Subtitled \u201cSeven Prayers That Even I Can Pray\u201d it is a fascinating, geeky Librescan look at prayer that is completely unique. I love it. Here\u2019s the foreword I as honored to write for it:<\/p>\n
This may sound strange, but when atheist Leah Libresco announced that she was entering the Catholic Church, I felt vaguely let down that atheism would no longer have Leah around to (as she sunnily puts it) \u201cpick fights\u201d on behalf of the No God crew.\u00a0 I knew the online conversation would again subside into the normal boring round of Flying Spaghetti Monster chatter and \u201cIf God created everything, then who created God?\u201d high school sophomore philosophy that Libresco-less atheism tended to be.\u00a0 I would miss her Turing tests (in which she tried to get believers and non-believers to really do their level best to get into each other\u2019s heads instead of simply caricature each other\u2019s positions).\u00a0 I would miss her \u201cgeek orthodox\u201d analogies from gamer culture, math, and sci-fi\/fantasy.\u00a0 I would miss her cheery, non-hostile confidence that the Truth would not lie to her and her willingness to really follow an argument wherever it led.\u00a0 I would miss her ability to call out intellectual laziness (mine as much as anybody else\u2019s) in atheist\/believer arguments.\u00a0 In short, I would miss her old school belief that the purpose of arguing was not to win, but to clarify<\/em>.<\/p>\n
I am happy, however, to report that I didn\u2019t wind up missing any of this for long, since Leah brought all that with her into the Church, verifying once again St. Thomas\u2019 conviction that grace perfects, not destroys, nature.\u00a0 It is in Leah\u2019s nature to be a highly original thinker\u2013and therefore to restate old truth (and all truth is old) in fresh ways, whether as an atheist or a believer.\u00a0 You hold in your hands the proof of this.<\/p>\n
Leah\u2019s great gift is that she really really<\/em> trusts the Truth.\u00a0 She trusts not only that (in the words of the X Files<\/em>) the Truth is Out There (sometimes Way Out There, as the astonishing truth of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of God Almighty demonstrate), but that the Truth is also In Here: in our intimate communion via the Holy Spirit with the Immanent God, who speaks to us through our personal struggles, questions, confusions, and crazy intuitions as we examine them in light of apostolic tradition.<\/p>\n
So she is, rather like the apostles were, not afraid to ask weird questions and say, \u201cI don\u2019t get it\u201d \u00a0and propose her questions and judgments about life, the universe and everything to Jesus and his Church.\u00a0 In all this, she is not rude or defiant or impious. She is, rather, a wrestler like our father Jacob. She is, very simply, clear-headed and says things that a lot of the rest of us were too timid to say\u2013resulting in answers from Christ the rest of us are too timid to get.\u00a0 After all, who hasn\u2019t<\/em> thought \u201cWhy am I asking God for stuff he already knows I need?\u201d or \u201cIsn\u2019t it silly to demand that Justice be meted out to bad guys but I get Mercy for me?\u201d\u00a0 Leah is willing to tough it out and really stay with those kinds of questions until she gets an answer from the Tradition that satisfies<\/em>\u2013that does not bend or mutilate either the Tradition, or her own apprehensions of Truth, Mercy, and Justice put into our hearts by God.\u00a0 She believes\u2013really believes<\/em>\u2013that we shall know the Truth, and the Truth will make us free.<\/p>\n
The originality\u2013and in a funny way, charity\u2013of Leah\u2019s thought is nowhere more on display than in the opening of this book, wherein she makes the case for one of the most unlikeable characters in all of world literature: the entirely uncharitable Inspector Javert of Les Miserables<\/em>.\u00a0 Seeing him through Leah\u2019s eyes, we see how this creature of rules and regulations, of self-sufficiency and inflexible merciless rectitude is attempting (as we all do) to reach a good end, but by bad and ultimately self-destructive ends.\u00a0 More than this, we see this merciless man through the eyes of God\u2019s (and Leah\u2019s) mercy.\u00a0 Who but Leah Libresco would begin a book on prayer by referring us to so unyielding and unsupplicant a character\u2013and find her way through him to the God of mercy, of grace and, yes, of answer to prayer who has found us?\u00a0 Who but Leah Libresco could formulate the completely original yet old-as-the-gospel discovery that \u201cI guess morality just loves me or something\u201d and her realization that \u201cMorality wasn\u2019t just a rulebook, but some kind of agent\u201d who had leapt the chasm to her that she could not cross herself.\u00a0 She may not have known it when she first said it, but that is as serviceable a restatement of John 1:1-14 as you could ask for.\u00a0 It is characteristic of her sense of intellectual freedom\u2013a deeply Catholic sense\u2013that she would do this.\u00a0 This is somebody who, under the grace of the Holy Spirit, really thinks<\/em>, and therefore does her level best to think with the mind of Christ, who is the Power and Wisdom of God.<\/p>\n
Most of all though, what I appreciate about Leah\u2019s work in this book is how deeply humane and full of charity she is.\u00a0 As much as she appreciates the finest qualities of even a merciless Javert, she also approaches even her enemies with the mercy of Christ\u2013and is paradoxically merciless with her own falsities, charades, self-flatteries, flummery, and balderdash as she does so.\u00a0 For as she herself came to realize, we are all in Javert\u2019s boat, only not quite so stony in our refusals of grace.\u00a0 Here, it seems to me, her own atheist past, under the guidance of God\u2019s strange grace, taught her well.\u00a0 She grew up as a sort of stoic: wanting to do and think and say the right and the true and the good, not for the sake of reward, but for its own sake.\u00a0 Where most people fear lack of popularity, she feared flattery and being told what she wanted to hear.\u00a0 In consequence, when she did hear the Good News, she really heard<\/em> it and took it in, not because it promised her health or wealth or fame or power or honor or pie in the sky when she dies by and by, but because Jesus is Goodness, Reality, and Beauty or, as he himself put it, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.<\/p>\n
Not, of course, that she doesn\u2019t struggle.\u00a0 This book is a chronicle of struggles, questions, confusions\u2013and spiritual progress under grace.\u00a0 Indeed, one of its greatest merits, I think, is that Leah, by her own free admission, does not have it together when it comes to prayer. She struggles to get to Amen. But then, so do we.\u00a0 As St. Paul notes in Romans 8:26, \u201cwe do not know how to pray as we ought\u201d, and this fact marks Leah\u2019s experience of prayer as well. So she both relies on and struggles with the many helps and graces Christ gives to us through his teaching, his inspired word in Scripture, his Church, the liturgy, the saints, and the abundance of other ways his Spirit pours out grace on us.\u00a0 In this book, Leah does us the great favor of not being a spiritual master, but rather of being a fellow kindergartner with us and jumping up excitedly when she finds something new and\u00a0 beautiful.\u00a0 Join her on her journey into prayer and you will find yourself kindled anew as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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