As you may (or more likely not) have noticed on my sidebar over there, I’m a member of The Daily Scribe. We’re a loosely organized group of bloggers and you can visit the site to learn more about us. Our intrepid leader, Shawn Anthony, finds different ways of exploiting our greatness and building our blogginess. One of those is getting books into our hands to review. In one way or another, we’re all nerds and like to read so free books are a bonus. So it was as a result of all of this that I was recently accepted as an Ooze Select Blogger. This = free books to review.

I received an e-mail announcing my first book. Approximately two days later LightBoy brought me a small package with an ominous look on his small face, “More educational hell, Mom,” he announced. Hmmm, I thought … I haven’t ordered any educational hell recently, so I wonder what this could be? It was, in fact, my first book from Zondervan; My Beautiful Idol, by Pete Gall. It had been announced in the e-mail as a confessional memoir and the promise waved that it would stand up to Traveling Mercies or Blue Like Jazz. My red flag sailed up the pole and I tossed the book onto my coffee table. Those are two of my favorite books and no mere interloper on the scene could possibly measure up to them. I didn’t even want to look at it.

And … by the way … have I mentioned this quilt I’m working on?

I had a doctor’s appointment in the morning, and curiosity killed my cat, so I picked it up on my way out the door. After all, I’d promised to read it. I might as well get started. Since I only manage to read about two pages a night, I’d need plenty of time to get the review in under the deadline. Well …

I finished it at about 9 o’clock that evening. I would have finished it closer to dinner time, except that we left the house for several hours in the late afternoon to do some shopping. I did take a break in the morning for some computer work and a couple of naps in the early afternoon. But I read the whole book in one day. In one sitting, so to speak.

So, Pete Gall is not as laugh-out-loud funny as Anne or Don, but he’s deeper than they are. Maybe not deeper than Anne, but definitely deeper and more serious than Don Miller. He packs some serious theological juice into this book, but it’s readable, ponderable and believable. It’s more than a stand-up routine. I loved Blue Like Jazz, but I read that for the punch lines and the laughs. I loved the deconstruction that was in there, but I never could quite believe that anyone really lived that life. Pete’s life is utterly believable from the opening cab ride to Burritoville, to the ending ride home to Zionville.

His life is believable because the scripted things don’t happen. He writes as if they were about to, but then … they don’t and we must wrestle with the theology and theodicy of why those things did or did not happen. Life is not a television script where all things work together for good in our human ken. What we understand as good must be wrestled with in the face of great evil and darkness even in those who would do great good. Money and food do show up at the last minute, but it’s not the result of prayer or living “righteously” as most people have us believe. They show up, no matter how Pete screws up … or sometimes doesn’t. Because God is not a gumball god. We can’t put in our quarter and get back a prize, no matter how much we want to believe that’s how it works.

Christianity has this entire worldview that treats the filth of life as impermanent, redeemable, escapable, and unable to make the bride too filthy to be loved. But we have this thing in our culture where we don’t believe a bit of it. We work so overly hard to make God look good that what we say has no credibility at all; we’re such cow-brained dullards. In our insecurities and arrogance, and our lack of honesty, we demand to see God turn lives around, to do something cool for us. To be our dancing poodle. We want to be able to tell a great story about well our lives have been transformed by this God who, to exquisite torture, simply does not do enough flashy stuff for us to feel comfortable letting his work stand on its own. We are so desperate to share the good news that we almost always fake it. We forge the miraculous and we promise more than we really experience ourselves. And we are so conflicted about how to be “good Christians” — people whose lives been turned around and made squeaky clean — even though that’s not what we experience exactly, that we have developed a twisted, hand-wringing culture where we are far less matter-of-fact about sin and temptation and doubt and the profane than are our Scriptures, our God, or even the rest of the world around us where there is no promise of rescue or redemption. We’re obnoxious fools, and our dishonesty makes us incredibly vulnerable and weak — and far from trustworthy people who could actually benefit from knowing the truth according to God. (p. 148-9)

Pete is at his best when he’s pulling together his story lines and spinning an abstract web from his concrete story slabs. The conversations are a little contrived, but that may be because he is recalling them from over ten years ago. He is better still drawing analogies which return time and again making more sense with each coda.

As we discuss our respective desires to be used, to have a mission in life, it strikes me that we’re more alike than I’d thought for a long time. Maybe we’re not the only ones. Both my mother and I are determined to point to something outside of ourselves to demonstrate our worth and our utility. The crab shell must be covered, well and completely, beautifully and wisely, by a collection of things or by the sponge of Jesus held desperately by hopelessly inadequate hind legs, or we will have no one to blame but ourselves when the squid brings the pain. We want to be important enough to be loved, both of us.

Strangely, somewhere both my mother and and I have come to believe worth and utility are the same thing. But they are not. There is a great difference between being worthless and being useless, and there is a great difference between the things that make us useful the true measure of our worth. One is what we do, and the other is what we are. One is developed and grown, and the other full and unchanging from the moment of our conception. (p. 212-13)

There are two things I wish had been different in this book. One is that I wish that Pete had spent more time exploring this value gap of worth vs. use. I think there is a gold mine of how we in the West mix up our theology with our economic philosophy in that discussion. Unfortunately, I rather think that would not have reflected his journey.

The other thing I wish had been different is this. Very early in the book, as in on page one or two, Pete admits to lying for fun and profit with people. He never really backs away from this and I can’t get rid of the image. While the book is utterly believable, I’m left with the contrasting image from the beginning of a man who lies to sell things. It is unsettling, unnerving and the reader is left to wrestle with that image. In the end there are no white hats and no black hats. Just people, wondering when and how their scaffolding will collapse, and hoping the pain won’t kill them.

Would I recommend this book? If you are person who can live with grey areas, metaphors which might collapse at any moment, or uncomfortable analogies, then yes, I would recommend this book with fervor. If you are a person who likes boxes in your head, who likes life as you now know it, and is not into questions with no answers, then no … do not read this book. So it depends. There are some people for whom I will purchase this book and wrap it up with a bow and others for whom I would suggest perhaps not reading it. It is however, a very well written and engaging memoir of one man’s coming to grips with his spiritual nature. If you read it, you might come to grips with yours as well.