White Knuckle Love: A Memoir of Holding by April Stace is a book that I’m reviewing for Speakeasy. For the past few years I’ve been writing a reading log of all the books I read each month but I’m not doing that anymore. Though from time to time you’ll see these reviews when I read books from Speakeasy.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this Ebook free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
April Stace a mother, harpist and an ordained pastor had just left her marriage of fifteen years as she couldn’t deny that she was a queer person, anymore. She had recently moved to New York and was trying to survive whilst also caring for her 9 year old son. This is her story of working as a chaplain intern and a chaplain resident in two different hospitals in New York City, from 2016 -2018. She not only helps those she encounters in her work but is helping to find herself, as she chooses to live.
I found it fascinating that chaplains in the hospitals were from all sorts of Christian, Jewish and Buddhist backgrounds. At any time they could be asked to work with patients from different religious or no religious affiliation. In one hospital her supervisor was a female Jewish Rabbi who also dabbles in Buddhism. Other chaplains and interns included an Orthodox Rabbi, a Buddhist who converted from Catholicism, an Irish Catholic priest, a Haitian-American Pentecostal Christian, Rabbinical students, a Catholic-turned-Unitarian.
Alice shares her background of growing up in a family that appeared “normal” from the outside whist attending a mainline Protestant church. She first had the idea of being a pastor when she was a 17-year-old, mosh-pit loving, poetry reading, young feminist but quickly dismissed the idea. A few years later she was hired to play background music during the cocktail hour of a local pastor’s book signing. During a break in her playing she found herself thumbing through the book and found what she’d been wanting from church her entire life – honesty, depth, complexity, mystery, and kindness, a place to ask questions, and then ask some more.
This pastor was Brian McLaren who has become a famous Christian author. In fact I’m currently using his book “We make the Road By Walking”. I’m finding myself liking what he has to say and how he explains what Christianity should be about.
When Stace talked about her view of what she wanted from church as a child/teenager it really challenged me. “But what I experienced, over and over, were people dressed up in uncomfortable clothes talking about Jesus being the son of God without ever explaining or asking why that mattered. These were people who really loved it when I played the harp, but knew nothing about me or my spirituality, and never asked. … Yet I had had good interactions with pastors, and sensed that somehow, church could be more than what I knew.” (ch8). Our churches need to be places where we know each other, can ask questions and have the faith that Alice wanted. How do we be that kind of church to those who’s faith should be nurtured when they come into our churches?
As she met many different people in her work as a chaplain she found that she was “… a co-traveler, one who could recognize, with others, the way the Divine is constantly at work in the world and within us …” (ch 25). Again I found myself challenged to be a co-traveler and not just with those who are in our churches.
White Knuckle Love concludes with April finishing her Chaplaincy work and we’re not really told what’s next. In the epilogue it’s Holy Saturday, 2020 and she talks about the pandemic and says “… we are asked to do exactly what I learned to do as a chaplain: be present, don’t leave, and tolerate the powerlessness of it all. It is in that labor, that invisible space where we are all incompetent, that our true competence is found.”
April Stace has written an open, honest book which explores what is necessary to have faith and how to choose to live even if that means some things die. I found myself wanting to keep reading not only to know what happened to April but to find out about the particular patient she was sharing, in that part of the book.