Reckoning Life and Death: A Book Review of Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power and Justice in an American Church By Eliza Griswold

 Recently Eliza Griswold was a guest speaker at Christ Church Ponte Vedra in the Diocese of Florida. Though I could not attend her talk, I did have the pleasure of reviewing her newest book Circle of Hope. I offer it to you here. Below is a picture of Eliza with my dear friend, the Rev. Laura Magevney at Christ Church.

In 2003, Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold consecrated the first openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Church, dividing the church in a modern schism caused by a profound rift. Griswold’s daughter Eliza was 30 years old, an investigative journalist and poet, who remembers watching her usually reserved father “put his head in his hands and cry over his failure to hold the church together.” Today Eliza Griswold is considered by some one of the best political reporters in the country, she is a Guggenheim fellow and a Pulitzer Prize winner for general nonfiction.

As a pastor’s kid, reporter for the New Yorker and poet, Eliza Griswold says, “I’ve spent much of my life at the edge of belief, observing how people organize their lives around what they hold sacred.” She earned a front row seat for this journey because of her father’s ministry, and she used what she learned from that vantage point to “analyze human concepts of the divine in order to understand their universal principles.” Her discovery that “almost every religious community has to contend with a leaky roof because inevitably the outside world bears down,” led to her most recent book Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power and Justice in an American Church.

In 2019, Griswold encountered the Circle of Hope “church,” four thriving congregations  which began in 1996 as a group of people who felt called to come east from California and bring young people to Jesus. They billed themselves as progressive evangelicals, a microcosm of the radical evangelical movement, promising “not only to reclaim the moral heart of evangelicalism but also to serve as Christianity’s last, best shot at remaining relevant.” When Griswold met with the pastors for the first time in 2019, their “roof” had already begun to leak.

This book is not only the story of the rise and fall of yet another effort by human beings to claim the truth about Jesus, but it is also the story of Griswold actually joining Circle of Hope. She immersed herself as a reporter not only intricately weaving her own life into the lives of the pastors and a group of people attempting to live with Christ in the center of all things, but also ultimately buying into their theology and ministry. Perhaps this total immersion by the author was an attempt to recover from the pain she witnessed her father exhibit and internalize with the breakup of his beloved Episcopal denomination. She said, “I really thought it was going to be fun and inspiring, an existential and important project.”

  Bishop Frank Griswold opposed schism at any cost and considered its possibility a personal failure. However, at the end of his term, he was succeeded by a woman Katharine Jefferts Schori and in 2009 the Episcopal Church officially removed gender and sexual orientation barriers to the qualifications for electing a bishop. Bishop Griswold's consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson proved to be a dramatic and lasting turning point in the life of the church at large. 

Like the four gospels, Griswold tells the story of Circle of Hope through the eyes of the second generation of four pastors who at first focused outward on healing the world like Jesus called his disciples to do, ultimately turning in on themselves struggling with privilege and power, sounding more and more like the disciples, arguing “who is the greatest among us?”

As a cautious reporter, Griswold witnessed all that the pastors struggled with and lost, and yet they kept their commitments “to lay bare their mess” for her, as they had promised to do. She never forgot that despite all the conflict, they always closed their services with “Go in Peace” reminding her of her father’s theology of the extremely thin line between the three Abrahamic Faiths and his underlying principle of humility: who are any of us to presume that we know who it is that God does and doesn’t choose?

Closing with A Benediction, Griswold tells of her father’s health issues which coincided with Circle of Hope falling apart, challenging the reader to live up to the humanness of showing up in the fullness of who we are…how we live and how we die. In a recent interview, Griswold said, “This book is a hint of how we can start to understand the embodied nature of life, death, rebirth and renewal.” It is fitting that she end with the story of her beloved father’s death, his struggle with the world’s understanding of God as Mercy and Love, and the great truth that there is nothing we can do to separate ourselves from that Mercy and Love. They are part of our DNA.

The four pastors, and their story so expertly told by Eliza Griswold, accomplish just what she says exegesis of scripture does: “examines a story or an experience for what it reveals not only about the world or God, but also about ourselves and what in our embodied consciousness must grow, or die.”

If you are human, this story will give you hope about the cycle of life, of churches and of peace.