A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 142 pages
• Published by: Beacon Press
• Edition: 1st Edition September 1, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 080707733X
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0807077337
• Book Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Weighs: 7.2 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
Mairs is an extraordinary woman. The acclaimed author of the spiritual autobiography Ordinary Time suffers from multiple sclerosis, yet is able to write with passion about a God that others in her position would have walked away from a long time ago. A convert to Catholicism, Mairs often finds herself on the other side of the political and ideological fence from her church's hierarchy, but her gift for finding the sacred in everyday life is so steeped in a Catholic worldview that she must keep practicing her faith. The author draws strength from prayer and some religious devotions, but she focuses that strength through her political activism in a world that requirements justice. Her self-deprecating humor is wonderful—much like the writing of Anne Lamott, although Mairs manages to create her own style. As one who suffers from a debilitating disease, Mairs has been continually challenged with the spiritual truth that it is who people are rather than what they do that makes them worthy of divine love. This is a tough but integral lesson for anyone who takes spiritual matters seriously. Through her writing, Mairs illustrates the difference between orthodoxy and faith. She chooses the latter, and given her life experiences, she should know. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
For those struggling with contradictions between organized religion and their personal beliefs, this testament to living an intimately unique brand of Catholicism will be welcome reading. Inspired by the beauty and the mysticism inherent in the ritual, Mairs, a convert to Catholicism, is able to divorce herself from the restrictive dogma, fashioning an affirmative alternative to the institutionalized Roman Catholic Church. Unconcerned by threats of excommunication or by accusations of being a "cafeteria Catholic," she embraces a dynamic God, worships and celebrates communion—without benefit of a priest—and, above all, devotes herself to the call to social action she sees as the bedrock of her faith. Although dogmatic Catholics will dismiss her views as heresy, the more spiritually minded will find food for thought and much to embrace in these thought-provoking pages. Flanagan, Margaret --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith (Hardcover) The ten remarkable essays of A Dynamic God continue the interior journey Nancy Mairs began in her spiritual memoir, Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal (1993). In that book, Mairs introduced us to her understanding of belief, faith, conversion, and social conscience, maturing within the context of family history (both she and her husband were conventional Protestants) and continuing medical catastrophes. (She has multiple sclerosis; her husband George has had multiple melanomas.) This one-disaster-after-another life, which might have led a less hardy soul to despair, has graced Mairs with both wisdom and a wise uncertainty. "I now know that I now know less about God than I did to being with," she says in A Dynamic God. "I have discarded as many fixed ideas as possible about the God I inherited, and I'm unlearning more every day." This "deconstructive process"--trading conventional notions of God for radical understandings of the Sacred--is traced in a variety of ways throughour the essays. In "Left at the Altar," about communion and community, she reminds us that the central purpose of the Eucharist is to take God in "in preparation for living God out," and that absent the outreach to others, communion has little significance. In "A Calling," she wonders what her life purpose can be, bound to a wheelchair: "My doing days are done," she says. "Wanting some task carried out, God can do better than look to me." But being has a purpose that far transcends mere doing. We have to help God be God, she says, echoing Etty Hillesum, in An Interrupted Life. I am who God is. God is who I am. It is a theological, moral, and ethical statement of profound significance, and it colors all of Mairs' beliefs and actions. Many parts of this book will be uncomfortable for conventional Christians. Rejecting belief in a personal salvation gained by taking Christ as a personal savior (she doesn't believe in hell, either, or the virgin birth or the resurrection--literally, at least), she insists that we are not in this world for the purpose of being personally "saved." We are here to be God, to love others as ourselves: "If we take care of one another, we are saved." Her profound faith in a God that is the Whole of It expresses itself in her moral and ethical life: the choice that she and her husband have made to live modestly and simply, their protests against war, their visits to the sick and imprisoned and gifts to the poor--acts of charity described with a refreshing humility. "Believing as I do . . . that our every atom bears God into being, I cannot experience myself as truly apart," she writes. "Between you and me there is no Between." But while Mairs' doing days may be done, she is still writing, and it is her wry, witty candor and fierce, unflinching honesty that draws me to her work, over and over again. As an agnostic, I find her radical doubt energizing and inspiring. I am moved by the unconventional questions she asks and by her embrace of the best of Catholicism, Buddhism, and Judaism, to seek radical answers for myself. Mobile and more or less able-bodied, I am challenged by her courageous refusal to allow her immobility to define the direction and dimensions of her moral and spiritual growth. A Dynamic God is rich, risky, and startling. It is a remarkable book. Read it. --Susan Wittig Albert is the author of Writing From Life: Telling the Soul's Story. This review is also published on the website of the Story Circle Network Book Reviews.