I just finished reading Cathleen Falsani’s book Sin Boldly today. As I closed the last page of the book, I couldn’t help smiling and feeling a bit lighter on my feet.

Maybe it was the combo of finishing her book the same day I started re-reading Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved.

Maybe it was the Spring air and the puffs of white clouds in an afternoon sky.

Maybe it was a surge of nice pregnancy hormones.

But whatever it was, I came out of the week-long funk I’d been in as I read the last chapter of Cathleen’s treatise on grace. I even laughed.

It probably had something to do with the way she helped me stretch my grace muscles this past month, to see all the nooks and crannies where grace resides…sometimes really ugly and uncommon pockets of the world where grace abides. But it also had something to do with finding such a common voice, a soul sister of sorts, in the pages of Sin Boldly. I heard echoes of my own feelings, hesitancies and hopes as she recorded her interactions with extraordinary people.

Take this conversation, for example, as a Vermont native questions Cathleen about her religious background.

“Wait, go back to that Southern Baptist part,” Julia said, interrupting, as she does. “Are you born-again?” articulating her question as if she were asking me if I were really a headhunter or a Martian.

“Yes,” I said, “but I’m not an asshole. At least not theologically speaking.”

I could picture myself saying the exact same thing to any number of people who ask me if I’m a Christian. Because, let’s face it, Christians (like every other group) get stereotyped, pigeon-holed and otherwise ridiculed due to the asshole-ness of a few poor representatives of the faith (though we are – all of us – poor representatives of Jesus more often than not).

But I digress. That was just one small example of why I loved this book. The candidness, the messiness, the laugh-out-loud-ness, the unorthodox search for love and grace, mercy and peace. It is a book I highly recommend to anyone who wants to be moved a step or two closer to an understanding of unearned favor, unmerited joy, undeserved love. Because, as Frederick Buechner says, “in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Amen, brother Buechner. And thanks, Ms. Falsani. You have helped me break off another link in the chain of lies that bind me to ungrace. Grace has indeed taken me “by the hand and romanced me.”

Tags: cathleen falsani, Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, sin boldly  |  Posted under just a word...  |    No Comments