Three Belated Christmas Gifts for You

I made something for you.

Actually, we all made it together, a few weeks ago, when you shared the authors that have helped you feel the most unlonely. I asked my daughter to create a word cloud of your responses. That’s gift number one, and here it is!

The second gift, at least for me, is looking at this word cloud and seeing something sacred about writing and reading and community. If you’re unfamiliar with how a word cloud works, every time the same response is offered, that response gets weighted and magnified in the cloud. Henri Nouwen’s name is biggest here because eleven of you mentioned him as your unloneliness author. Richard Rohr came in a distant second and, as you can see, Parker Palmer and Anne Lamott were right on his heels.

The gift for me here is that this community’s responses almost perfectly mirror my own experience. As I mention in the book I’m writing with paid subscribers, Henri Nouwen was the only author I was reading when I had my spiritual awakening in 2008 on Marine Base Quantico. Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward was the book that finally gave me the language to describe what happened on that Marine base. Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak was the first book I ever listened to on Audible. And Anne Lamott, well, I just read something of hers every time I want to laugh and cry in the midst of the chaos.

The gift for us all, I think, is the awareness that we are—all of us here in this Humaning community—like metal shavings being drawn back to the magnet, somehow being tugged ever so gently into the center of the same something.

Here’s the third gift for all of us: this community’s responses almost perfectly mirror my own. However, I’ve not read all the authors in that cloud, and I’m guessing you haven’t, either. I’m going to start with Kate Bowler.

Take a look at the cloud, and let us know in the comments which new author you’re going to try.

It’s been a very graceful and very human trip around the sun with you all here on Substack this year. I can’t wait to see what 2024 has in store for us!