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I was trying to figure out an appropriate book group for Kate Braestrup’s memoir, Marriage and other Acts of Charity.  You don’t need to be married to read this book, though I do think it might feel more relevant to a person who is, if not married, then contemplating the married state.  Still, her meditations on compassion and service are moving and profound and could be edifying for a wide range of readers.  I enjoyed this book as a diversion from everything else I was reading, fiction and non.  It is not fiction, but she does tell some absorbing stories.  And it is not, strictly speaking, non-fiction, since as she admits, some characters are composites and details have been altered.

Braestrup is a chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, and a mother of four who is remarried after being widowed.  She is a deeply spiritual person – her denomination is Unitarian-Universalist – and she talks about how certain people seem predisposed, neurologically, for mystical revelations.  Her recollections of her early religious experience, college activism and stormy first marriage are absorbing if a bit overwrought.  One might accuse her of rambling a bit but for the most part I didn’t mind, since the places she took me were spiritually instructive.  She always has her eye out for transcendent truths, a quality I admire in a writer and that I expect from a person of the cloth.

I was taken in right away by her description of what she does for a living: ”No one needs a chaplain when the outcome is likely to be good, so quite a lot of my work deals with death.  Or to put it differently…I bear witness to the ways in which love resurrects itself in the face of loss.  It is a great honor to be present to a stranger’s grief, to play even a small part in the most intimate, excruciating, and transformative chapter in a person’s and a family’s history.”

I know several people who attend book groups at their places of worship (Lutheran, Mormon and Jewish).  Braestrup’s tone, which is reverent and earnest with some lighter moments, seems appropriate for a faith community’s book club. My husband and I agree on her assessment of the conjugal state, and also concur that the most charitable act of all is to remain silent on which partner is the more charitable.  I will certainly never tell.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2013 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Adult Books, Book Club Tips, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.