candidate for the US Presidency. And he was the second person to make such an attempt this summer. The same day a Waffle House employee was shot and killed by an angry customer, two years after a Subway employee suffered a similar fate.
And the fact that I know all this bad news is itself bad news. We have messaging, social media, networking apps, workplace sandboxes, and email continually chiming, dinging, vibrating, popping little red circles onto our retina displays. Our sympathetic nervous systems are on call 24/7 thanks to today's technology.
Anyone who knows me will attest to my love of technology, but even a technophile knows things can get out of balance.
Thankfully, I'm married to a sociologist-turned-spiritual director who is good at balance. In each chapter we pair an impulse of our day with an invitation to be slower, more intentional, with our choices and practices.
Slow to Speak: An Invitation to Quiet
Slow to Grasp: An Invitation to Contentment
Slow to Fear: An Invitation to Courage
Slow to Anger: An Invitation to Empathy
Slow to Judge: An Invitation to Humility
Slow to Envy: An Invitation to Gratitude
Slow to Consume: An Invitation to Generosity
Slow to Isolate: An Invitation to Community
Since I've revealed the beginning paragraph already, it's only fair to give you the final paragraph of the book:
And so we end as we began, boldly claiming that the grace we long for persists, available to us in any moment. The magic of our activity is less real and less satisfying than the mystery we encounter in the pauses. God’s grace endures, present in all things: peopled interactions and solitary moments, in blooming flowers and dying ones, in morning birdsong, the rotating of our planet that brings sunrises and sunsets, and our journey around the sun bringing winter, spring, summer, and fall. God stays lovingly present in the interstitial spaces. There is nowhere God is not. We embrace the comfort of this truth when we slow down, pause, and enter the moment.
Lisa wrote most of that paragraph. You can tell because she mentions nature and because the prose is beautiful.
I wrote the bejeebers part. Be kind, though. It was an accident.
The print and electronic versions of An Invitation to Slow will be available in November or December, with the audiobook coming early in 2025. We have videos of various lengths describing An Invitation to Slow. (1 min | 4 min | 8 min)
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