Book Description
“Getting Honest” is a compelling, poignant look back at a life that began as one of sixteen children born to parents in the destitution of rural Mississippi. There are episodes of domestic violence. There is frightening racism. There is poverty. But for me, there are other worlds, too. Worlds I read about in the magazines my mother brings home. Escaping from Mississippi did not mean escaping from my past. From the events that really shaped me as a person.
Spiritual journeys are almost never noticed as such while they are taking place. It’s only in retrospect that, if we are particularly blessed, we can discover that we have been on one.
For me, an ordained Presbyterian minister, the realization would come when I went back home. To Mississippi, some fifty years after leaving it for what I assumed would be for good as I had absolutely no desire to ever return. I had come full circle. Something had been moving me through my entire life; something had been with me, guiding me all along. And the destination created in me a profound need to reexamine my life, to consider my journey, and to discover what the journey had required of me: a brutal kind of honesty. What the journey ultimately would do is force me to come to terms with my past, to come to terms with myself.
