Johnny Cash once stated that he had been everywhere. a Renee Altson has also been everywhere. She has been in the land of abuse, humiliation, shame, guilt, anger, and deep sorrow. This is a road very few people will ever travel. Stumbling toward faith is a profound and depressing read. It hurts and it stings; it is personal. To be sexually abused by your father, while he prays the Lord�s Prayer or sings the hymnody of the church is the most perturbing and despicable form of abuse. When anyone would lose their sanity over such atrocity, Renee fights; she fights for her sanity and for her humanity.
This book is the story of a woman who has tried all religious means to find refuge from her pain and, as a result, it deepened her agony and led her to even further disparity. The church, the house of God, the abode of comfort, the haven of rest, became the abusive ecclesiastical house in the life of Renee. She sought a place to belong and found that people wanted to control her instead of loving her. She sought love and found abuse; different forms of abuse. She experienced abuse unfathomable to most of our modern minds.
Renee�s story is the story of how fundamentalism can ruin the lives of people. It is the story of how man-made law can lead a person away from the very God they seek to worship. But Renee�s story is more than that; it is a powerful, though, implicit, critique of the evangelical world; a critique of those who have made God after their own image.
My first impression of this book was one of skepticism. Any book using different fonts, two-word sentences, and lower case style, strikes me as another emergent attempt to demoralize the catholic church; but this book caught me off guard. It truly spoke to me as a man; as a Christian; as a churchman. I love the church. It is my mother and I cherish its ideas and dogmas, but I am well aware of its sinful tendencies. After all, if it were not sinful Christ would have no business in sanctifying His bride.
I was struck by the simple poems and I was even struck by the verses she referenced. It was open and honest. The book runs like a series of journal entries. It appears to have no connection, but everything in it connects when one realizes it is the story of a woman who has been stripped of every form of human dignity and now finds herself trying to put the broken pieces of glass together to reconstitute her broken soul. Continue reading “A Review of Stumbling toward faith”
- “I�ve been everywhere man!� (back)