Sue Monk Kidd, a new favorite author...

So when I'm not napping, I've been reading a few books. Not only have I been reading books for class, I've also read a few books for pleasure.

One of my friends recently gave me a copy of The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. For me, this was one of those books that once you pick it up you can't set it down. Last Sunday I spent the entire day in bed reading this book.

Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina - a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come (from the back cover).

A quote I like from the book:

"Most people don't have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about."
I loved the idea of bees having a secret life, just like the one I was living.
"What other secrets have they got?" I wanted to know.

I loved the depth with which Sue Monk Kidd writes, so I decided to pick up another one of her books from the AMBS library, one that was also recommended to me by a friend.

The last few days I've been reading When the Heart Waits. While The Secret Life of Bees is a novel, this one is a moving account of Monk Kidd's own story through some of the darkest days of her life and how waiting can be a fertile emptiness, the space that we most need for inner awakening to take place. This work is really spiritual direction in book form.

Though I'm not finished the book yet, here are a couple of quotes:

"If I can't trust God now, when I need him the most, how can I ever trust him again?" she cried. It wasn't a matter of whether God could be trusted, of course, but of whether or not she could wait. She didn't understand that there was a journey to be made here. A waiting, a gestating, a slow and uncertain birthing. That is where God was to be found. Not in the erasing of the experience, but in the embracing of it.

"Contemplative waiting is consenting to be where we really are, " (Brother Anthony) explained. "People recoil from it because they don't want to be present to themselves. Such waiting causes a deep existential loneliness to surface, a feeling of being disconnected from oneself and God. At the depths there is fear, fear of the dark chaos within ourselves."

Next of my list of books to read is The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.