MY LIFE AS A PRAYER

A memoir traces one woman’s journey from mainstream Christianity to interfaith minister and novelist.

An established author, Cunningham is best known for a series of novels—The Maeve Chronicles—in which Mary Magdalene is revealed to be the descendant of Celtic warrior witches and Jesus spends his young adulthood on the Isle of Mona. This memoir is, in some ways, an account of how the daughter of an Episcopalian priest came to turn a Christian saint into a pagan priestess and the savior into an acolyte of the Druids. The author describes the God of her childhood as a distant, unnerving character—not unlike her own father. She found more solace in imaginary friends embodied in plush toys. Maeve Rhuad—her series’ protagonist—would become a different kind of imaginary friend in Cunningham’s adulthood. Between those years, the author would endure experiences that disrupted her journey through higher education and pushed her further away from mainstream Christianity. Her first encounter with “the Goddess” occurred in 1985, when she was enduring her second pregnancy loss (“All life comes from the sea, and the Goddess is the mother of all living, all that dies, all that is reborn”). At this moment, Cunningham started developing a spirituality that existed within herself and outside of Christian doctrine. In the second half of her memoir, she recounts how she reacted to the epiphany that would transform her spiritual life and set The Maeve Chronicles in motion. The author knows how to tell an engaging story, but there are long stretches that feel more like recollections Cunningham has to set down for herself than a carefully crafted narrative. That said, the author’s descriptions of participating in rituals led by the influential activist named Starhawk offer a valuable glimpse of the “Reclaiming (Neopaganism)” movement in its early days. And anyone who has struggled with a Christian upbringing and discovered meaning elsewhere may well find solace and inspiration in Cunningham’s vivid account of her own religious evolution.

An eccentric, iconoclastic, and sometimes meandering spiritual autobiography.