Nancy Mairs' new book is reviewed at the end of a review of a Norman Mailer book. I have highlighted the paragraph that caught my attention similar to the meaning of life I noticed in The Peaceful Warrior.


A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith
Reviewed by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 16, 2007

The vagaries of faith, on the other hand, reside at the heart of Nancy Mairs' "A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith," which in some sense picks up where the author's 1993 book of essays "Ordinary Time" left off. In Mairs' view, faith -- and, for that matter, "God Godself" -- exists almost entirely beyond conscious comprehension, but then, that's exactly how it ought to be.

"The need to reduce God to a person having mental states with which we are familiar -- desire, anger, retribution (but seldom, alas, a sense of humor) -- does God little service and ourselves even less," she writes in this stunning collection. "We would do better to stand before God in silence, allowing the Holy to open to us without our definition or direction. Only God can say what God is. We can only allow ourselves to be taught."

"A Dynamic God" owes its power to Mairs' sensitivity, her attention to detail, her honesty about herself. In previous books, she's taken on child-rearing, infidelity and her struggle with multiple sclerosis. (Wheelchair-bound, she is increasingly unable to care for herself.)

Throughout the essays here, she touches on these and other issues to get at not just the roots of her progressive Catholicism -- Dorothy Day is a favorite role model -- but the nature of faith in a world where it often doesn't seem to be rewarded, where "most of us face, from time to time, more than we can handle."

For Mairs, this is the whole idea: not that good people are blessed or bad ones punished, but that the universe itself is a question mark in which we choose to believe that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. It's messy, inconvenient, even illogical if we look at it intellectually, but if we want to come to terms, what other option do we have?

"My life is a lesson in losses . . ." she notes late in the book. "Thanks to multiple sclerosis, one thing after another has been wrenched from my life -- dancing, driving, walking, working -- and I have learned neither to yearn after them nor to dread further deprivation but to attend to what I have."

What Mairs is after is a quality of "mindfulness," which is how she frames her faith. It's a quiet thing, personal, the province of heart as much as mind.

God, after all, defies the intellect; that is the nature of belief. As Mairs affirms: "Believing as I do that God is the Whole of It, that our every atom bears God into being, I cannot experience myself as truly apart."

david.ulin@latimes.com

David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.