Larry Moffitt's review of...
MIRACLE MOTORS: A Pert Near True Story
By Peggy Senger Morrison
By way of full disclosure, I used to be Peggy Senger Morrison’s editor at ReligionAndSpirituality.com, the religion news service of United Press International. Editors are real bastards. We change people’s perfectly good prose. We mess up art. Occasionally an editor will get a truly exceptional writer about whom he/she recognizes they are unworthy to edit, aside from delousing for typos and changing every instance of “that” to “which” and every instance of “which” to “that.” Peggy is a truly exceptional writer.

Miracle Motors is way more than a motorcycle travelogue seen through the prism of a Quaker pastor, raised by straight-arrow parents, who tried to be a good girl and mostly succeeded. She comes with a few quirks acquired from having an extraordinary ability to really see people and the flaw of giving a crap about what happens to them. A good girl she is, but not exactly the pastor’s wife her parent’s envisioned.

It is precisely those quirks that make Peggy Senger Morrison, storyteller and self-described “provacatuer of grace,” such a readable writer. She is a fully realized human being endowed with a set of empathetic feelings and the jaundiced shields required for survival and humor. She is a biker. Not a biker chick. A biker. Think of finding yourself in line next to a leather-clad motorcyclist at the Starbucks in a truck stop. The two of you sit down with your mocha fraps and she proceeds to make your jaw drop telling your about her newly adopted congregation being struck by a quadruple homicide. Or the conversations she has with God.

Reading her book is like that. Along the way, we also learn a few things about the Quakers. They’re not Amish and they don’t manufacture oatmeal.

She writes eloquently about the motorcycling experience and the rest of her life that transpires in and around her ministry. The bike saddle is her prayer room. Riding is where she gets most of her talking with God done.

Regarding the book’s subtitle, “A Pert Near True Story,” she quotes a cowboy poet she knew who told her “pert near true" is defined as "something that is so full of truth it doesn't matter whether it actually happened or not.” Every few pages has that kind of workable truth, often rendered with great humor, and things I wish I had thought of first.

She is a woman of deep and practical faith who chats up God frequently with the expectation that the conversation will not be one-sided. God’s voice doesn’t come to her through burning bushes or booming out of an offstage sub-woofer. She has trained herself to recognize the voice via her own intuition and in the words of others. A medical student from Central Africa asked her out of the blue, “When are you coming to Burundi? I need your help.” In those brief words Peggy heard God’s unique voiceprint, or the “Present Christ,” or whatever you want to call it. It was all she needed to motivate her for three trips to an African country that hadn’t seen many straight-talking, motorcycle-riding preacher women. Like maybe none.

She reveals enough about herself to indicate she has been has honest in telling her story as it’s possible to be in such a book. She’s clearly not your father’s Quaker pastor.
The world is full of people who can write well but have nothing to say. Conversely, there are those who see what goes on but can’t articulate it worth diddly. Peggy observes and describes life with clear eloquence. Unforced wisdom, useful and harvestable, abounds throughout. Peggy Senger Morrison is a gifted storyteller who knows jack, and has given us a book of true-life adventures tuned to a frequency appreciated, not by theologians, but by you, me and joe sixpack.

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The Sidecar – A Companion to Miracle Motors

The Sidecar – A Companion to Miracle Motors

This photo of Drs. Indiana and Henry Jones can stand for so many things in my life: the loving but fraught parental relationship, my relationship with my God, even my relationship with my own belief system. Sometimes my world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket, and there sits my faith in the sidecar – all smug and self-contained. Its suitcase is packed; somehow it still has an umbrella. My faith is supposed to help me, but I am not sure that it is doing anything but weighing me down. It certainly can be critical at times. Yet, I know I can’t afford to lose it, and then, just when the bad gets worse, my faith can bail me out in unexpected ways.

This study guide is an exploration of the sidecar. Miracle Motors: A Pert Near True Story, is a rollicking tale, but it raises many more questions than it answers. There are problems of consistency and heresy in there. If you take what I am saying seriously, you either have to do some interior re-arranging or get out the torches and pitchforks.

The gospel writer said that “Jesus never spoke to the crowds without using parable, but when alone with his disciples – he explained everything.” If that is what you are hoping for in this sidecar study guide, you are going to be disappointed. And when you think about it, even with the explanations, the disciples with an all-access back stage pass to the Son of God, didn’t really appear to get it.

 

I don’t either.

But I don’t think that should stop us from wrestling with the realities.

Sometimes you wrestle a blessing out of the process.

So the goal of this study guide is two-fold. First, to lay out some of these very messy ideas – just to wrestle with. Maybe you will find some answers - maybe you won’t. I bet you will have some stories of your own to share. Eventually there will be a section of exercises. Real world suggestions for activities you can do to encourage your own inner hero. Because nobody else is going to do it for you.

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In Any Decent Inquisition

I am aware that I am lucky to live when and where I do. In any other age and in many other places, my brand of uppity women don't tend to last long.

Above and beyond my tendency to mouth off, and not do as I am told, there is the fact that some people take offensive offense about the loving relationship that I keep. And yet we live with expansive liberty and joy. Mostly unharassed.

And just to push my luck I have freely published a book that would get me burned in any decent inquisition.

Now to top it off I can put onto the world wide web a brazen list of the heresies contained or implied in Miracle Motors: A Pert Near True Story.

Here they are, not complete, just the Top Ten.


10. God doesn't get mad, or even sad, when you reject God.
9. Humans are not fallen - We do not inherit sin as a birthright.
8. God speaks to me directly and often contradicts religious authorities and their interpretations of the Bible.
7. It is not possible to be disconnected from God.
6. Subverting the dominant paradigm is often a very good and Godly idea.
5. The death and resurrection of Christ had nothing to do with punishment.
4. God is often closer during sin than during righteousness.
3. Hell as a place of eternal punishment is a false construct.
2. Salvation is a transformation from good to better , not a reprieve from doom.
1. The Bible contains the best pert near true stories that I know.