Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal

In Ordinary Time, Nancy Mairs brings her trademark directness to the subject of religion. Themes that bring out piety and sentimentality in many writers, Mairs treats with all her usual outspokenness, candor, and courage. Mairs is a passionate questioner and storyteller, and above all Ordinary Time is writing firmly rooted in the messy realities and questions - the "ordinary time" - of one woman's life. Mairs's marriage is in many ways at the center of the book ("My spirit has been schooled in wedlock"), and she draws a portrait of her life with her husband that is detailed in a way rarely seen in personal writing. She shows us moments of marital despair (in "Here: Grace", for instance), but also the details of the way toward clarity and reconciliation. Mairs writes with wit, exactitude, and intelligence about her conversion from a devout New England Protestant teenager, "a bit mystically inclined", to an unorthodox, activist Catholic in the Southwest; about her commitment to feminism two years later (and about her uneasy dual identity as Catholic and feminist); about run-ins with "monomaniacal" priests; about her husband's cancer and her own disease; about women and the Church; about charity and the body; about raising children; about understanding "God's will" and imagining death.