My Life as a Prayer, Elizabeth Cunningham. Monkfish Book Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9781958972106), 2023.

Summary: A spiritual memoir describing the author’s journey from daughter of an Episcopal priest, through a variety of communities as a writer and multi-faith minister.

Elizabeth Cunningham may be known to many as the author of the fiction series, The Maeve Chronicles, in which Mary Magdalene is reconceived as the daughter of a line of Celtic warrior witches. This, her first non-fiction work, traces her spiritual journey from growing up in the home of an Episcopal priest to becoming a multi-faith minister. Throughout, she describes her life as a prayer and explains what this might mean toward the end of the book:

“The prayer of oblation may be what I mean by life as a prayer. It may be what in Judaism is called a mitzvah or Buddhists mean by mindfulness. Or what Brother Lawrence called practicing the Presence of God while sweeping the floor, of scrubbing pots. The attention of Miss Sang [a mentor] gave to setting the table. what if we made all tasks, each small act, an oblation? Nothing to do with success or failure, obscurity or recognition. Just an offering. I believe that the Dalai Lama once said that his religion is kindness, and religion is only useful in so far as it helps him to be kind. If it helps to make an offering to a deity, then good. An offering is an offering even if we never knew to whom it is made or who receives it” (pp. 254-255).

This gives a good flavor of her outlook. She grew up the daughter of an Episcopal priest. Even as a child she struggled with how God was portrayed in the Bible, but more comfortable with Jesus Her relationship with her father is complicated. She respects his social conscience and activism but his faith didn’t seem to find warm expression in their family life. He seems to have had anger issues and struggled with alcoholism. She grew more distant, eventually joining a Quaker Meeting. A further stage came about the time of her miscarriage when she discovered the Goddess, who became a guide to her. She recounts a decade of hosting with Miss Sang a multi-faith retreat center and community, High Valley.

An important part of her life is the enchanted character of the natural world from the forest next to her childhood home to the land around High Valley to her own garden. This reflects the neopagan influences that sees all things as animated by gods or spirits. She also recounts her writing efforts, the rejections and how she came to write the Maeve Chronicles.

I had several responses to the book. One was that I think it is a reflection of the spirituality of many who would say they are spiritual but not religious, involving both the rejection of some traditional belief while retaining remnants of that faith combined with other practices from diverse sources with self (or the god or goddess within) as the final arbiter.

I was saddened by the account of her childhood encounters with Christianity and found myself reflecting on my very different experience of parents, relative, and a number of adults in my life with vibrant and thoughtful and gracious Christian commitments. Working in collegiate ministry, I’ve been struck by how many who struggle with faith or have rejected it had negative childhood or teenaged experiences of that faith.

I also was struck with the indeterminacy of the object of her life of prayer. To God, to the spirit in all things, to herself, her Goddess, or even a type of well wishing to others (“sending prayer”)? It seemed all of this at various points. How different from a Christian understanding of knowing that we come freely and boldly to our Father, that we are heard, and that prayer is communing with the lover of our souls.

At the same time I loved the idea of life as prayer, in the language of St. Paul, “living sacrifices.” Cunningham offers an example, albeit multi-faith of living that out that is worth observing and affirming.

Flannery O’Connor wrote of the “Christ-haunted south.” There is a Christ-haunted character to this memoir, with snatches of Jesus’ life, of Episcopal liturgy, the writings of C.S. Lewis, of forms of prayer, and more. It feels like something from which she turned away but that still has a hold on her. I wonder what the author will make of that in time to come.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through Librarything’s Early Reviewers Program for review.