Amazon.com Review
When a preacher has a crisis of faith, the ramifications can be terrifying. How can you lead a congregation to God, when God has withdrawn His presence from you? A few years ago, Renita J. Weems, one of the nation's leading black women preachers, hit a spiritual brick wall that she describes in her stark, lyrical, and often amazing memoir,
Listening for God: A Believer's Journey Through Silence and Doubt. The book is a collection of prayers, journal entries, and meditations that discuss her initial anger at God's absence in her life and her gradual willingness to "[accept] the silence as a new way of communicating with the divine and [learn] to perceive God in my life in new, amusing, laughable, glorious ways." In contrast to the many spiritual memoirs that relate new believers' intoxicating experience of divine intimacy,
Listening for God (like C.S. Lewis's
A Grief Observed and Madeleine L'Engle's
The Irrational Season) stands out as a careful and honest description of the spiritual desert in which many mature believers find themselves stranded, to their dismay and surprise. This book is further distinguished by Weems's frank observation that, as a wife and mother, she couldn't just up and meditate for an hour a day, or go on extended retreat. "If God was going to speak to me," Weems writes, "God would just have to do it amidst the clutter of family, the noise of pots and pans, the din of a hungry toddler screaming from the backseat during rush hour traffic, and the hassles of the workplace." God did, and Weems captures the divine noise with a near-perfect combination of wit, pleasure, and respect.
--Michael Joseph Gross
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Bible scholar, ordained Methodist minister and author of Just a Sister Away, Weems found herself several years ago maneuvering through her own "spiritual breakdown." This account is an extrapolation of her inner struggle as she attempted to prove that "just because God is silent doesn't mean that God is absent." Weems believes it is necessary to refute the misconception that solitude and silence are necessary before one can hear God's voice. She invites God to speak to her "amidst the clutter of family, the noise of pots and pans, the din of a hungry toddler screaming from the backseat during rush hour traffic, and the hassles of the workplace." In four chapters, Weems addresses the mystery of silence and prayer, the mystery of ministry, the mystery of marriage and mothering, and the mystery of miracles. Each chapter contains several anecdotes, journal entries and musings about Weems's attempts to recover her spirituality, particularly via rituals and nurturing relationships. While Weems's account of "the long dry seasons" of her spiritual journey is deeply moving, the struggle between her faith and scholarly knowledge remains relatively unresolved at the end, which may discomfit insecure readers. But others will appreciate Weems's honest assessment that her love affair with God has never quite returned ("not really, not like before") and admire her determination to comfort others who feel that God has become more distant. (Dec.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
