Beginner's Grace: Bringing Prayer to Life
by Kate Braestrup
Free Press, $25, 286 pages

Reviewed by Martha K. Baker

Anyone who was fortunate enough to read Kate Braestrup's memoir, Here If You Need Me, is in for another blessing via her most recent book, Beginner's Grace. She filled Here If You Need Me with remembrances, including prayer and inspiration, laughter and life; Beginner's Grace is a how-to-pray book, with liberal offerings of laughter and life, plus inspiration on the side. 

Her voice -- practical, frazzled, grief-stricken, inspired, pastoral, maternal, uxorial and funny -- is a strong binding thread holding each book together and twining the two.

Braestrup is a Unitarian Universalist and a community minister serving as a chaplain to the Maine Warden Service. She is as down-to-earth as the forest floor. As she described so achingly and humorously in her memoir, Braestrup was a mother with four little ones when her husband, Drew, a law officer, was killed in an automobile accident. She went to seminary, as had her husband, and was ordained; she raised the children, kindly pastored victims and their relatives and officers in the Maine woods, met a new man, re-married and added two more children to the family. Through it all, she prayed.

Those experiences gave her the solid foundation on which to write Beginner's Grace. 

Braestrup "brings prayer to life" in two ways: she escorts airy-fairy prayer to the realness of bloody, sweaty, tearful life, plus she animates dry-as-dust words until they dance off the page. She divides her offerings into six parts (Invitation, Sirens, Ask, Celebrate, The Word, and Leap) and subdivides those parts into 24 chapters about the forms prayer takes. She offers lovers' prayers and enemies' and proves that prayers are pleas. Prayer can be just the right words at the right time, and she advises on avoiding the wrong ones. Prayer is no words at all; it can be mere presence or a significant posture. "Laughter is the beginning of a prayer," she writes. Prayer can be flags or tears. Prayer is song, even ones with dubious lyrics: "There are many things I am unwilling to speak, but am nonetheless happy to sing." 

Prayer, she says, is love: "Love is the only legitimate intention for prayer." And to prove that, she returns often to her theme about prayer as empathy and consciousness: "The way to manage the miseries of consciousness and the agonies of empathy is to become more conscious and more empathetic" [emphases hers] -- in other words, to pray.

When Braestrup needs back-up, she turns to Bible scholarship as well as other fields of academe; she rarely lets those pages remain dry, for her own style refreshes anything moldering (except in "Prayers in the Dark and Quiet," her treatise on sleep, which is soporific). "In Praise of a Little Hypocrisy" is plum brilliant, and her discussion on "feet" as a euphemism for genitalia really reinforces incarnation.

For support, Braestrup also turns to anecdotes from her friends, in both the clergy and in law enforcement, and from her family -- aunts, grandmothers, husbands and all those children. Even strangers feed her stories, like the one about the poor woman buying baloney and Band-Aids in "Considering the Grace that Saves." Braestrup is a crack storyteller, to wit, her tale of her grandmother as she lay dying.

Not only are her expositions well researched and her narratives craftily written, but her descriptions exemplify the rhetorician's art. Her style pops with the colloquial (yes, this ordained minister knows about "swirlies"). She writes inspiring sentences, like  "Prayers are not recipes or formulae, they are love poems" and pastoral ones: "There were people waiting in the world above the ice, the ones who longed for the return of the woman's body, that they might care for it and lay it safely to rest." 

And she writes prayers: "May the hungry be well-fed. May the well-fed hunger for justice. Amen." Prayers dot and end each chapter; she repeats many in an appendix of prayers. Braestrup respects other faiths, repeating their prayers alongside Christians', and she quotes a rainbow of resources from Mychal Judge to Czeslaw Milosz to Margaret Wise Brown.

Beginner's Grace is unlike other prayer books or books about prayer. It is not just for beginners: It pastors all pray-ers.