Come Away From Her
My friend wrote a book. There's death, dark themes, even a mystery - but most of all, it is a book on a community dealing with a facade that's quickly slipping away. Can they learn to heal together?
This article contains mentions of trigger heavy topics including but not limited to: suicide, domestic abuse, alcoholism, incest, and loss of faith. If you are struggling with mental health, please reach out to the people you can trust, or call the Mental Health America’s national Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988. If it is truly an emergency, please call 911.
Rest well, my friends.
My wonderful new friend Samuel W. Gailey wrote a book called Come Away From Her. Actually this is his third book. I’m currently knee deep in his debut book, Deep Winter, because of how much I enjoyed Come Away From Her. Sam and I have been a part of some writer’s exhibition nights here on our sleepy little Orcas Island, and his wife Ayn, has been such a sweet champion of my own writing journey. Ayn and Sam reached out to me just before the book came out, and asked if I’d like to read and review it - specifically because of one of the book’s ensemble, Cap, a pastor of local church in a small Pennsylvania town who, through his own life and the circumstances of his community, slides rather unceremoniously into the process of questioning his entire faith. We have a lot to talk about when it comes to Cap’s journey, but what struck me the most about the book is the entire ensemble of characters. Amongst the backdrop of winter storms, alcoholism, suicide, infidelity, and abuse, there is a small community fighting to love themselves and one another; as all of their darkest secrets and insecurities begin to come to light. This book provides an incredible reflection of my own journey here on Orcas Island - and the ways that I have and am experiencing community bent in walking through the dirt and sludge of life together, and the reconciliation of it all. First and foremost, I can do nothing but recommend this book to you. Sam has managed to hold a mirror up to people in the deepest places, and given us a reflection of humanity that is not only honest, but incredibly vulnerable. Everyone who reads Come Away from Her will find a piece of themselves in the story.
Come Away From Her is a story of a deaf woman named Tess, who is fleeing from her own life. She finds shelter in a sleepy little rural community in Pennsylvania. Her presences is the first domino in the line of the secrets that the townspeople have been holding in all their lives; and forces them to face one another in ways they’ve never had to before. Most of all for Cap, the local pastor, who finds himself in his position by default and out of shame for his past. During the course of the novel, Cap comes to be finally honest with himself, that his entire life is built around running on the fumes of his parent’s faith. As the town begins to metaphorically fall in on itself around him, Cap is forced to confront the fact that he has more questions than answers, and that maybe certainty isn’t so certain after all. The story starts with a dead body, and unfolds little by little as we meet the people of the town, all of whom have meaning and motive in this mystery. Maggie numbs her anxiety and depression that conceals her C-PTSD with pharmaceuticals and minor shoplifting, as her husband Wade sleeps around with people much younger than he is, and their teenage son Butch struggles with feeling unnatural in a natural world. We meet Robin, a young mother who wants nothing more than out of her marriage to Chuck, who in his own self-hatred has turned to alcohol and domestic violence to numb his pain. Our main characters are surrounded by their community, who is walking through their own pain and trauma.
“A silent thanks was offered to God that today wasn’t Sunday - a day of rest for many, but to Cap, it proved to be the most taxing day of the week. How he’d grown to dread the seventh day, the irony of which did not escape him.”
To say that Cap is a direct reflection of much of my own faith journey is an understatement. As a person who has worked in and out of ministry for many years, and as a person raised in church; it often feels ironic that our journey that is “supposed to be” marked by certainty becomes a confusing, burnt out mass of hurt. Followed by more shame and guilt than we know what to do with. Doubting and deconstructing whilst working in ministry feels like being drug along a gravel road for several miles without a lick of clothing on. Everything is telling you that you know better, that you can get up and walk away, but you can’t help but just lie there out of exhaustion and be drug along the pebbles. Leaving high-control evangelical spaces can feel like this too. Churches, families, social groups, that rely on community based only on one very particular set of beliefs to hold everything together; so if/when those perceptions are challenged, the entire system falls out because someone falls out of line. There’s sort of an overwhelming sense of social acceptance that must be upheld at all costs. In order to belong, you must deny natural parts of yourself (this is not the platform nor time to get in atonement theory, but you could absolutely go down that rabbit hole). Suddenly in these places of rest, or at the very least where rest is supposed to be provided and available, we feel none at all.
The story weaves together a beautiful and sorrowful pattern of life unfolding as the social weaving of this little town begins to shift and fall away with Tess’ arrival. Almost everyone is in the process of wanting to question, wanting to shed their perceived notions of themselves (there are a few truly obstinate characters in this story - people so marred by their lives and choices that they actively choose indulgence in pain as currency rather than healing as a journey). Poor Cap is stuck in the middle of all of this. As the people of his town pass him by searching for some sort of home, Cap finds himself having to be honest that he really isn’t sure how to provide one for himself. It reminded me of some lessons I’m learning lately.
We just finished a series with our students called Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. One of the things that struck me the most about this series was two questions we asked in the very beginning:
Why do you feel the need to separate the sacred and the secular?
Why do we have a hard time seeing ourselves in a holistic way?
Honestly it’s been sticking with me since we asked it. There hasn’t been a day gone by that I haven’t reminded myself to treat my day to day as all sacred - because every space, in faith, is inherently so. Even the mundane ones. Our whole persons are intellectual, are spiritual, are physical, emotional, and social. And one the most difficult points of human fallacy is thinking that we have enough control to only display the pieces of person that we want others to see. Come Away From Her attacks the question of how do we recognize when we are emotionally, relationally, spiritually unhealthy, and how do we move through that as individual people, and as people in community?
How do we recognize when we are emotionally, relationally, spiritually unhealthy?
How do we move through that as individual people, and as people in community?
In the Emotionally Healthy series we also talk about the three biggest roadblocks into becoming our true selves:
I am what I Do.
I am what I Have.
I am what Others Think.
We ask again, are we living into our own stories, or in pursuit of someone else’s perception of us? This is what Sam does so perfectly in the book - he ties this concept of unhealthiness and healing and intertwines it. He treats each character as whole embodied persons who are missing chunks of themselves through life, pain, trauma, joy, and the painstaking work of breaking ourselves apart to appease others. It is tragic, in every way. I cried out in pain alongside these characters more than I rejoiced with them. They are deeply cracked. However, they represent the fact that our healing, that our cracking open, is always happening alongside someone else’s, whether or not we realise it. And whether or not we realise it, our lives echo out into the communities that surround us. What a catalyst for grace. I love this book as a description of the threshold into pruning life towards new seasons. Deep change, true, deep, integral change in our lives is often unsavory and unseemly. It is dirty, full of muck, and most of us would rather not utter a words. But Divine chooses moments for us for it all to be revealed amongst those that matter. Spring always arrives, and the snow always melts. There is dawn as the day lengthen. I would also say this book is an incredibly healthy take on some really important accepts of discipleship, and what it means to shake away generational curses in the process of becoming whole people - the “putting off of the sinful patterns and habits of our families of origin and being transformed to live as members of Christ’s family.”1
Come Away From Her is such a beautiful narrative. Filled with characters and story that is an honest reflection of just how brutal life can be, and how we, as communities, begin to face it all and heal together when the pain of where we are becomes unbearable and it all comes crashing down. I cannot recommend it more. I’ll add a hyperlink to purchase the book through Amazon below, but please, go to your local bookstore, ask them to order it for you. I guarantee that you will find so many pieces of your life among this book. You might even read it twice (I did).
Buy the Book: Come Away From Her
Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Peter Scazzero.