The writers were part of a growing and increasingly creative round of social protests in Russia where puns, humor, play, singing and creative interactions seem to be the center. One long time activist said that she had given up trying to explain the situation to her husband in prison. Olga Romanova, encamped in a Moscow park, told the New York Times:

“I started to write, ‘There’s a wedding taking place here right now, and now a cow has come,’ ” Ms. Romanova said. “Then I understood that I have to cross it all out because he’ll think that I’ve gone crazy with grief or something is happening with me. How will they explain to Putin? There was a wedding. A cow came. How will they explain that?”

I admit that Russia's love for and belief in dissident writers is what drew me to study the language and visit the country in the first place. Lately, I've been memorizing poems by Osip Mandelstam, who died en route to one of Stalin's camps, and Anna Akhmatova who took on the task of trying to find words for the unexplainable on my own "modest stroll" to and from the train station.

I won't pretend to understand what is happening in Russia or that my own situation emulates theirs. But I know that I wanted to join in a round of "Katyusha" when I read about the march.

The people in this book, while they come from different geographic and religious corners, share one culture. They share the pain of a toxic culture of religion and sexuality. Themes of shame, isolation, fear, silence and vulnerability surface and resurface. At the same time, the healing and wholeness that many have found are also a part of the same fabric. When one person works toward healing, we all step closer to it.

Over this last weekend, at the Calvin Festival for Faith and Writing, I met a young writer named Stephen Lamb. Stephen has come closer to this articulation than I have been able to, and even more, he has found a way, not so much to say it, so as to enact it. First some background:

A few months ago, Rachel Held Evans, a popular evangelical blogger issued a challege. She posted an excerpt from John Piper, an "influential Christian preacher and author" as Wikipedia has it. In the excerpt, taken from a speech at the Desiring God Pastors Conference, Piper concludes that:

God has given Christianity a masculine feel...And being God, a God of love, He has done that for our maximum flourishing both male and female... He does not intend for women to languish or be frustrated or in any way suffer or fall short of full and lasting joy in this masculine Christianity. From which I infer that the fullest flourishing of women and men takes place in churches and families that have this masculine feel.

Held Evans then expresses her own weariness about being called upon to respond to statements like this, knowing that she will be dismissed and discounted as "angry." Her challenge was issued to male bloggers everywhere: respond to Piper in order to celebrate the "basic value and dignity of God’s daughters."

Hundreds of men and women responded with an outpouring of remarkable and moving blogging. Stephen Lamb was one of them. In his post, Stephen writes about being the great grandson of fundamentalist preacher John Rice, who urged women into silence so that men could take control of the "church work" as God intended. He calls into question what Piper might mean by "maximum flourishing." But then he turns to my book, and especially to the last two chapters, the stories of Genevieve and Genevieve's mentor and friend Becca Stevens. He reflects on the kinds of social structures and beliefs about masculinity and femininity that truly keep people from their full flourishing, and then he decides something remarkable that gets directly at the connection between Mark and Genevieve that I still don't have the words for. He writes,

I resolved that, in the future, every time I hear another pastor claiming that Christianity has a God-given masculine feel, or opining about women staying silent and knowing their place, however explicitly they articulate those thoughts, I will make a donation to an organization like the one Becca runs (Magdalene/Thistle Farms), helping women like her to live out their God-given calling.

And Genevieve, too. Thanks, Stephen.

Every time I see her face, I fall in love with her a little bit more.

P.S. Click on the link to see the photo.

I decided to get the ingredients to try bitter melon stuffed with ground pork and a chile/bean sauce to mellow the bitterness of the melon. To Sam’s delight, I also brought home dumplings, green tea mochi, and rambutan—spiky looking little fruits, the size of plums. These last even the cashier didn’t recognize and had to ask others what they were. We discovered that they have a delicious, sweet, almost grape-like texture and flavor. We learned that these fruits that look like sea urchins are the apples of South East Asian, so we started planning a trip to Vietnam.

The stuffed bitter melon was delicious with its balance of bitter, sweet, salty, spicy Here’s my version:

1/2 lb. ground pork

2 T. soy sauce

1 T. chopped fresh ginger

2 T. chopped fresh green onions

2 T. chopped fresh garlic

1 T. lime juice

1 bitter melon, halved and de-seeded, then halved again.

