the Empathy List #58: In or out?

The mysterious whims of Jesus.

Hey friend, Liz here.

I’ve been reading irreverent spiritual books lately. In fact, they are books that the authors would probably never even classify.

Take Patricia Lockwood’s book, Priestdaddy. It’s a hilarious and heretical memoir of an adult daughter moving back home and into her father’s rectory when she and her husband go broke.

(By the way, when some Christians say heretical, they mean someone cusses. When I say heretical, though, I mean downright profane, like a whole chapter on her mother’s fear of, um, sexual remains in the hotel bedsheets… which is snort-out-loud funny. Psst, NO KIDS ALLOWED!!)

To me, her doubt is refreshing and human and lovable. She was hurt by my religion—her father’s Catholicism, particularly—and she expresses that by sprinting in the opposite direction.

Yet during her teenage years, she attended a Pentecostal youth group, where she experienced the intensity of belief (though it faded later on). She writes:

“To believe with that kind of wholeheartedness…