Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

doubts

A guide through the messy work of discovering: Review of Out of Sorts by Sarah Bessey

“Sorting” is not a word we the people of the United States use very often and certainly not in the British way. But it’s a perfectly apt description of the process of discovering and re-discovering what I believe and why. And Sarah Bessey guides us through this messy work in her new book Out of Sorts.

It is a record of her own faith journey and a guidebook, in a way, of the path through a process that can be disorienting.

Like all good stories, it begins with a familiar phrase:

beautifully sorted out

And while there’s no tidy ending (because all of our journeys are unique), it’s not a story devoid of “happily ever after.”

The sorting of a person’s beliefs can be a beautiful thing. But it’s not necessarily easy.Out of Sorts cover

Out of Sorts doesn’t offer a how-to approach to finding your once-and-for-all set of beliefs. But it offers encouragement to question, to remember, to grieve losses and hurts, to look back on your life and church experiences and theology and determine what stays and what goes. Bessey’s book is like a friend who sits with us as we sort, but who can’t make the decisions for us. Those are for us alone. She offers her own experiences, her own work of finding a fresh look at Jesus in the Gospels, of discovering ancient practices she’d not been exposed to in her charismatic upbringing.

“Lean into your questions and your doubts until you find that God is out here in the wilderness too. I have good news for you, brokenhearted one: God is here in the wandering.”

It’s the kind of book I want to re-read to soak up the richness. Like a guidebook to a favorite vacation destination, I want to consult it again and again until the landscape is as familiar to me as my own neighborhood.

“You may sit by the trail and cry over the poisonous, lovely things being left behind. You’ll wonder why you’re still holding on this thing or that thing. You’ll find that some things you were ready to toss have become dear, so precious, that you’ll carry them in your lap to keep them safe.”

Encouraging, prophetic and challenging. A must-read if the faith tradition in which you were raised seems in conflict with the faith tradition you have now.

St. Francis 101: Review of Chasing Francis by Ian Morgan Cron

Everything I knew about St. Francis of Assisi before reading Chasing Francis can be summed up in these words:

I may be an evangelical Protestant, but I know that Francis is a Catholic saint from the thirteenth century who’s famous for holding up concrete birdbaths in people’s backyards. (38)

And with that, Ian Morgan Cron captured my heart with his wit, writing style and cleverly convicting observations about the church today. (Disclaimer: I received a free copy of Chasing Francis from Zondervan through the Booksneeze program in exchange for my honest review.)

chasing francis coverChasing Francis is fiction but it reads like a memoir. Chase Falson is an evangelical pastor of a New England church he started, and his faith is crumbling. When he makes some controversial remarks in a sermon, he’s asked to take a leave of absence. Not knowing where else to turn, he calls his Uncle Kenny, a Franciscan priest living in Italy, who encourages him to travel to Italy to meet someone who can help him through his time of doubting.

He’s surprised to learn that the person his uncle had in mind was St. Francis of Assisi. The rest of the book is an account of Chase’s pilgrimage to sites important in Francis’ life and the life of the Church.

How much did I love this book? I recommended it to three people before I was halfway through it. It’s that good. I’ve heard good things about Cron’s memoir, Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me, but I haven’t read it yet. “Yet” being the key word. It’ll be on my list now.

Not only is Chasing Francis a convicting look at the state of the Church today, it’s also a primer on the life of St. Francis. The book includes a study guide at the end with extra snippets of information about Francis’ life and thought-provoking discussion questions. I would love to read this book in a group and discuss the study at the end. I dog-eared dozens of pages, sometimes two per page, to record the wisdom written there.

Two of my favorite lines that relate to the setting of the story and give you an idea of Cron’s genius:

Gelato is what heaven would taste like if someone froze it and crammed it into a paper cup. (124)

When God created language, he neglected to include words that could do justice to the dazzling beauty of the old city of Florence. (36)

A warning: Chasing Francis will create a longing in you. A longing for authenticity, for beauty, for encountering God outside of the walls of your local church. Be prepared to desire a pilgrimage of your own. But don’t let that scare you. Chasing Francis is a must-read for the Church today. Surprisingly (or maybe not) we can learn a lot from a long-dead Catholic saint.