For one reason or another--full moon? lack of caffeine?--there are a number of books I read this year that I loved but didn't review, and this is a good time to mention a few that would be fine gifts for discerning donees and for your deserving self. Two memoirs are notable for their integrity, kindness and honesty, and remarkable for their lack of scandalous behavior.
is both uplifting and funny, a winning combination. Braestrup was married to a Maine state trooper who was planning to leave the force to become an ordained minister. A fatal car crash left those plans, and Kate and her children, shattered. She decided to become a minister herself and is now chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, whose task is to serve wardens and their families and to assist victims and families during search and rescue missions. She writes about her experiences movingly and often wryly, laughing that she, a "famously loquacious person, [has] a job that mostly requires me to just show up, shut my mouth, and be." She can also bring you to tears, as when she recounts tenderly washing her husband's body for burial: "I knew that I had to walk up to that which would hurt me most: Drew's body without Drew in it. [In] all the time that I shall live without him--time roaring and tumbling at me like some merciless, black avalanche--I will be able to tell myself that I bore our love with my own hands all the way to the last hard place." She has found immense joy in her work, becoming a conduit for God's love, a cool cup of water offered to thirsting people.
If Kate Braestrup is a cool cup of water, Sara Miles is a warm (and sometimes crusty) piece of bread. Miles was a left-wing journalist who covered revolutions and the disenfranchised for years, a lesbian and mother who led a decidedly secular life. One Sunday when she was 46, she walked into a San Francisco Episcopal church out of curiosity, took communion and was transformed, an "unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion." She still can't explain it, but she embraces the miracle and the mystery. The story of her journey to that transformation and the results of that first communion are told in Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion (Ballantine, $24.95, 9780345486929/0345486927). She came to realize two things: the "truly disturbing, dreadful realization about Christianity [is] you can't be a Christian by yourself," and, "If I wanted to see God, I could feed people." And she does, with the help of church people and street people, starting a wildly successful food pantry in her church that has in turn seeded other pantries. While telling of her struggles and achievements, Miles is irreverent, intense, and thoughtful about God, people, and herself.
Henri Nouwen said, "Our greatest fulfillment lies in becoming bread for the world." Kate Braestrup and Sara Miles embody this in different ways, and tell their stories with grace, passion, and a good bit of humor.--Marilyn Dahl