Chili-bean sauce (store bought)

Combine the first six ingredients. Stuff into the melon and steam in a big skillet with a cup of water for 20 minutes. Check periodically to see if more water needs to be added. 

Serve with more green onions to garnish and chili-bean sauce. 

As I continued to wander around, a man led me to the very back of the store in the corner where there were Ziplock bags of freshly made "kenkey," a fermented corn paste. "This is what we eat in Ghana," he told me. I took the smallest package I could find, which still wasn't very small. The clerk then added a tub of spicy shrimp paste to my basket. "About ten o'clock in the morning in Ghana," he said, "people will eat a little kenkey with some shrimp paste and then they won't need to eat for the rest of the day until evening."

That night, I heated up the kenkey and added the shrimp paste: a powerful taste sensation. The spicy shrimp paste--ginger, hot peppers, garlic and dried fish--was just to the edge of my spice capacity, and the peppers were something like a chipotle in their smokiness. The kenkey is a very dense cornmeal with a strong sour taste. I can't say that it was the most delicious meal I have ever eaten.  The sour and spicy fought with each other in my mouth, and I could only eat tiny bites at a time. Later a friend told me that of all the Ghanaian starches, kenkey was her least favorite. But I could see how it was good nourishing food that could take you a long way into the day.

Last night, I finally boiled up my enormous African yam--as I found out that my huge tuber was called. It pureed into a beautiful silky and light texture like my mother-in-laws creamy mashed potatoes, and will make a great base for soup or a starch for some kind of curry. I think I will try it with the shrimp paste and see if that goes better.

Today is the release day for See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity. One friend suggested I celebrate with a Godiva hot chocolate. Another suggested a drink called The Aviation. I admit I am stuck. It seems wrong to let a moment for celebration pass without some kind of acknowledgement. But I did eat quite a bit of Halloweeen candy yesterday. You see the dilemma. I am open to suggestions.

I ordered something called "The Southern," partly because I was intrigued by the name. In the U.S. "The Southern" would probably mean grits, but here it meant pierogis. This still has me mystified. What "south" is indicated by potato and cheese pierogis? Is it the south of Poland--Krakow--where I first tasted pierogis? Or the south, and Polish, part of Chicago? I have no idea, but I'd welcome thoughts.

My disorientation continued as Rachel and I listened to a couple of old farmers in the next booth talking rapidly in a language I didn't recognize.

"What is that?" I asked her.

"Plattdeutsch," she said, grinning.

A "southern" breakfast in a northern town, in a restaurant run by East Asians, in a place where at least four languages are spoken readily. Fun.

If you want to eat off the beaten path, go to southern Manitoba.

Last weekend, I took the train from Chicago to Grand Forks, North Dakota and then crossed the border into southern Manitoba. Because I have been trying to make this trip for eleven years, the journey had the feeling of a pilgrimage.

(My first attempt to go to Manitoba was aborted at O'Hare when I realized I had left my passport back home in Leadville. My second attempt was also aborted at O'Hare when I got word of a family crisis. Would the third time be the charm?)

When I finally crossed the border with my friend Rachel, it was dawn and the sky was clear, enormous and just turning pink. The fields of corn, soybeans, canola and sunflower had been turned over, for the most part, and the leaves on the few trees were brown or fallen. The grasses in the ditches and along the river were spectacular brown, gold, pink and orange.

One of our first stops was in Rachel's favorite little town in Manitoba, Neubergthal, where many of the houses still have their barns attached, in the traditional Mennonite way. Neubergthal is a little stretch of highway, without a commercial location of any kind. It was early morning, and a few children were waiting at the end of their driveways for the school bus.

"I would love to live in Neubergthal," Rachel said. At first, I couldn't imagine why. As I looked around at the leaf strewn lawns and the roughly hedged yards, I had a hard time understanding Neubergthal as a place. It had, on the surface, so little to define it. There was no river, no forest, certainly no buildings that hemmed it in to create what I thought of as a sense of space. I realized that I was looking at Neubergthal and wondering where, under all that sky, would I hide?

Rachel saw it differently. In the city, she feels boxed in by the houses; everyone's boundaries end too soon. When her sister lived close by, she could hang a towel out her window to signal how the night had been. That helped Rachel feel that she could extend herself a little bit beyond her own particular box. But in Neubergthal, she imagines that she could live expansively against the sky.