IN MY SHOES

An independent minister, formerly a lay Eucharistic minister for the Episcopal church, draws spiritual lessons from her own life story.

“We spend our lifetimes searching for our personal labels,” Feldman-Steis writes in her slim nonfiction debut, and she contends that thinking more universally and eschewing specific labels breaks “the connections of the past and the dreams of the future and places us right here right now.” This doesn’t stop her from looking back on her own past, however, and she structures her book around moments from her own autobiography; she notes that each stage of her life, which led to her becoming a minister, taught her key lessons: “I look at what I went through growing up and feel so strongly that we must stop scaring people into faith,” she reflects as she recalls the church services of her childhood, for instance; fear and faith, she says, “cancel each other out and separate us from our own divine spirit within.” She looks back on her father’s alcoholism and the enormous damage it did to her family, but here, too, she searches for a deeper lesson: “Even in the darkest of rages there is grace and mercy that can guide all of us to forgive ourselves,” she writes. Over the course of this remembrance, Feldman-Steis relates events from her life with a great deal of concision and tact, and she skillfully manages a delicate balance between memoir and homily. The book’s pacing is consistent, and the frankly confessional nature of the personal stories lends moral heft to her broader contention that churches often have unhealthy relationships with the faithful: “Our thoughts of sins…keep us dependent on the church and further separate us from an independent belief in God,” she writes, effectively noting that this situation “hushes the divine within us.”

A powerfully personal redress of the overreach of organized religion.