OMG is a wise and wonderful book. It is also a courageous and challenging one. In it, Grand Marais mother, grandmother, teacher, wilderness guide, writer, and Episcopal priest Mary Ellen Ashcroft weaves together two distinct, interconnected stories.
The first story is her own, in which Ashcroft presents the story of a fascinating life well lived. In a series of short chapters, Ashcroft recounts key events from her past in a long sweep from childhood through to the present.
Two threshold moments shaped her formative years in western Washington: being “born again,” and deciding to move to England to pursue theological training there. Time in England, in turns, results in her meeting the man she would marry and their acceptance of his call to a church in a 1970s South Africa scorched and ready to combust from the hellfire heat of apartheid.
How the South Africa chapters sing! Here a fairly standard tale of early adulthood becomes fraught, tense, glorious. There is true courage in the honesty with which Ashcroft bares her fears about protecting her young children in a country on the brink of revolution; recounts the mental and physical exhaustion created by submerging her own identity in the role of the Good Vicar’s Wife; elicits laughter at her disorientation as a young American trying to establish relationships with her African domestic help and hosting a traditional Christmas feast in midsummer heat.
After seven years and three children born in South Africa, the family decides to relocate to the United States. Back in the U.S., Ashcroft decides to go back to college to develop her own intellectual and spiritual passions.
Success and stability: surely the God-given rewards for a life of faithful service as she moves into middle age? Well, not so much. In two horrifying body-blows, Ashcroft confronts thresholds that she is dragged through kicking and screaming. First, her husband of 29 years declares that he wants to leave the marriage and family. And then, a beloved son—husband and young father himself—is diagnosed with terminal colon cancer.
Again, Ashcroft’s courage is unflinching as she recounts the soul-searing and dislocating pain she endured as she was dragged across each of these cruel thresholds.
Ashcroft’s reflections on these threshold events in her life are eloquent and gripping. But, the title of this book is not “Oh My Ashcroft,” and this is God’s story as fully as it hers. The book’s subtitle, “Growing Our God Images,” reveals the major theme of the book.
In each passage of her life Ashcroft recounts how her understanding of God changed, in the end shattering her image of a “comfortable, containable God… who is good to the good.” In the place of the idol she had constructed and clung to, she discovers a “glimmerous god,” with us in “the depths of knowing, and loving, and loss.”
Rather than a childish, wish-fulfilling God, Ashcroft experiences God in the “glimmers” of companionship and support, the deep mysteries of art and nature, and other hints of the divine that are beyond human ken. As we reach our own “I’ve had it” moments with God, we can see how Ashcroft reconciled her own profound losses with God’s ultimate love and understanding. OMG is a book you will linger over and return to. Through guided questions at the end, Ashcroft invites the reader to pause and reflect on events in our own past; to number our own threshold moments and discern how our conceptions of God have stretched or shattered at those moments.
You needn’t consider yourself a particularly spiritual person to enjoy and benefit from this book. What you need is a willingness to reflect and the courage that Ashcroft herself models to look honestly at your own cherished beliefs.
Oh My God: a real and insistent presence within us and around us. Oh My God: alive within our suffering as well as our joys. OMG: a beautiful book that inspires, challenges, and instructs.
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