I received this book under the mutual agreement with my friend Matt that, if we promised to buy it for one another, we would finally get around to reading perhaps the most recommended book I have ever come across. Christmas season was upon us, and as we nonchalantly slid identical books toward one another, I knew I hadn’t anymore excuses to keep me from tackling a book that doesn’t seem so appetizing in its premise. A four-part biography quickly likens itself to school reading, trudging through the pages dedicated to the mid-term and then skimming the second half just in time to suffer through finals week. And as I made my way through the first ten or so pages, I was still wondering what all the fuss was about. I spent most of my efforts simply trying to follow along adequately. I had trouble keeping four biographies straight as the author, Paul Elie, wove their stories in and out of each other from the very beginning.

His strategy eventually paid off, however. The four figures started to take shape about 60 pages in, and from there the story really took off. Dorothy Day was seeking poverty, and finally living in it. Walker Percy was trying to escape the southern aristocracy had had grown up in, finally turning down medicine to become a writer. Thomas Merton was doing the opposite; clinging to his roots trough his father’s landscape paintings and their inherent adventures. Flannery O’Connor was discovering that she was simply different, venturing into the University of Iowa’s writer’s workshops and finally finding herself in the freaks that continually showed up in her stories. Each of these people were distinctly different from one another, and for the most part distinctly different from everyone around them. Through their teens and twenties their stories are alike in that they continually confront dissatisfaction in their efforts to seek out life, to seek out reality, and to seek out what it is that is truly meaningful in their world and ours.

But it isn’t just a biography of four interesting people that eventually became writers (although that would certainly be enough). What ties them inextricably together, beyond even the ostracizing communion of devoting your life to writing, is that in their search for meaning and life, they all found God. Elie retells the four stories strategically and skillfully, and it is fascinating to picture Day, Merton, Percy, and O’Connor (although she grew up Catholic) wandering into the sanctuary and into a crowd of people, and yet remain all alone. Elie describes them as still not knowing why they are there, for the most part, save for their innate attraction to the devotion, the faith, and the ‘differentness’ of the people around them.

And this is particularly why The Life You Save May Be Your Own has changed the way I think about spirituality. While Christianity and the collective faith in God was certainly built around, and heavily supported by, a sense of undying and relentlessly faithful community, it is the personal spirituality of exemplary figures such as the four in this book that inspires me (and certainly many others) and gives me the will to push on in my on life. Their search for genuine, authentic spiritual experience (which God faithfully and gracefully gives each of them in their own ways) is something that seemingly gets lost in a lot of big churches, college ministries, and the like. Elie serves as the collective voice to the four he writes about as he ventures to repaint the picture of what it’s like to be ‘religious’ and more specifically what it’s like to be Catholic. His patient intertwining of ritual and mysticism reveal God in a way that is attainable by anyone, and yet is somehow lost in many other divisions of the church.

God has become so distant from society and culture in recent history, and seeing as I am certainly no scholar on the subject, I don’t fully understand why or how (beyond the idea that modernism pushed out spirituality in favor of science and tangible information about the world as opposed to the WORLD). But what Elie does is perfectly relevant in light of the fact. Elie spotlights four people, at least one of whom is certainly relate-able to everyone who could read this book in one way or another, who sought out the Church, and sought out God in spite of the stigma Christians have today. Thus what we have in their story is an example of what faith in God is really like, and why Christians are so ardently faithful, stripped of all of the anti-abortion, anti-gay, conservative, corny, cliché stereotypes. I mean Dorothy Day was basically a communist when she first found herself in a Catholic mass.

So, in conclusion, this book was certainly refreshing. It is a challenging read, no doubt, but it will open your eyes in one way or another. I am left, after having finally finished it, with the realization that God is bigger than the stereotypes of Christianity, and that searching out God in the reality of our lives is something authentic and it can change us. Not to mention, as an aspiring writer of sorts, this book gives four pretty good examples of people finding their way in the literary world; some triumphantly, and some through pressing beyond their piling failures. So read the book if you want to be a writer. It certainly will inspire you. Read the book if you want to learn about the reality of God in this world. It will certainly inspire you. Read the book if you want to learn about what it is like to live life more intensely, more abundantly. It will certainly inspire you.