Book Review- White Knuckle Love: A Memoir of Healing

 

One of my New Year's resolutions was to try to read fifty books again, like I had done twice previously. I'm hoping to get back to work, so I thought it would be a good idea to get my neurons firing again... but it's now almost April and I've completed three. Safe to say, I don't think I'm making it this year. Maybe part of life is dealing with failure?

That being said, through "Speakeasy," the organization I mentioned in my previous post, I received several books. "White Knuckle Love" by April Stace was the one I decided to read first (because it looked like it was the shortest, haha), and even though I'm not going to get to fifty books this year, I still want to be intentional about the books I read and spend time reading books by women/ minorities/ LGBT folks... communities that I need to sit and be intentional about learning from.

The author of "White Knuckle Love" is April Stace, someone I had not heard of before, but in reading her book I realized was a fellow American Baptist ordained minister. Her life story intrigued me as well, as she and her husband divorced after coming out as a lesbian.  (Shout out to the ABC for not rescinding her ordination after coming out!) Through the course of the book, she finds love again through a genderqueer person named Lou, and we find out in the Epilogue that they are married.

The content of the book details her experience through both of those life events but also highlighting what she learned from two year long commitments as a hospital chaplain.  She weaves in deep questions of faith, finding joy, love, and death not in a theological treatise but conversationally as she reflects on the lessons God taught her through those experiences. 

Far too often religious books are written from the perspective of an expert or someone who knows all the answers to life's questions, but Stace writes from the perspective of a real person, on the same journey of life that the rest of us are on. I appreciated that, but also upon finishing feel connected to the author in a much deeper way than if I had read a systematic theology book. Her epilogue covers the beginnings of the COVID nightmare we've all lived through the past year, and a part of me wishes this book came out later this year or early next year after the pandemic is in our rear view mirror rather than our daily lived experience. All the more as she volunteered to be a chaplain at the beginning of COVID, knowing how nightmarish the pandemic was at the beginning in New York, where the author lives.

In much the same way that I was left with questions about the author's life, the author was intentional about leaving the questions regarding faith brought up through the course of the book unanswered as well. And maybe that's the point. Faith is about being okay not knowing the answers to all of life's questions, and trusting in a God that exists amidst that ambiguity.

All in all, I enjoyed it. It's not a book that I will continue going back to for insights and "ah ha" moments, but it's a book that will stay with me for a long time because of how openly the author shared her life, and the connection that produces with her readers, of which I am glad to be one.