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Failing Into Love

A quirky Catholic convert unlocks prayer and spiritual growth with Shakespeare, math, and ballroom dance.
libresco CNN

When religious converts write books soon after their conversions, they often write apologetics or narrative spiritual autobiography—giving their reasons, intellectual or personal. But in Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers That Even I Can Offer, Leah Libresco has produced a very different kind of book: an account of seven prayers that structure her prayer life, and a portrait of someone diving headfirst into the pursuit of holiness.

Libresco (a former TAC editorial assistant) is currently a news writer at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight and a convert to Catholicism, but has been known as a writer on religion since well before becoming either. Libresco started a blog on Patheos’s atheist channel during college as a way to “crowdsource” the arguments she was having with Christians at her university, eventually becoming one of the most prominent atheist bloggers on the internet thanks to her tendency to “skip past the normal scripts and have the weird arguments.” When she announced her surprise conversion to Catholicism, the news was covered on CNN. Libresco switched her blog over to Patheos’s Catholic channel, where she’s been writing ever since.

On her blog, Libresco often uses her other passions—musical theater, Shakespeare, math—to unpack Catholic doctrine and practice. When faced with a new aspect of Catholicism she doesn’t understand, Libresco turns her eclectic mind to what she does know in order to make sense of it. For instance, when trying to wrap her mind around the Atonement—how exactly Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection saved us—she uses computer science and math, writing that Christ entering Hell after His death is “like a program crashing when you ask it to divide by zero.” As on her blog, so in her book. Libresco walks her reader through seven Catholic prayers, and for each prayer she uses her widely varied interests to show us how it works—and works on us.

Libresco begins with petitionary prayer, the kind of prayer that was the “strangest” before her conversion because it felt like complaining, or cheating. She struggled with the concept of praying for other people, but found an entry via fiction. Fiction can give us empathetic access to a person’s inner thoughts in a way that real life often doesn’t, and Libresco latched onto that access as a “pilot line”—the weak first wire across a chasm upon which eventually an entire bridge will be built—towards love and prayer for real people. She might see a trait in a character that a friend in her life shares—and so she is more easily able to emphasize with, and pray for, that friend.

Libresco’s discussion of confession includes one of my favorite examples in the book. She explains a Japanese method of repairing pottery called kintsugi, in which gold dust is put into the glue that’s used to repair cracks. When the pottery is fixed, the “scar” left by the crack is visible, but the gold dust makes it beautiful. This, for Libresco, is an image of how confession works: God uses the sacrament to heal us, leaving behind a scar made beautiful. Instead of being a distraction from or distortion of beauty, the healed scar then becomes part of the ‘work of art’ that is our life.

Libresco draws her overall framework for approaching the repetitions of the rosary from ballroom dance. Her ballroom dance instructor had her focus on what’s called the ‘basic’ step for a long time. If you’re with a good partner, all you have to do is keep up the basic step, and your partner will lead you in anything more complicated. You don’t have to know what you’re doing or what’s coming next—you just have to keep the basic step up and let yourself be led. Likewise, Libresco found that God is your partner in praying the rosary, and your task is keeping up the basic rhythm of the prayers, letting God do the rest.

This tour through Catholic prayer culminates in the Mass—fittingly, as the Eucharist is, in the words of Lumen Gentium, a document released by the Second Vatican Council, the “font and apex of the whole Christian life.” Libresco draws on her entire wealth of unexpected analogies to get at what the Mass is, and what it means, from coordinate plane theory to foreign language study and more. For example, when writing on how the Eucharist changes us, Libresco turns to the Chinese myth of mellified men, in which mystics became “transmuted entirely into honey” by eating, and bathing in, and being buried in the substance. Their bodies became honey, but they were still recognizable as themselves: their basic shape and form remained. For Libresco, this is like the way that the life of Christ comes to change our lives through the Eucharist, “transmuting” us without erasing our identity.

Libresco concludes with a sort of defense of St. Peter that’s really, in a sense, the heart of the book. Libresco notes that when Peter fails in the Bible (and he often does), it takes the form of a kind of flailing: he jumps in too eagerly in his friendship with Christ, and winds up getting ahead of himself. His very eagerness for intimacy with Christ is what pushes him out of his depth. Libresco here gives the example of Matthew 14:22-23, in which Peter steps out of the disciples’ boat to join Christ in walking across the water. Once he has walked a little distance on the water, however, Peter gets frightened by the strong winds and begins to sink. He calls out to Christ to save him from sinking, which He does.

Libresco sees in Peter’s cry for help a sign of his faith rather than just weakness, and she pivots to an incident in E.L. Konigsburg’s book About the B’nai Bagels. A character in the book is practicing the texts he will have to sing at his bar mitzvah, and is singing softly because he’s “self-conscious about his weak singing voice.” His brother, however, tells him to sing loudly, not softly. Libresco notes that the louder you sing, even if you have a bad voice, the more likely you are to be noticed—and so corrected. “Loud fools [tend] to get fixed,” she writes. The louder you fail, the more you grow.

In Libresco’s hands, this concept becomes a guiding principle for the spiritual life, one that runs throughout her whole book once you start looking for it. When praying the Lectio Divina, for example, she would pause after reading a Bible passage and try to remember what she’d just read. When she remembered wrongly, her mistakes often illuminated a flaw in her understanding of God.

In part, then, what Libresco has done in Arriving at Amen is show us what it looks like to fail well, so that you can grow—to be willing to fail precisely so God can correct you. To fail well requires great humility, both because it can make you look like a “loud fool” and because you have to be ready to change when your failures are pointed out. It also requires you to love enough to care about growing in the first place. Peter failed into growth because he precisely because he loved Christ as much as he did. This love pushed him out of himself, and for Libresco that’s how, in earthly terms, he became the saint he is. Holding back out of fear of failure means we will never grow.

“In a higher world it is otherwise,” wrote Cardinal Newman, “but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Libresco illustrates the role failure, in faith, plays in that process. Her book has its faults—some of the examples she uses to unpack the prayers are more illuminating than others—but Arriving at Amen does the service of showing us what it means to fumble and flail and fail into a closer friendship with God.

Peter Blair is an associate editor at The American Interest and Editor in Chief of Fare Forward: A Christian Review of Ideas.

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