The Water Will Hold You: A Skeptic Learns to Pray
by Lindsey Crittenden
(Harmony Books, New York, 2007)

I’m a huge fan of movies and books that are set in the San Francisco Bay Area. Watching the 1950 film “D.O.A.” gives me a thrill with its panoramas of a city that had been lain to waste only 44 years earlier. Reading those books by Christopher Moore that are set anywhere from Big Sur to San Francisco always gives me a sense that I might see the characters walking down the street at any moment.

Then there is that connection you make when you read a memoir and find haunting similarities between the milestones in your life and the memories of the author. It’s like connections of place, but they are deeper than that — connections of human experience that let you know that you are not alone.

And there is one more thing that I like in a book, and that is when an author knows how to make you see what she sees, in a way that is rich and visual, but is not sappy or manipulative. For me, this is done best through sentence-craft — I don’t want to call it poetry — that helps words find a type of musical quality. In other words, it is the type of writing that I love to read aloud and that falls in such a way as to give a perfect picture of the scene.

Every single one of these elements is present in The Water Will Hold You: A Skeptic Learns to Pray, by San Francisco author and member of All Saints, San Francisco, Lindsey Crittenden.

The spiritual memoir has become a popular seller in the past decade, and fans of books by Frank McCourt and Nora Gallagher will very quickly find space on their shelves for Crittenden’s work. Honestly, even though I like biographies, I’ve never really been a fan of the spiritual memoir. Reading such books has always felt a little too voyeuristic for me. Like sex and personal hygiene, I really don’t want to know that much about the spiritual lives of my contemporaries. But in Crittenden, there were simply too many opportunities for me to enter into dialogue with her. A conversation opened up as I read this book that made me think in a new way how my own lapsed religious upbringing had been revived through a number of — what I thought had been disconnected — personal experiences.

I also love the connections of place and person in this book. Readers from the Diocese of California will find familiar churches and clergy in these pages, while traveling to familiar haunts. While I was in seminary I did my field education in Sacramento, and I would take the train back and forth from Berkeley. One of the things that I noticed in the dusky winter evenings as the train rolled between Sacramento and Davis were the murders of crows in the trees. I found those same crows in The Water Will Hold You.

Crittenden is at once gritty, neurotic, poignant, and funny, all while tracing an emerging faith. The book’s title reflects a personal theology and a sense of faith that unfolds from page to page. I have already recommended The Water Will Hold You to friends who are only just beginning an adult experience of religion, and one friend told me that Crittenden helped her get past “a corny feeling” she got when she tried to pray. Prayer is the gift of this book: not just how to, but an all-encompassing understanding of the depth and breadth of prayer. Buy a copy of this book for yourself, and buy one for every person longing for a deeper spiritual connection.