Julie Lane-Gay

Writer, editor, catechist and trained horticulturist — Julie Lane-Gay’s titles reflect her passions well. Although she spends most of her professional time writing book reviews, obituaries and garden articles, she also manages to find time to take care of her own garden, write a book on faith and liturgy titled The Riches of Your Grace, and teach a Christian course on technology and creation during the summer. Julie’s ability to research and think deeply gives her the grace to touch hearts with words that make a lasting impression. Enjoy the rhythms of honest conversation as Julie shares her commitment to climate change advocacy, her weakness for sweet treats and her borderline obsession with the Book of Common Prayer.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

I was 6 years old, and it was my first burger at a restaurant.

One Saturday, my dad, grandfather, sister and I had taken a long trail ride, and then we cut back to Rossotti’s (affectionately known as “Zot’s”) in Portola Valley, California, for lunch. My Dad tied up the horses to the big steel rings out in front, lining them up alongside the others, awaiting their owner’s return. We climbed onto the benches of the big wood picnic tables and cherished our glasses of lemonade. The baskets came; the burger was juicy and delicious, and the bun was soft. It was early May, and the Northern California coastal hills were green and lush and soft, and I remember thinking I was the luckiest girl in the world to be eating a burger at the most beautiful place in the world.

Several years ago, we had long since moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, when our daughter was in grad school in Palo Alto and wanted us to meet a guy she was dating. This was a first — she holds her cards close — and she suggested an early dinner at the Alpine Inn. She told me the address and I said “Oh! At Zot’s!” She insisted this was a different place — far cooler than anywhere I remembered from my childhood.

While the name has morphed and they now serve avocado toast and Smoked Chicken Tinga Tacos, the picnic tables are still long and wooden and the green hills as beautiful as ever. I confess I paid more attention to the enduring beauty and ambience than the new guy. I ordered a burger and silently toasted California and my dad.

Last week, our daughter married the guy; he’s a gem. Sunday evening when the wedding festivities were finished at last, my husband said, “Let’s go to Zot’s for dinner.” It was a beautiful May evening, the hills were green, and the Oak trees shimmered in the soft light. We texted our new son-in-law’s parents and said, “Meet us for a casual dinner?” We shared juicy burgers and good wine as we toasted the past and future.

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activity (or activities) do you love engaging in, which also help you find essential spiritual renewal?

I am passionate about plants, about the bounty and beauty and tasks of gardening. I love growing my sungold tomatoes from seed, pruning my climbing roses and weeding out the relentless morning glory. I’d gladly spend hours puttering in my greenhouse and reading garden books. When I arrive in a new city, I don’t hop onto Yelp for sushi or pizza; I identify the trees. What do they tell me about the place? How cold does it get in the winter? Are the poplars as big as the ones in Vancouver? Which trees are native?

Plants, from giant pines to creeping periwinkle, embody God’s love for his world. The elegance of leaves and flowers — and their endless variety — reminds me that beauty and fragrance often serve no other purpose than for God to delight his people. And God must really, really love me — and you — if he created them that way. I find it an enormous encouragement and cheer.

My other passion is reading; nothing tells me I am on a holiday more than stretching out on a chaise lounge with a novel in my hands and a cold drink at my side. Nothing feels more like indulgence than reading as late into the night as I want and knowing I can sleep late in the morning. Try these with The Covenant of Water, the best novel I have read in the last year.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness. Every human too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you hide it?

In my Frigidaire are my two weaknesses: Diet Coke (Coke Zero does nothing for me) and Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream. Diet Coke is full of lousy chemicals, but knowing I get one can, just one, at lunch — ideally with a handful of cheese puffs — makes lunch fun.

At some point during COVID-19, my husband and I started dipping into Ben and Jerry’s around 9 p.m. — just one (usually) big spoonful per night — and, well, the bad habit stuck. Many nights, it’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie, but on occasion, it’s Chunky Monkey. You can’t buy the latter in Canada, but if I am south of the border, I buy a few cartons and parcel out the spoonfuls night by night. I hide it from my sons. Sometimes from my husband.

At a deeper level — this is the real confession — when the days are hard and there is too much to process, I read lightweight romance novels. People think of me as a reader of weightier things — and I am — but as a way to calm and settle myself, nothing works better than an old Nora Roberts or Debbie Macomber. I feel embarrassed I’m not filling my brain with deeper gems, but these vacuous stories with a few well-intentioned people distract my mind effortlessly.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?

I am doing what I have done for the last 15 years, writing and editing. I write garden articles and web content, obituaries, book reviews, manuals, annual reports — whatever I am hired to do. I recently finished a book, The Riches of Your Grace: Living in the Book of Common Prayer, and it seems to be nourishing Anglicans and Episcopalians, as well as those interested in liturgical worship but deterred by its formality. So I am now writing and speaking about my book and the topics it connects to. I’m an unenthused promoter, so this has been a new, and bumpy, learning curve for me.

My obsession is climate change. How can we care for our planet in specific, doable ways? Which sacrifices matter the most (I am trying to fly less)? I think about it, read about it, and find experts on it. My husband and I teach a course each summer called “Technology, Wilderness and Creation.” For nine days we row (yes, row) our way through Canada’s Gulf islands, looking at the impact of climate change and discussing how we might think Christianly and theologically about caring for the creation and about technology and its relationship to the creation. How might going without your phone for nine days make you think differently about trees?

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?

I find grace through the words, prayers and services of the Book of Common Prayer. There is never a prayer in which sin is named that grace isn’t alongside it. Saying each morning, “Lord God, who has bidden light to shine out of darkness, and who has wakened us again to praise these for thy goodness and to ask for thy grace” never ceases to drizzle grace into me. It changes my mood to think that the only two things I truly have to do (as opposed to what I feel I must do) that day are to praise God for his goodness and ask for his grace. It sounds a lot more doable than the 19 things on my to-do list.

