SEEING THE LIGHT THROUGH BLACK DEATH

A man recounts his long road to spiritual maturity, a journey marked by a gruesome accident, in this memoir.

Trotter had all the worldly trappings of conventional success: wealth and its appurtenances, an accomplished career as an entrepreneur, and a happy family. But he experienced a tedious absence of complete fulfillment, a discontentment he could not comprehensively articulate. In the troubled wake of the author’s divorce, that sense of dissatisfaction intensified, and finally he took the advice of his eldest daughter, Amy, to seek solace and guidance in his Christian faith. Trotter began to read the Bible regularly—he calls it a “central component of my life”—and started to frequent church as well. He even had a mystical experience during a religious retreat, a vision that left him “trembling in awe.” Still, the culminating moment of his spiritual development came in 2012 while he was on a hunting expedition on the plains of South Africa. He was charged and gruesomely mauled by a Cape buffalo, a beast so dangerous it has earned the moniker Black Death. Abrie, the professional hunter leading the safari, subsequently said he saw the author bathed in a column of light and an angel overhead “boxing the horns of the beast.” In his heartfelt book, Trotter, with impressive candor and unabashed emotion, denotes this as his turning point, the event that finalized his utter devotion to God. This lucid story of spiritual enlightenment offers some rich and thought-provoking details that many Christians will find comforting. But ultimately, this is a familiar, even formulaic account of finding God in the detritus of catastrophe. Even the crucial lesson—openness and submission to God and the complete authority of the Bible—won’t surprise believers or persuade skeptics. In addition, the author writes with a self-confidence that rules out philosophical circumspection: “Why can’t we experience the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth as Jesus asked us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer? The answer is, of course, we can.”

A frank but familiar account of an extensive spiritual odyssey.