Arriving at Amen, the forthcoming memoir-infused guide to spiritual practices by Leah Libresco, reads like a fantastic series of blog posts combined into a less-spectacular guide for small groups getting their hands dirty with spiritual practices. Oddly, Leah seems to respect her audience a bit too much by assuming that they are as geeky and morally driven as her. This limits Arriving at Amen’s usefulness in the pastoral context, which it seems marketed and designed for — but makes it more interesting for me.
Leah has a great internet presence — from her blog Unequally Yoked to a new radio show Fights in Good Faith and now reporting and doing analysis for FiveThirtyEight. Leah is, basically, a very liberally well-educated math nerd who turns to religion in the same way that she turns to everything – full-voiced and with the intention to win.
Arriving at Amen riffs on some historic spiritual practices, all billed as Roman Catholic (though I, as a cranky reformed Presbyterian, can still get some mileage out of them) such as the Divine Office, examen, lectio divina, and several others.
Leah has lots of helpful tips here. The Divine Office (a set structure of prayers that I’ve found healthy in my own life) can become a means to organize your time and a way to transition to and from work on your commute. She suggests using the Jesuit daily self-reflection of the examen as way to proactively think about virtues that you can cultivate rather than as another opportunity to spiral into guilt. She even rethinks lectio divina, the practice of meditation on scripture, by suggesting that the reader translate scripture into another language as she does with American Sign Language.
All of this is helpful advice — but it also demonstrates the scattershot nature of Arriving at Amen.
Leah was (and is, because grace perfects rather than destroys nature) geeky and conscientious: the sort of person whose conversion story is that she argued herself into needing to believe that God exists.
Leah’s introduction is a perfect example of her conscientiousness and intelligence. She points to Javert fromLes Miserables as a character she looked up to as a child for his steadfast adherence to the rules. Javert held firmly to the rule of law, and even when that meant that he needed to be punished, he valued the law over his comfort.
This is all a bit too specific if this book is actually supposed to be useful in parish life. Needless to say, nineteenth century French literature isn’t a turn-to for most of us when describing ourselves, but it landed well with me. In fact I am likely the perfect audience for Arriving at Amen in all the ways that I, as a seminary grad, am not typical.
For Leah, the difficult part of the Christian faith wasn’t that a just God would condemn people to hell but rather that grace is possible without the law being broken. It’s hard to move away from a tight legalism without room for repentance while still allowing room to grow in holiness.
On the other side, a focus on God’s grace rather than the law can fool us into thinking that we don’t need to actively work on increasing holiness in our life but rather let the gospel transform us without us doing anything.
I found Leah’s story of attempting this through the use of these spiritual practices fascinating but I doubt our society is quite as Kantian in its desire to do the right thing without being noticed as either Leah or I are.
More than this, I doubt most small groups like to talk about Kant as much as I do.
Arriving at Amen ends up being an ideal help for a very small audience to discover spiritual practices. As such, it’s inoffensive but not terribly useful. I really appreciate her blogging voice, but as a broadly useful guide to a larger set of spiritual practices, Arriving at Amen falls short.
Arriving at Amen is due out May 2015, available from Barnes&Noble and Amazon.
Greg Williams is Communications Assistant for Sojourners.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!