Mary Cartledgehayes

It's awkward, really. How do you review so personal a tale? Too personal, in fact. Call me a prude, but that's too many details about the author's sex life, included, I presume because she wants to demonstrate her humanness despite being a pastor, a minister, a person of faith. I mean there is purpose in the book, as she seeks to reveal that not all clergy are pompous asses with a hot line to God (though many, she and I would agree on this, are). But the fact that she and Fred decided to have sex on their nth date, or that she likes his penis, or that she likes to say "fuck" a lot, either as a verb or a noun or an expletive, somehow begin to wear thin after a while. Sort of C. S. Lewis meet Henry Miller perhaps? And were people in the last say four decades, really shocked to find a pastor wearing blue jeans?

Yet there are moments of tenderness, especially in pastoral care. Those of us who've carried out that role know how tender, exhausting and exhilarating those journeys are - and how uneasily they sit with the ecclesiastical bitchiness that is so much a part of ecclesianity. Come to think about it, maybe it was the bitch in me that reach the point where I did not want to read another sermon and then have it followed by comments on how wondrously gobsmacked the listeners were. I'm happy to read sermons from time to time, and even blog my own, but if they're wondrously good I'd prefer to allow the reader or listener to decide for themselves. No, I'm sorry, it all became a little self-congratulatory after a while. And the piano lessons? Yeah I got that they were respite from ministry and that the young tutor was a spunk, but even that became "oh my goodness I am good," after a while. Good preacher, good pastor, good pianist, what's not to like? Perhaps just not good with bushels and lights.

So yeah, I'm sure you faced challenges, and you certainly write well, but enough already okay?… (mehr)