A Review of Maurice Monette’s Confessions of a Gay Married Priest.
This is the time in salvation history when faith and spirituality are beginning to reign over religiosity. Our society is experiencing a renewed spiritual awakening, a kairos, not only for those groups of people who have been marginalized and ostracized by institutionalized religion, but for many of the general faithful as well. People are re-evaluating, re-thinking and analyzing their religion, especially the Catholic Christian religion, perhaps for the first time.
Maurice Monette describes this renewal and discovery through his own personal faith journey in his book, Confessions of a Gay Married Priest. Through a skillfully crafted literary style as diverse as his own faith journey, he brings an honest and clarifying simplicity to profound truths; truths that were learned through personal pain, isolation and loneliness.
Mr. Monette succeeds in his goal, for this reader at least, of drawing the individual into a sacred space for personal reflection and meditation of one’s own spiritual adventure through life. As I read this spiritual memoir, I was often times thrown back into my own memory of similar experiences and feelings. For anyone with the desire and courage to reconcile their identity with their faith and spirituality, this totally candid and personal memoir will give you those “Aha!” moments that will lead to your renewal and reconnection to the divine.
In his one act play, The Angel That Troubled the Waters (1928), based on the Gospel of John 5:1-4, Thornton Wilder reminds us, “In Love’s service, only the wounded soldier can serve.” Maurice Monette emerged a triumphant soldier in the war to find spiritual coherence with his sexual identity. In Love’s service, he discloses his entire being so that the seeking reader may find truth, freedom, happiness, love, and peace. Don’t deprive yourself of this opportunity.
(Although Confessions is available on Amazon, author Monette, who lives here in Mexico part time, is looking for a publisher and distributor. See http://gaymarriedpriest.com/)
