[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”1617952168″ locale=”us” height=”160″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51zm3Fd25nL._SL160_.jpg” width=”107″]Page 2: Micha Boyett – FOUND
Found isn’t the book one will recommend for a systematic treatment of Benedictine spirituality (nor does it claim to be), but it’s worth reading for the company we keep. Boyett, as an author, is a woman we recognize as weary and heavy-laden. She is a woman bearing resemblance to ourselves, a woman having deigned to be and do for God but swallowed by “constant, gnawing guilt because I never went to live in Nairobi and work at the orphanage school. I hold the unknown faces of children who no one fed, no one rocked, no one read stories to because I never showed up for them. Instead I studied poetry.”
Having entered motherhood, Boyett chronicles the shedding we all must do between the dawns and dusks of our lives, and through Benedictine spirituality, she learns to love Jesus more than her brave deeds. She learns to become most urgent about awareness and prayer. And she confesses the idolatrous desire to be remarkable. Her book transcends the limits of motherhood and lays poetic claim to a universal struggle and rescue. “’God, I think you’re carving a long tunnel in me, toward something better than guilt,’ I whisper out loud to the room. I believe in grace. On my best days I actually believe there was a cosmic magnetic gathering that happened in Christ on the cross. In Jesus all ascetic suffering, all the sacrifices I ought to be asked to give, were collected and woven into him.”
Having titled the sections of her book after the hours of prayer, Boyett begins with, “Vigils: Midnight (“Prayer in the darkness. Keeping watch. Stillness.”), ends with “Compline: Night Prayer (“Resolution. Quietness of the soul. Trust.”). And for what could have been an artificial structure imposed on Boyett’s journey into motherhood and Benedictine spirituality, the book keeps to this time, if subtly so. There is no grand epiphany or decision. There is no righting of prayer, even if there is finding God. But Micha Boyett and her book move from the fervent anxiety of the vigils to the calm consolations of compline, from the fears of losing and being lost to the trust in having been found. “There’s never a moment when you learn how to be whole. . . . There’s only the constant prayer that your heart would become what God is making it to be.”
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Jen Pollock Michel is author of [easyazon-link asin=”0830843124″ locale=”us”]Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith[/easyazon-link] coming this summer from IVP Books.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
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