 REDEEMED:
A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal
Sanity, and the Peace that Passes All Understanding,
By Heather King (Viking Press)
It’s a bit odd for me to be reviewing
this for Jersey Beat, because pretty much everything
we write about here has to do with music. And
Heather King’s only connection to punk
rock is that her kid brother Joe plays in a
little punk rock band you might have heard of
called The Queers. In her first book, Parched
- an often funny, frequently tragic, self-deprecating,
and brutally honest memoir of her years as an
alcoholic - Heather recounted her descent from
small-town New England girl to - by her own
admission - a frowzy, sleazy drunk who spent
her mornings sipping Sea Breezes with besotted
old men in divy bars, and her evenings shacking
up with any sleazebag that would have her. Somehow,
in between the blackouts, the greasy waitressing
gigs, and the hangovers, she managed to graduate
from law school with honors and pass the Massachusetts
bar exam on her first try. Finally, after hitting
rock bottom, her family staged an intervention,
shipped her off to rehab, and she found sobriety.
After conquering her physical demon, Redeemed
picks up the story as a sober Heather seeks
to fulfill her spiritual side. The book touches
on episodes of her life after rehab –
the death of her father, marriage, breast cancer,
divorce, career – but as the title suggests,
the running theme is her embrace of Catholicism.
She reads books, she tries out various denominations
(the Protestant churches were too much like
a social clubs, she writes, and the Unitarians
so politically correct that they referred to
Jesus as “the J word,”) and finally
finds the solace she’s looking for in
the Catholic church.
As a lapsed Catholic (and former altar boy)
myself, I can identify with her attraction to
the symbols and rituals of the Church. The parish
I attended as a boy was a grand domed cathedral,
festooned with statues and murals, with its
own seminary and convent. The art, the grandeur,
the dignity of the priests and the passion of
the nuns; all of it casts a spell. For me, that
all came to an end at adolescence, when I couldn’t
find the spirituality beneath the pomp and ritual.
Heather does; in her ongoing quest, she treats
religion as an ongoing process, like walking
through an endless hall, constantly opening
up one door that leads to the next. She embraces
Christ on a deeply personal level, constantly
questioning herself and her own value, and finding
answers in the Scriptures, spiritual counselors,
Sunday mass, and the sacraments.
Parched proved that Heather is a compelling
writer who can tell a story, and for me, the
best parts of Redeemed are the autobiographical
sketches where she focuses on a particular incident
in her life - the family vigil for her dying
father, the disentegration of her marriage,
the brush with breast cancer that exposed her
to the inhumanity of our health care system...
She recreates these moments in painstaking detail,
dredging up emotions that most of us would rather
forget, in clear, precise, yet vivid language;
this could easily be the stuff of a great novel.
As for her spiritual quest, well, in all honesty
her unfettered embrace of Jesus Christ and His
church at times made me uncomfortable. She confronts
her qualms with the Catholic church - the pederast
priests, the doctrine that keeps women from
the priesthood, the church's stance against
sexuality, divorce, birth control, abortion...
and her faith lets her sweep these qualms aside.
This is a woman who, as she reveals in the final
pages of the book, leaves a place set at the
table every night... for Christ, or whatever
His grand design brings into her life. "Does
this cross the line between passion and pathology?"
she asks. Convert, or California wacko? That's
a question best settled between Heather and
her God. The rest of us can only envy the grace
she's found, and hope that somewhere, someway,
we can find our own peace.
|
