Pam's Book 27: The Mermaid Chair

Like Erin, I read this book because it was written by the same author as The Secret Life of Bees, which I loved. This book I did not love; in fact, it made me angry. As Erin said, this is more of a romance than anything, but it's a romance about adultery. As rare as it may be these days, I don't find anything about adultery romantic. Jessie returns to her hometown, a tiny island off the coast of South Carolina, because her mother has cut off her finger. Throughout the book we, along with Jessie, are trying to figure out why her mother would do such a thing. Somehow that remains mostly secondary.

Brother Thomas, with whom Jessie cheats on her husband (I don't feel like I'm giving anything away here, as it happens very early on and is implied in the book's description) has a quality, though, that I can't help but admire: doubt. It's not easy for a monk to admit, even to himself, that he doubts in God. I found the following passages to be the most striking:

"'Sometimes I experience God like this Beautiful Nothing,' he said. 'And it seems then as though the whole point of life is just to rest in it. To contemplate it and love it and eventually disappear into it. And then other times it's just the opposite. God feels like a presence that engorges everything. I come out here, and it seems the divine is running rampant. That the marsh, the whole of Creation, is some dance God is doing, and we're meant to step into it, that's all.'"

Later he quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "Before and with God we live without God."

Somehow I feel doubting God, even as a monk, or believing outlandish, undoctrinal things about God, is far more honest than romanticizing or rationalizing honesty. So your dad died when you were a kid. And that somehow gives you license to cheat? I don't think so.