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The Road Taken: A Woman's Life In and Out of the Pulpit
Victoria Davidson, author
Adult; Memoir; (Market)
As a minister, not only am I not able to walk on water, but it feels more like slogging through an East Texas stock tank. Instead of confidence and benevolence, I am perplexed and even aggravated. Tomorrow I will stand before a grieving family in a packed chapel with nerve dredged up from somewhere. Meanwhile, tonight I have an old Smith-Corona portable and my sister's Bible from which to wrestle a badly needed message. Tomorrow, I will be the shaman who conducts the grief stricken family over the river of death...
Typically, a minister's life is a curious mixture of pain and deep joy; of public performance and private agony; of "blessed assurance" and a hell of doubt. The personal is never really separated from the public, nor the public from the personal. Being female adds extra thorns to an already complex and even mystifying profession.
The Road Taken is a very personal story of both the professional and everyday family life.
Reviews
Davidson recounts her 35-year journey as a United Methodist minister in Texas by weaving together the deeply personal, such as the dissolution of her marriage and her grief over a daughter’s battle with anorexia, and the mundane professional realities of ministerial life, such as committees and fund-raising. She writes honestly and confronts head-on the self-doubt, insecurity, and uncertainty that often plague a minister’s life. She highlights the hardships and blatant sexism she faced as a woman in the Methodist Church, and the struggles and joys of serving as a pastor in an inner city Dallas church. “There is at the heart of the ministry a web of paradoxes,” she writes: “a career which is the source of so much conflicted feeling and even anger is also the source of a great deal of personal growth and a sense—at least part of the time—of being in the right place.” The book sometimes reads a little too much like a simple chronological account and suffers from excessive detail in some sections. Still, Davidson offers a glimpse into the life of a female minister that many involved in or considering ministry will find interesting and inspirational. (BookLife)
