I don't rave about books often, especially books sent to me to review. I'm kind of an ass, in fact. Just ask Matt Mikalatos. (Fortunately, he's kinder than most, and forgave me.) Harper Collins sent me a copy of Breaking up with God, by Sarah Sentilles. In truth, I requested this one because the blurbs intrigued me. Philip Gulley, Bart Ehrman, and Spong all like the same book. What the hell? When the book arrived, I almost laid it aside. I'm working on three others right now, and I barely have time to read as it is. I decided to read the first bit to see how well she wrote.
If you don't know, spiritual memoirs can be among the schlockiest pieces of shit in publishing, and the more liberal the writer, the more schlocky and loose the metaphysical language. From metaphors that make me want to kick a puppy (God is the sunrise, warming the day of my life with his presence.) to similes that simply induce rage (God is like my great aunt: maiden, mother, crone...), the language of memoir is deeply personal, so depending upon the gravitas of the writer, you're either dealing with Augustine or Jerry Jenkins, or worse, some swami no one ever heard of who makes a living insisting all paths lead to god. (Don't remember which prof told me comparative religions relied on emphasizing what was similar while de-emphasizing or ignoring altogether the major differences, but he's been proven right in more textbooks on religion than I can count.)
And so I read, until I reached this bit: "At the base of the mountain, even when we think we hear the voice of God, we can never be sure. Idols are all we ever have. Maybe the most faithful thing Moses did was smash the tablets." (pg. 7) Now, see, no one writes like that, not if they mean to tell a shitty little story about how they became an atheist (and that's not what she's doing, by the way). People who write memoirs about their faith journeys typically blow extraodinarily hard at the hard work of theology. Sentilles writes about theology like it's a native language. She reduces difficult theological concepts to brilliant anecdotes, such that you'll be reading, wondering what the hell she's doing, and then the story will explode on the page and the metaphor will open, and you'll be left gasping for breath. Well, if you've done theology and grieved your loss of faith or tried the walk of the dark night. Some will undoubtedly scratch their heads and wonder what she's talking about, much like the woman who supported Prop 8 who responded to Sentilles's questions about hermeneutics with "Naa-naa-naa-naa-naa-naa." (pg. 208) But for those of us who have read theology, who have learned the "love languages" of the theologians as they tried to make god more "scrutable," who have struggled with the missing handholds as we tried to scale the precipice of a world without faith or without a faith grounded in an error-free text, her story is poignant, and beautiful, and tragic, and joyous, and mostly it's so fucking honest you'll find tears in your eyes and wonder what the hell you're crying about. So when you get to the toe-sucking part, you'll know what I mean.
After reaching Moses, I decided to give her a little more time before I fully committed, and then I reached this place: "My mother gave me the gift of suspicion. She isn't Catholic. She's Episcopalian...My mother told me about the parts of the Catholic Church she found problematic—the crucifix, the belief in Limbo, the obsession with the Virgin Mary, the obsession with Latin, the obsession with guilt—and her ongoing critical commentary gave me an early theological education: People tell a lot of stories about God, but only some of them are true." (pp. 18-19) That was it. I was hooked. I've now read it in three sittings. I rarely call a book so good that I can't put it down, but her voice crawls inside your head, takes a stretch, and scratches out a bed, and she's so honest about her faults and pathologies that your heart breaks, and she talks about theology like it makes all the sense in the world, and it does to some of us.
Sentilles traces the trajectory of her faith from awkward adolescent to awkward teen to Yale to Harvard to Compton and back to Harvard. A friend once said that the best writers tell their own stories as if they themselves are not even in the room. It speaks of unflinching honesty, not just about others, but about myself, my faults, my fears, my story. Sentilles never looks away, even when she talks about the foolishness and desperation that made her try to change herself for men who didn't love her. It's a remarkable thing to watch yourself perform surgery on your soul (and I use it metaphorically, in her honor). Along the way we're introduced to various instantiations of god via ancient and contemporary theology. Sentilles weaves the theological narrative of her belief and atheology like many of us learned to do as we sorted through the theologies. For her it was Harvard, Liberation, and Feminist theologians. For me it was Wesley, Barth, Yoder, Frei, Brueggemann, Moltmann, and Hauerwas. All of us can tell a similar story, the story of our theological family tree, but most of us would scare the shit or bore the shit out of a reader. Not so Sentilles. Set in the framework of a Love Story (that is the subtitle: A Love Story), she uses her theological narrative to speak of fear, anger, uncertainty, trust, love, confusion, disillusionment, and acceptance, as she comes to know and unknow god.
There is so much to love about this book that it would be far too easy to keep listing excerpts from it. Her language is always straightforward, and her voice is strong and consistent, but straightforward isn't just simple. At times the language is exalted, breathtaking, captivating and just stupid fucking brilliant. Her undergraduate degree was in literature at Yale. It shows. She quotes poets and theologians with equal ease (they are the same thing, sort of), but her language often achieves the rhythm and beauty of narrative poetry. Read the section on Mary Daly's God (pg 128) and try to catch your breath. If you aren't carried away by the language, read it again, only like it's poetry, because it is. And then read An American's God (pp 195-196) about Abu Ghraib and feel the patriotism flayed from your convictions, and try to pretend we're not all culpable somehow for choosing to believe the lies. She is a prophet, but that's a cliché. Every motherfucker who talks in jeremiads is a prophet these days, but she speaks in a different voice, the voice of her own guilt, complicity, and hypocrisy. Her salvation happens as she becomes more fully human, relying less on tortured theological arguments and more on moral arguments against torture. It's an anthropological turn to being, just being: being human, being moral, being responsible, being alive, being in love. She likes to say that we choose some cages and some are given to us, but the key to being human, I think, is to recognize which cages we have chosen, open the door, and walk out, knowing that sometimes, cages are made of words.
