Review: “Out of Sorts” by Sarah Bessey

I just read Sarah Bessey’s latest book, Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith. It’s a beautiful work, complex and sincere and able to tap into a wide number of concerns with great honesty. Friends are hearing about this book nonstop from me; I’m recommending it over and over again. Perhaps it’s just come into my life at the perfect magic moment — whatever it is, I kind of can’t get over the way this book has spoken to me and given masterful language to all the things my heart is feeling.

Out of Sorts is, as the subtitle suggests, all about the way a person’s faith can change over their lives; it’s about how tough those changes can be, how earth-shaking and scary they can feel. Sarah’s family became entranced and energized by a local charismatic Christian church when she was a child, and she grew up enfolded in the safe, loving worldview that church espoused. Transitioning into her adult life brought questions, and some disillusionment, and intense loss, all of which impacted her faith.

The book is organized around a metaphor of sorting through one’s possessions — a house full of them — and deciding what to keep, what to trash, what to linger over, what to hang onto for now even though you know you will discard it eventually (because this just isn’t the right moment to say goodbye). Sarah Bessey compares this sorting process to being “out of sorts,” which she defines this way: “a state of being in one’s heart or mind or body. Often used to describe one’s sense of self at a time when one feels like everything one once knew ‘for sure’ has to be figured out all over again.”

Writes Sarah, “We sort on the threshold of change; it’s how we gather the courage to eventually walk through the door and out into the new day’s light. Of course there is grief in this process, whether it’s from the death of a loved one or the death of an old way of life. Of course there is.

“Whether it’s in our relationship with God or with our own families, at some point we find that it is time to sort. It’s time to figure out what we need to keep, what we need to toss, and what we need to reclaim. And we need to tell our stories in order to move forward.

“Every ending is also a new beginning.”

I love how she expresses this, because it rings so achingly true. And that’s why faith transition takes such an awfully long time — there are piles of boxes and beliefs to sort through, then to reorganize. You can’t exactly throw out a whole box at one time (or at least, I can’t), not without checking all the contents. And so when your faith isn’t tidy anymore, and you have to clean it up, there’s a lot of work to do. Painstaking work.

This sorting-things-out process is something I’ve done with my own faith, for maybe seven or eight years now. Well … actually, I think some of those years were less sorting-things-out, more insisting-I-could-keep-all-these-items-if-I-could-just-reorganized-them-correctly. I was none too eager to downsize my collections of beliefs or get rid of things that were broken. But anyway, regardless of when I’ve stayed on task and when I’ve let my mind wander, I’ve been out of sorts for a while. And I’ve been sorting through the remains. My dilemmas have been thoroughly Mormon, which makes them different in some ways from the dilemmas Sarah Bessey describes in her book (she deals with mainstream Christianity). But at the same time, the dilemmas are not so very different, at least not as she approaches them. This book isn’t about solving the specific problems or answering the specific questions; it’s about lending peace to the process and giving a vote of confidence to the reader, saying, Hey, you can do this. I know it’s hard. Give yourself all the time you need, but be brave — God is with us.

There are a wide variety of resources out there for Mormons encountering some kind of faith crisis or transition; I’ve read and listened to many of them, and they’ve helped, absolutely. There’s something I really love, though, about seeing this matter handled from a Christian angle that is not specifically (or even tangentially) Mormon. It means I have to stay on my toes. In Out of Sorts, Sarah Bessey is writing about familiar topics in unfamiliar (to me) language, causing me to read more carefully and think through her suggestions instead of shifting into an auto-pilot mode. Even the fact that she doesn’t quote the King James Version of the Bible, preferring other translations instead, is just different enough that it keeps me paying attention.

Take this alternative version of James 1:5, a verse familiar to most Mormons as the one that prompted Joseph Smith to ask God which church he should join: “If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and He will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking.”

Gives a slightly different flavor, right?

This book isn’t an argument to make or a point to take. It isn’t a single story with a plot and a climax and a denouement, and it doesn’t have a simple three-step program to follow with nicely spaced headers.

I don’t think this book will be turned into a calendar for the gift shop.

It’s about loss and how we cope with change. It’s about Jesus and why I love Him and follow Him. It’s about church and church people and why both make me crazy but why I can’t seem to quit either. It’s about embracing a faith, which evolves, and the stuff I used to think about God but I don’t think anymore, and it’s about the new things I think and believe that turned out to be old. It’s about the evolution of a soul and the ways I’ve failed; it’s about letting go of the fear and walking out into the unknown.

It’s about the beautiful things we might reclaim and the stuff we may decide to kick to the curb. It’s a book about making peace with unanswered questions and being content to live into the answers as they come. It’s about being comfortable with where we land for now, while holding our hands open for where the Spirit leads us next. It’s about not apologizing for our transformation and change in response to the unchanging Christ.

Really, it’s a book about not being afraid. This book is my way of leaving the light on for the ones who are wandering.

I’ve heard that most of our theology is formed by autobiography. This is true in my case and maybe it’s true for you too.

I think that is why I love reading or hearing other people’s stories of faith — the conversion, the wrestling, the falling away, the calling, the triumphs, the tenderness, the questions, the why behind all of it. I feel like I’ll know Jesus better if I hear about how you love Him or how you find Him or how you experience the divine in your life.