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By Gina Dalfonzo|Published Date: March 05, 2010
If anyone had reason to look back on her childhood with self-pity, Mary DeMuth would be that person.
Those of you who have read our reviews of her novels know that she frequently deals with the topic of abuse. That's no accident. As a young girl, Mary suffered repeated molestation by two older boys; the loss of her father; her mother's multiple divorces; her parents' drug abuse; and more. To this day, as Mary writes in Thin Places, her new memoir, she struggles with the fallout from all this. While God's grace has brought her further than she could ever imagined, she says that there are still things that "Jesus hasn't seen fit to heal me from":
I've spewed one million whys to the heavens, cried one billion tears in agony. I've shouted "It's not fair!" more times than I can count. In those moments I rest in one thing: God's sovereignty. It's not pretty. It's not easy to believe, especially when I dive into raw questions like, "What kind loving Father would allow His baby girl to go through so much abuse?" It's not intuitive. It doesn't smack of justice. But it's there.
God holds the cosmos in His hands. And, though there are days I wonder if I'm a disembodied spirit belonging to no one, I am in His hands -- the hands that are marked in blood with my own mountain of sins. The hands, feet, and heart that bore the sins of those two boys who walk this earth as haunted men. The naked, violated One who hung on a cross so I could be set free from this ugliness. I'm captured at the sight of Jesus up there on the cross. I see my own agony etched across His face.
Instead of wallowing, Mary has learned to see her hurts and inadequacies as what the Celts called "thin places" -- "snatches of time, moments really, when we sense God intersecting our world in tangible, unmistakable ways." Her patient, unshakable search for God in the darkest times of her life elevates this memoir to something far out of the ordinary. By the time I closed the book, I felt that I had gained a whole new perspective on my own spiritual walk and times of trial. A hard place looks so different -- sometimes almost miraculously different -- when you learn to see it as a thin place.
Stay tuned for more on Thin Places next week.
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