I’m not religious. Which doesn’t mean I don’t have faith. My faith is atheism. I believe what we see is what we get, we have one chance to leave a positive impact on the people around us, and our afterlife is what we leave behind in those people’s hearts and minds. 

It also doesn’t mean I don’t respect other people’s faiths. I do, very much. Even when I don’t understand their religious choices, as I don’t understand all the choices the Muslim women Sheima Benembarek wrote about in Halal Sex, I respect their right to make those choices, free of judgment. Which is probably why a diehard atheist like me got so much out of a book of essays written by a devoted Christian. 

Karen Stiller (class of 2018), author of The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More (Tyndale, 2020), has written a book filled with stories about what it’s like to be married to a member of the clergy—the burden of other people’s (and her own) unrealistic expectations, the wish that sometimes people would just stop talking to her and leave her alone, the loneliness of being unable to find a friend in one’s own community, the disappointment when her husband’s career takes the family places they’d rather not go instead of where they’d love to go. 

Stiller not only offers insight into what that life is really like, but she does so in an I-bet-you’re-more-fun-at-a-party-than-anyone-might-guess authorial voice, which she combines with a self-deprecating sense of humour that makes you wish that party was happening tonight. In a chapter on family, Stiller weighs in on what it’s like raising three human beings who are blessed and burdened with being minister’s children: 

The messes and misses are what Brent and I remember the most, what touch us so deeply—our clumsy selves just trying to do our best. There are so many real things that we did wrong, especially me with all my yelling. 

I wish I had never once shouted. I also wish they had not stretched plastic wrap around the living room lamps as I watched, helpless, while interviewing someone on the phone for a magazine article I was writing about whether or not spanking was a good thing. I wished they had not dumped a can of beans in their brother’s bed, or put all my bras in the freezer on April Fools’ Day. I wished that a frog had not been dropped in a sink full of dishes because, as it turns out, frogs die in hot, soapy water. …

I also wish I had done those things I had planned to do, like cooking a meal from a different country every week, learning about the culture together (sitting quietly, taking turns reading out loud), and praying for the people who lived there (sitting quietly, taking turns praying out loud). I did not do that, not even on one single Wednesday evening. That was an idea I had before we had kids, something nice to do with your puppy maybe.

This is a deeply human book, a book I chuckled along with as I recognized, against all odds, how much Stiller’s life reminded me of mine, a book I feared I wouldn’t enjoy (and then wouldn’t know what to write about) but instead ended up reading in one sitting. It’s the kind of book I like to read when I’m awake at 3 AM, much as I like reading Richard Wagamese’s gentle memoirs-in-essays, so that its kind and soothing message can take my mind off the troubles racing like squirrels around my brain—and allow me to find my way back to an untroubled rest.  

Books about faith:

Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America, by Sheima Benembarek.

The Scientist and the Psychic: A Son’s Exploration of His Mother’s Gift, by Christian Smith.