I love you. Love you. Love you Mary de Muth

Mary E De Muth is an author who I met online five or six years ago. We joined a small listserve together with some other Christian writers and eventually formed The Master's Artist, a blog designed to encourage writers and other artists to focus on serving God through their art as an antidote to all the pressure to write snappy book proposals, aim a product at a market and try to get published by hook or by crook. Both of us have moved on, too busy with other things, but a great group of writers continues that wonderful blog.

A few years ago, I met her in person at a Christian writers' conference in Dallas and we and several other Master's Artist bloggers hung out and partied together, even went out dancing at a jazz club and the agent who joined us showed off some of his ballroom dancing moves.

Anyway, Mary stands out among fiction writers publishing in the fiction market. I've read a number of her novels and all are good. She writes beautifully.

But her memoir, Thin Places is a masterpiece.

I read it on the plane to Vancouver last June and have been meaning to write about it ever since.
I probably had tears welling up most of the flight because of Mary's transparency about her struggles growing up as the child of separated hippie-ish parents, who partied and smoked dope, who left her feeling tremendously unsafe. Her biological father used to take her periodically and photograph her naked and she only later in life realized what a boundary violation that had been. But that was all she knew and she loved him. She called him Jim, and he committed suicide, leaving her with a lifelong hunger for her father.

But the defining, harrowing events of Mary's life began when a group of neighborhood boys raped her, starting when she was age five, until she realized if she pretended to be taking a nap at the babysitters, she did not have to go with them to the ravine where they brutalized her and left what she called a lifelong mark that seemed to attract other predators into her orbit as she grew up.

What's beautiful about the structure of Thin Places, however, is that each event in her life is penetrated with spiritual insight, joy and love as she examines these sad events with the wisdom and maturity of adulthood.

"The Celts define a thin place as a place where heaven and the physical world collide, one of those serendipitous territories where eternity and the mundane meet," she writes in introduction. "Thin describes the membrane between the two worlds, like a piece of vellum, where we see a holy glimpse of the eternal---not in digital clarity, but clear enough to discern what lies beyond."

Mary reveals the thin places in her life story, as she encountered God in Jesus Christ and began the poignant and sometimes difficult journey towards forgiveness and healing.

She wonders what Jesus might have been thinking when he chose her. "That one! I choose her because she knows her lack, because she knows her insatiable need for a father. Someday she'll cling to me."

Even 25 years after accepting Jesus into her heart, the ache for her father has still not entirely gone away. She recalled hearing a friend tell of taking his daughter to look at colleges and felt the loss of her own father who never saw her graduate from school or walk down the aisle with her husband or play with his grandchildren. "It's an injury that never seems to heal."

"I am Jacob in times like this," she writes. "Wrestling with God over my lack of a father. He injures me so I limp. The limp reminds me of God's Godness and my frailty---the most humbling thin place."

Mary wrestles with feelings of shame and unworthiness. She also writes a chapter about the corrosive effect of envy on her life. Her relationships were boys is haunted by the abuse. She runs away if anyone comes too close. But she eventually marries a loving husband. The work, though, continues.

I could not put the book down. There is great story-telling, coupled with tremendous spiritual insight. It took a lot of courage first of all to confront all these inner recesses of pain and struggle and secondly to put it unsparingly on the page.

This book deserves to be a best seller. But it may be too real, too good.

I would especially recommend this book to anyone who is struggling with the after-effects of abuse. But all of us, if we examined our lives with the honesty Mary has examined hers, might discover we too are a mess that only God can fix. He comes alive in her words. The book is shot through with heavenly light.