Book review: Seeing the Good in Unfamiliar Spiritualities

★★★★★

If Gethin is not a poet, then certainly his love of poetry shines. Verse mixes with prose to lend richness throughout. I think this is a book which should be read outdoors, in the squares of our busiest cities or beside the brooks of our remotest parks. 

It’s about God, our perception and experience. It meanders thoughtfully around the topics of faith, mercy, sexism, and hell, on its journey to “reaching middle ground” between the various world religions. The stability of our society rests on “mutual respect, and a genuine attempt to understand and to appreciate the other, to detect the voice of God in the other, and to pursue a thoughtful, caring life with the other.”

Religious thought is evolving, but the evolution of our understanding of God has been a gradual process, and we are by no means at the end of it. Enchantment is coming back into vogue, and society may be experiencing sacralization rather than secularization. Many of us yearn to “feel the Greatness and the Glory, and all those things that begin with a Capital Letter,” but we’re unsure how to proceed. The closer we approach the mystical (though not the magical, that stuff is evil, right?) the further away we appear. 

Gethin’s gimmick of threading the story of Ezekiel throughout the discussion is what makes the book real. I laugh out loud as I write this, but it is so; Gethin doesn’t feed us the wild-eyed, theatrical Ezekiel most of us avoid, but the human, struggling-to-understand-it-all Ezekiel. The Ezekiel strolling mournfully beside Babylon’s Tigris, dreaming of Israel’s Jordan. For all his extraordinary visions, Ezekiel never actually gets to see God. 

This book is a joy to read, and one to fill our dreams with hope.