Thoughtful, compassionate book for searching souls
The WaterWillHoldYou is an easy-to-read, accessible, and thoughtful story of a friendship with God. NOT in a scary, arrogant style, but with a tone of understanding and humor, the book explores getting to know God. I loved it and have bought many copies for gifts. It's a great book for people who WANT to believe, but are not sure how.
Clearing a Path
Lindsey Crittenden is intelligent and discerning; not one who would turn to God or prayer on faith alone. She is also a person to whom life has given an unusual amount of loss. The fire of isolation brought her into an Episcopalian church, where she met people who believe in God and the teachings of Jesus yet who welcome questions, keen intellect, and authentic sharing of the vulnerability of the heart. Encouraged to experiment, Lindsey discovered faith based not on dogma but on personal experience. Regular prayer creates space for insight, re-framing, and a bodily knowing that one is loved by a Divine presence.
After finding a connection to well-being through prayer, Lindsey experienced betrayal and loss that was perhaps the straw on the camel's back. She then survived months of extreme grief and depression during which prayer seemed obsolete. But with time and perseverence Spirit found her again, through nature. Prayer and divinity are much larger and less predictable than a quiet morning meditation or a Sunday at church, though these rituals are often crucial.
This book is beautifully written; a fascinating and searingly honest memoir. It's a great read on that level alone. But readers interested in the powerful effect of a concious spiritual practice will find a special resonance. One does not have to be Christian to appreciate this point, or Lindsey's fascinating book. Lindsey is simply telling her own story, prescribing nothing to the reader; any one who chooses can find reinforcement in this book for their own efforts to clear a path for the Divine.
Though beautifully written and quite engaging, I couldn't help but be a little bored in parts by the author's romantic problems.
I hate to sound sexist, but this is probably more of a 'women's book' because of the emphasis on the romantic woes of a late 30s Anglican lady. I would have liked more of an emphasis on church and spirituality, and less on the author's personal life.
But that said, I'm sure there are many who will find the book more interesting BECAUSE of this personal content. I just wanted to warn any hard-hearted, impersonal types like me out there!
I will probably read more books by this author, however - it would be interesting to follow her spiritual journey.
I just wish she wouldn't take herself so seriously.
Lindsey Crittenden Makes Me Nervous -- and That's What Makes Her Memoir So Powerful!
As a longtime journalist covering the power of spirituality in everyday life, I am drawn to memoirs that -- like Lindsey's story of her life -- invite us into fresh waters. I've read thousands of books in 30-plus years of journalism and I always feel sad when I realize that countless waves of promising spiritual memoirs wind up rippling safely in tried-and-true pools.
One phrase I've picked up in critiquing and covering spiritual media, just over the past year, is "the fix is in." The phrase handily describes those books, memoirs especially, in which we can tell from Page 1 precisely what will happen on Page 250.
Not so with Lindsey's book, which is why I've been recommending it in my writing for more than a year -- and I'm freshly recommending it during Lent 2008 in an online Lenten project I'm helping to publish. I was moved by her writing about her relationship with her mother toward the end of her mother's life. But, more than that, I was moved by Lindsey's solid-as-steel commitment as a memoirist to be honest about her life.
This honesty takes us places, as readers, that we sometimes may not want to go. There are passages in this book that you may never have expected to read in a spiritual memoir. Certainly, Lindsey takes us a good step beyond Anne Lamott. But that's what makes it a terrific book.
It's honest. And, yes, honestly this memoir "Will Hold You."
When she was four years old Lindsey Crittenden was practicing that magical trick many an adult still remembers learning -- floating on your back in the swimming pool. When you flap and flail, you will sink, but if you just relax, said her swimming instructor Mrs. Ursula, "the water will hold you." And such is the experience of Christian prayer as she describes it in this memoir.
By her college years Crittenden was a lapsed Episcopalian and a doubter, but in 1996 she walked into All Souls Church in Berkeley and, to her shock, embarked on a life-time pilgrimage shaped by Christian prayer. At first her prayers were visceral and spontaneous: "You are here, I am here." As her faith grew, initial spontaneity gave way to disciplined intentionality, including regular worship, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the rosary, candles, and spiritual direction from her pastors. She compares a life of prayer to her discipline of writing: "If I waited for inspiration, I'd never write a word. . . . I had to make prayer a habit, to go to it the way I went each morning to the desk. Not to summon prayer, but to tap into what was already there."
That discipline became essential to negotiating a complex and extremely painful family history. Her adopted brother Blake, hounded by drug addictions, was killed in a homicide. Her parents, then retirement age, gained custody of her nephew Dylan and became his de facto parents. When her mother died of cancer her aging father was effectively a single parent. Then followed a broken and deeply troubling relationship with a man, a vicious clinical depression that lasted over a year, and then a third death, her father's, all of which left her feeling like a Christian "failure and a fraud." In the end, she writes, Christian prayer is not only a way through loss and grief, it is a call of love and grace (p. 227); it's the growing realization that, yes, the water will hold us if we learn to relax.
The first time she said those words, suggested to her by an Episcopal priest, Lindsey Crittenden was riddled with misgivings. She didn?t pray or attend church services?she wasn?t even sure she believed in God?but the simple phrase held a soothing power she couldn?t deny. Unlike the prayers of her childhood with their vague references to forgiving trespasses and dying before you wake, this felt solid. I am here was incontestable, certain. You are here confirmed the existence of a world outside herself and eased the knot of isolation Lindsey had been carrying with her since the day her brother died.
She soon found that she couldn?t pray enough. She spoke to God; she questioned God; and as a result, she came to a deeper understanding of herself and the world around her. Prayer opened Crittenden up to the present and to those around her. It gave her strength when her mother, and then her father, became ill, and when her late brother?s young son became increasingly hers to care for. But when a relationship went sour, prayer abandoned her. Or so it seemed, until she learned the most important lesson of all.
Poignant, personal, and surprisingly honest, The WaterWillHold You is a skeptic?s story as much as it is a believer?s story. It explores the power of the ineffable through a compelling narrative of family, loss, and love. Lindsey Crittenden has emerged as a fresh new voice with a message to cross spiritual and religious lines: Faith is constant discovery.
based on 8 reviews
