An Immovable Feast: How I Gave Up Spirituality For A Life Of Religious Abundance Tyler Blansky, Ignatius Press
All conversion stories are commentaries on St. Augustine’s famous saying, “You have made us for Yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”1 What makes each story unique (and often fascinating) is how the restlessness appears in a person’s life, and how God moves to bring rest to a restless heart.
Tyler Blansky grew up in a believing and practicing Baptist household. He accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior at the age of 12, at church camp. He never backed away from that; in fact, the story of his restlessness is the story of his desire to live what he believed.
He rejected what he called “ ‘suburban Christianity’, a therapeutic deism in pursuit of the American Dream,”2 in favor of a desire to live an authentic Christian life, and soon thereafter, he found himself rejecting “religion” in the name of “spirituality.” By the grace of God, he was never quite comfortable with that either; God put people in his life to challenge him (most notably, eventually, his wife Brittany). His desire to live what he believed led him to the Episcopal Church, and then onto the path toward ordination as an Anglican priest, intending to do a church plant in Minneapolis. Just a few months before graduating from seminary, he and a nine-months pregnant Brittany set all that aside to enter the Catholic Church.
Of all the books I read while I was on retreat, this is the one that has stayed with me the most. A constant theme is the necessity of trusting God, even (especially?) when we lack clarity in understanding.
The book is engagingly written, reminding me a bit of a 21st Century Thomas Howard,3 though I doubt that Howard ever wore dreadlocks or listened to quite the eclectic range of music that Blansky did. The narrative is interspersed with apologetical sections explaining what he was learning that led him to change his beliefs, step by step. I admit to skimming portions of this material since I was familiar with it, and I confess that I wish he were less taken with Scott Hahn’s Fourth Cup theories, but that’s not too significant in the grand scheme of things.
Readers who never spent time as High(ish) Church Anglicans might not recognize some of the names that Blansky drops along the way: “I loved Keble and Newman and Andrewes and Webb and Pusey and Ramsey.” He also assumes a certain familiarity with Scripture, with hymns, and with Anglican and Catholic prayers–at least, he includes phrases from them regularly without pausing to point out what he’s doing. Neither of these is a bad thing, but they might slow some readers down.
I will conclude with an excerpt, as he and his wife move into married student quarters at the seminary:
Brittany unpacked her library and I unpacked mine, and we realized we did not have enough bookshelves. The next morning, our mattresses on the living-room floor, our little apartment crowded with stacks of books, Brittany rolled her eyes when the mailman arrived bearing gifts: Dulles’ The Priestly Office, Balthasar’s Priestly Spirituality, Pope Saint John Paul II’s Ordinatio Sacerdotalis,4 and an anthology on the subject with essays by Thomas Hopko, Alexander Schmemann, and Kallistos Ware.
“Do we need more books?” Brittany said.
“Think of it as we get more books,” I said.
As always, a reminder that I am an Amazon affiliate and get a small reimbursement (costing you nothing) if you purchase from the link in the review. Feel free to buy elsewhere, if you like.
- Confessions, I.1.↩
- Page 19.↩
- I was a bit surprised not to encounter any references to Howard in the main text. He does show up in the acknowledgments.↩
- He has to be exaggerating a bit here. Ordinatio Sacerdotalis isn’t long enough to make a good pamphlet, let alone a book. Perhaps this was an edition with accompanying documents.↩
Cogitans Clare 