Grappling with God: The Naked Truth About My Spiritual Life

A.J. Pell is the rector of Holy Trinity Cathedral, Diocese of New
Westminster, British Columbia.

The spiritual life of a person is an intensely personal and interior
one, yet that interior life is also expressed and lived in the exterior
realities of the everyday world. In Grappling with God, Patrick Donohue,
a Roman Catholic layman and journalist, bares his own spiritual
struggles, interior and exterior, by sharing parts of his journals from
1986 to 1990. These excerpts are grouped in seven chapters—God Within;
Other People; Marriage and Parenting; Life and Death; Sin, Guilt and
Forgiveness; Prayer; Religion. The entries within each chapter are left
in chronological order, but none is dated.

Although only 156 pages long, Grappling with God is not the sort of
book one can just sit down and read from cover to cover in an evening.
The very nature of the material means that a chapter might be read in
one sitting. But it would not be read quickly, for many entries call for
a second or third (or more) reading to grasp both the emotional and the
intellectual content of Donohue’s writing. Yet this is not a book to
be used for personal meditation either, for the material is too peculiar
to the life of one particular Christian. What the reader will find in
this volume is the spiritual journey of a person who is willing to share
that journey with anyone who wishes to read of it. This journey
reassures the “average Christian” with its ordinariness, its
unevenness, and its flawed goodness.