Cris Harris

I Have Not Loved You With My Whole Heart

Spring 2021 Oregon State University Press

I Have Not Loved You With My Whole Heart is a memoir of trauma, healing, faith, and violence, told in overlapping essays. At its center is the author's father, the Rev. Renne Harris, a heavy-handed, alcoholic, Episcopal priest who came out in the height of the AIDS crisis and died of HIV in 1995. 

Cris Harris pulls the reader through turning points in a household crowded with abuse, addiction, neglect, acceptance, and grief, as well as the healing that comes after reconciliation. In recognizing perpetrators of violence as complex people--as selves we can recognize--Harris wrestles with paradox: the keening dissonance of loving people with hard edges, the humor of horrible situations, and how humor can cover for anger. He shows how violence can mark us and courageously lays bare those marks, owning them as his own precious history, born of a fierce species of love.

I Have Not Loved You With My Whole Heart will speak to readers whose family members came out late in life, and to those who lost loved ones in the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s and 1990s. Those with complicated relationships to faith, survivors of abuse, and anyone who has lived with family crisis, will also find healing in these pages.

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Paradox

Nowhere Magazine 2017

Narthexes, fetid water, Rick Steves, dovecotes, wreaths of marigolds, Lazarus, human truths, Darjeeling, goat sacrifice, Kali, leather straps, terra cotta tesserae, successive blessings, Constantinople, mosaic bloodshed, enormous overbites & the container of that which
cannot be contained.

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"Paradox" explores conundrums of faith and history in Northern India and central Turkey.  Read the full essay here