This Is Why I Came

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A woman sits in prayerful meditation, waiting to offer her first confession in more than thirty years. She holds a small book on her lap, one that she s made, and tells herself again the Bible stories it contains, the ones she has written anew, for herself, each story told aslant, from Jonah to Jesus, Moses to Mary Magdalen.

Woven together and stitched by hand, they provide a new version, virtually a new translation, of the heart of this ancient and sacred text. Rakow's Bernadette traces, through each brief and familiar story, a line where belief and disbelief touch, the line that has been her home, ragged and neglected, that hidden seam.

The result is an amazing book of extraordinary beauty, so human and humorous, and yet so holy it becomes a work of poetry, a canticle, a song of lament and praise. In the private terrain of silence and devotion, shared with us by a writer of power and grace, Rakow offers, through Bernadette, her own lectio divina for the modern world.

No reader will forget this book or be able to read the Bible itself without a new perspective on this text that remains, arguably, Western civilization's greatest literary achievement. Review: Praise for This Is Why I Came Rakow's prose sings at this register of humanistic truth, infused with the sacred power of language and feeling...

Harvard Divinity Bulletin These stories, both Old and New, are awash in dread and terror and beautify. They aren't lifeless myths; they are mythic stories once again given flesh and blood Commonweal Magazine This Is Why I Came is a new mode of transportation. It elevates...unnerves and unsettles... And you finally arrive home, tenderly consoled.

Glad tidings. Gregory Boyle, author of Tattoos On The Heart Examine the book thoroughly: it s miraculous. Christian Century But the reader starts to see a different kind of faith form, built on her revision of the testaments (particularly the Old, which is more vivid and startlingly rendered than the New).

In Bernadette's Bible, man and God are both vulnerable to each other's disappointment, both culpable for their own mistakes. Whether God made man in his image or vice versa begins to seems moot. Either way, we're in the soup together. Bookslut Mary Rakow s quite extraordinary book is billed as a novel, but agnostic gospels would be more accurate labeling Rakow s feat in these fragments is to blend the gnomic and the prosaic, skepticism and wonder.

At the close, the priest doesn t just absolve the woman of sin. To doubt the God you believe in is to serve him, he tells her. It s an offering. It s your gift. No faith is required to pay Rakow a similar tribute. Mere mortals can use imaginative jolts like the one she delivers. The Atlantic The outlines of the Bible stories are familiar, but their characters are more rounded, more poignant in Rakow s spare but poetic telling These tales, and the dozens others in this short book, are all ultimately human.

If we are created in God s image, Rakow seems to say, then this deity must have the same failings we do. How we resolve them by reaching out to each other or, at the very least, like poor Cain, coming to a greater understanding of ourselves may be the true moral of all these tales. The Boston Globe Rakow's latest novel brims with wildly imagined Bible stories, into which she infused new layers of mystery and mysticism, ambiguity and wonder.

In her hands, tales we've heard all our lives achieve the miracle of surprise. O Magazine [Rakow has] cast off her academic robe for this delicate work of fiction, which is informed by the most basic human desires and disappointments. ...the Old Testament chapters that open the book feel more imaginative, less constrained by fighting against theological dogma.

Rakow moves unpredictably from the simple, stark details of the Sunday School versions we know to her own striking emendations and elaborations....brief as these prose poems are, they re still capable of arresting moments and startling insights ... the novel is tremendously poignant as it follows the life of Joseph, who speaks no words in the G