pat loughery

A short while ago I was happy to hear that I’d “made the cut” into a book review group with The Ooze. It’s a very nice setup – I get books sent my way, I read and write reviews here, and it’s free. Free books, and all I have to do is write about them? Sounds pretty sweet to me, even though my time for reading something that’s not grad-school driven is pretty narrow. If there’s a catch, it’s only on this point, but perhaps it’s a big point for my circumstance.

So when the first book arrived a week or so ago, I felt bittersweet. A bit guilty, actually. I’m behind on my school reading, but sometimes it’s fun to read without a highlighter and pen in hand.

When I opened the package that contained “My Beautiful Idol” (Pete Gall), I took a few minutes to familiarize myself with it. I stopped about 50 pages later. For the past week, I’ve stolen away half an hour here, an hour there, enjoying this page-turner as it meanders through Gall’s life.

My Beautiful Idol is a spiritual autobiography by a young man who communicates the painful truth of honest faith lived through an imperfect life and a self-critical nature. From the first chapter, I know that the author knows himself well – perhaps too well. Driven by a passionate need for an authentic life, he leaves corporate success as a writer in an advertising agency and a broken relationship and pursues his own path. A downwardly mobile path, at least for a good while.

That path deals with important issues: success, leadership, integrity, sex and relationships, family. Gall’s theme is that we make ourselves out to be important, helpful, good to others, as a way of idolizing our own selves – or our idealized selves, any way. God uses the experiences of Gall’s life to tear down these idols and reveal himself as he wishes to be known – a God who loves, without expectation. Gall struggles with the need to be liked, to be wanted, to be known as “a good Christian”, a holy man, a great man of God. His struggles are those of so many of us.

The flavor of the book is tense: as I read his story, I see much of myself in it. I get frustrated that he sees so clearly the faults that he describes, but seems resigned to them, even as he’s battling with his entire life against being irrelevant. The story is deeply moving, deeply passionate, and the stuff of real life. There’s no fairy tale beginning or ending here, and there’s really no grand “a-ha” moment that the reader is expected to take away. And that’s the point, really. Life, and a life embedded in Christian faith, is a constant draw toward a deeper reality.

Like Donald Miller’s “Searching for God Knows What” or “Plastic Jesus: Exposing the Hollowness of Comfortable Christianity” (Eric Sandras), when I’m reading I’m called to a relational understanding of my life with God. I’m called to go deeper, to recognize myself in full relationship with my God, and I’m called to chase the life that makes sense to me, as difficult as it is, but as much as I now that God leads me. The call is beyond that of the normal evangelical path – it truly is a post-evangelical story – but instead is an example of living fruitful life amidst the grey areas of life, all the while striving for more.