I also encounter God’s grace in observing unlikely moments that probably would never occur if the Spirit were not at work. For example, I had an awful conversation recently — the friend not only sharply disagreed with me but harshly criticized me for my perspective. I sat in my car afterward and wanted to scream, disappear and run as far from my aching heart as possible. How could I sift out what was awful, what was me, what made it hurt so much? But I was in the Safeway lot, and well, I needed milk, so I headed inside, haggard and unglued. As I was tapping my Visa to pay, the young cashier stared at me. “It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. You aren’t alone,” he said, seemingly as surprised by his own words as I was. God was in that; we both knew it.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you right now?

I am lousy at spiritual disciplines — at any disciplines — but here are the three practices I try to do the most regularly:

1) I try to consistently read good, heart-feeding, mind-expanding, scripturally based books. At the moment, it’s Karen Stiller’s Holiness Here. The best one I have read in the last six months is Holy Unhappiness: God, Goodness, and the Myth of the Blessed Life.

2) I make it a priority to get to church every Sunday. Even far from home, in the mountains of Lake Tahoe, we go to the Catholic mass outdoors among the pine trees. We aren’t Catholics, but we hear God’s Word and worship with his people. I need ways to remember who God is, his love for his people in Christ, and that I am part of something far bigger. Sometimes services in remote places are weird and different, but almost without fail, they draw me back into God’s ways, into truth.

3) I use my Book of Common Prayer every day. I say the morning prayers first thing in the morning and the evening prayer last thing at night — and usually a prayer or two in the day, such as when I hop in my car or before I start work. One of the great goodnesses of the prayer book is that the prayers are there waiting for you. You can add in specifics, but you don’t have to think about what to say or how to sound spiritual. Another goodness of the Book of Common Prayer is that 79% of it is taken directly from Scripture, so even if my Bible is sitting on the shelf, I get God’s Word poured into me.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed the game and changed your heart? What radically altered your life? What changed your reality?

Shortly after we were married, my husband decided to study theology for one year at Regent College. He wanted to learn to “think Christianly,” to begin to develop a “Christian mind.” Regent is a graduate school at the University of British Columbia that focuses on educating the laity. You learn side by side with architects, veterinarians, plumbers and stay-at-home moms. And while I was not initially as inclined to go to Regent as Craig, I thought, Why not? I love school of any sort, and Vancouver sounded like a great place to be for a year.

That first year at Regent expanded into two, and they were among the most formative of my life. I not only learned about Scripture, theology and church history but also about baptism, church and the end of time. I learned to think about literature as a Christian, economics and environmental issues as a Christian. There was an abundance of deep, rich, interesting food — for my heart as well as my mind. It seemed like a luxury to do that kind of non-financial-return study. Now I see it was one of the most practical things I have ever done.

Again, the Book of Common Prayer has deepened my faith; falling into worship rooted in the book’s liturgy has shaped my understanding of God, my awareness of the essential death and resurrection of Christ, my own sin, and how it both keeps me from the love of God and hurts the world around me.

Third, I have sought out Christians who are older and wiser than I am. They have loved me, stood by me and let me watch their lives close up. I have seen them through illness and disability, through the loss of their kids to suicide and through financial disaster — and learned what it is to be carried by the Holy Spirit through these awful events and know the love and presence of God more viscerally.

We all have things we cling to to survive (or even thrive) in tough times — times like these! Name one resource you’re savoring and/or finding indispensable in this current season, and tell us what it’s doing for you.

At the risk of being repetitive, I am sticking closer than ever to the Book of Common Prayer. I am using it more each day, not less. I am praying more of the Collects (short, set prayers) and saying the short evening prayer before I go to bed more consistently. The culture keeps promising that life will get better and better with science and technology and that electric cars, stem cell treatments, finely tuned antidepressants and personal investing have the capacity to make our lives happier. I need ways to remember that’s not truth.

These technologies are fun and helpful, but they don’t solve the deeper problems of our world or our hearts. We aren’t becoming better people or better parents than generations before us.

As Christians, we have been given a different narrative. We don’t get to make up our story or even amend it. It comes to us as a gift.

The Christian story of the world is God creating, our rebelling, God redeeming in Christ and Christ coming back to restore all things as they were meant to be. It is both hard to see this story and, once you look more carefully, hard to miss it.

QUESTION #8: dream

God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

Expectations make me nervous. I hope you can expect me to be present and attentive to God and to the people in my life — my friends, my family, my church and the people I encounter in a day. I am still weary from writing a book, but I am interested in learning more and writing about living in the liturgical year. Not the January-to-December year but the church calendar where we begin with Advent in late November, looking to the coming of the birth of Christ, and then we celebrate Christmas, await Easter and celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

What interests me about the liturgical year is: 1) What might it look like to pay more attention to these seven seasons, and how might they help me to root myself in the gospel more deeply? 2) What are practical ways I can aid myself and my family to be more aware of what God has done in each season? How can we see God more vividly in our daily lives? Again, I am lousy at disciplines (and too busy to pursue them), so I want ways that don’t take a lot of effort.

Julie points out that there are two stories competing for attention in our lives. The world tells us technology, entertainment and success are the keys to lasting happiness and fulfillment. The Word of God tells us a very different story — that the cause of humanity’s suffering is sin and that God sent his Son to redeem, forgive and restore us. Which story will we believe — not just when it’s convenient or we feel like it but also when it’s challenging or dull or heartbreaking? How we answer that question will define the trajectory of our lives.