Book Review: God Uses Cracked Pots

Title: God Uses Cracked Pots

Author: Patsy Clairmont

Date: 1991

Publisher: Guideposts

ISBN: 9781561790302

Length: 152 pages

Quote: “Picture an empty pitcher with a network of crack down the front...Where does the light shine through? The cracks. That is the same way the Lord’ light shines through our lives. Not so much by what we do well naturally, but by what He must do in us supernaturally for it to be so.”

For healthy people the LaHayes’ “Temperament Inventory” is a pretty reliable guide to whether you’ve inherited one of four permanent physical traits that shape human personalities: High Sensory Perceptivity, a Long Brian Stem, a Strong Will, or Attention Defciency. (Most of us have one; some have two or three.) There are, however, unhealthy condition that can give false results on the Temperament Inventory. If you were talking through the test with a counsellor rather than filling out a form, the flags might be easy to spot:

“As a child I had a lot of friends...different sets every year because my parents moved so much! I had a good time, dreamed of settling down in one home for life, then married a man who moves even more often than my parents did. Now...I have panic attacks when I’m outside, so I stay at home all the time. I don’t have friends or socialize much, because I’m afraid people will notice what a useless wimp I am. I’m shy, dread social invitations, and sometimes wish I had some sort of painless permanent disease that would make it socially acceptable for me to hide away in my own home—wherever I’m trying to claim as a home. I’ve dabbled in all kinds of arts and crafts from poetry to paper lace, but I have no talent. I have the behavior patterns of an introvert but I’m not really an introvert at all!”

The way the Temperament Inventory was done, however, Patsy Clairmont mistook herself for an introvert for years, and people in the churches where she spoke mistook her for an example of how people can “overcome” introversion. (Introversion should not be overcome; it should be cultivated.) Clairmont succeeded in “becoming” an extrovert because, as the stories the Queen of Self-Deprecating Stand-Up tells on herself in this collection, she was in fact a strong-willed  extrovert whose serious emotional problems, caused by homelessness, coincided with an early stage of hypoglycemic/cardiovascular disease.

I think we as a culture need to think seriously about the damage a nomadic lifestyle does to children. Rather than allowing social workers to screech about how living in a house with WAAALLPAPER ON THE WALLS! is a functional equivalent to being homeless, let’s face the fact that having lived in more “homes” than you are years old is an upscale way of being homeless. Corporate policies (including those of some churches!) need to emphasize preparing local people to move into job openings rather than “transferring” any married employee between cities, or even neighborhoods.

Real introverts don’t usually try to avoid our feelings by maintaining constant motion until we break down. We’re blessed with the ability to feel our feelings, recognize them, and make informed choices about whether to heed or ignore them. During my parents’ nomadic phase I was aware of a tendency to feel afraid of or averse to any more new places. Actually my sense of directions and memory for faces seem to be about average, according to tests, but my mother claims to believe they were meant to be as overdeveloped as hers and simply shut down after a few trips across the continent. Instead of whirring and chattering about and claiming lots of “new friends” everywhere we went, I whinged and grumbled and didn’t want to bother learning the names of people if I didn’t know I was going to be allowed to have real long-term friendships. I had silly fears and nightmares and wanted to go home.

Like Clairmont, I liked being able to predict and control my immediate environment in one place, rather than constantly worrying about what other environments might be like. I know this was the key to my emotional feelings about being moved from place to place because, when I reached the age of eighteen and realized I could decide where I wanted to be, all anxiety about being in new places evaporated out of my mind overnight. I had a home and could choose to visit, work, or travel in as many other places as seemed good to me. So I did. Instantly packing bags and buying tickets became fun, and anxiety became a thing of the past. Of course, I didn’t spoil things by making any emotional investment in any commitment-phobic, itchy-footed, unstable boys who wanted to consider changing their primary address within the one lifetime. I married late and have never been agoraphobic.

Clairmont seems never to have reached this point in the pattern; instead she reified her feelings and spent many years exploring every other possible way to change the feelings but saying out loud, “I need a single permanent address.” In this first book and in her subsequent books, she flails around in her emotional mess, trying to make the possible-answers contemporary popular psychology offered fit her real story. Since contemporary popular psychology, even as presented to “normal” adolescents as career and relationship counselling, was still based on a clinical model, it didn’t completely fit anyone who was able to live and work outside a hospital. Its advice was a nearer miss for some people than for others. It offered people like Clairmont lots of opportunities to pamper their “inner child” and blame their parents, rather than focus on the facts involved in their present-time adult (or adolescent) emotions.

I read Clairmont’s books as an extraordinarily frank and insightful look into the chaos of the extrovert brain, but Christians who’d been sucked into twentieth century efforts to normalize extroversion wanted to believe that they represented a good example of stories everyone ought to be able to relate to. They’re not. If you’re an intelligent, creative, analytical, artistic, literary, historical, mathematical, mechanical, musical, mystical, or philosophical person you’ll read Clairmont’s family anecdotes as Views Into Bedlam.

“I...can walk from one room to another and not know why I’ve gone there.”

“‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.’ Marty’s persistence matched his rhythmic tugging...I felt like screaming. In fact, I did. To a little guy my response was probably similar to the release of Mt. St. Helens as I erupted, ‘What?!’”

“As I watched out the window, there...was a rainbow...The lady beside me responded with, ‘Oh, look, a rainbow!’ ‘It’s mine,’ I stated too abruptly. Realizing my overreaction, I softened it with, ‘Excuse me,’ and then under my breath whispered, ‘but it is mine.’ I needed that rainbow-gram too bad to share it with her.”

“‘[Y]ou don’t want to learn how to play the piano’...Boy, did he hit a chord. No way was I willing to put in the time and effort.”

“I mentioned that ol’ Mr. Party Pooper wouldn’t let me buy the delightful hats, horns and confetti. In unison the two young men turned to my husband and said, ‘Thank you!’”

No, these are not stories all of us can relate to. They're funny--and they're stories that make some of us glad we're wired for a more efficient approach to life. 

Clairmont's intention is to give glory to God through these stories of chaos in the homes of extrovert Christians, however, and show that her family live in a blessed mess.