“You can’t take my conversion and throw it at your friend and hope it works”: Leah Libresco

“You can’t take my conversion and throw it at your friend and hope it works”: Leah Libresco April 22, 2015

interviewed in Australia about her new (and excellent) book. I’m in this at the end, where Libresco says some very kind things:

…I think the other thing is that because I came from outside the faith there are lots of things that look weird or look hard to me so I got to explore them in a way that you wouldn’t maybe if you take them for granted.

If confession is a natural part of your life – you grew up, your parents went – you might be good at going but don’t spend very much time reflecting on how because you know how. You go into the box and say your sins and come out.

And for me, it was much more mysterious. What am I doing here? What is this like?

So one of the things I decided it was like, as I am trying to understand it, is that it is like Japanese pottery repair – this process called kintsugi where you repair the pot, not to make the crack invisible but to actually limit with gold.

The crack becomes more precious than what the pot was; that confession is a process not of erasing our sins but of transfiguring them so that the mark of a wound becomes something more and better than a scar.

And so because I’m kind of sneaking up on Catholicism all the time I bring with me everything else I’ve loved and found beautiful.

I hope my book, for people who aren’t Catholic, is a way to see what’s beautiful about Catholicism in a language you may already know and for Catholics to see many other beautiful things that illuminate the faith.

If you love Catholicism, I will trick you into loving maths and music and folklore.

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