Amy Leach reckons with her heritage while staying faithful to it
The Salt of the Universe: Praise, Songs, and Improvisations by Amy Leach. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. 240 pp., $27.00
I want to call my friends and read them lines from Amy Leach’s new book, The Salt of the Universe. As a marker of a book’s value, the impulse to share means a lot. This tasty morsel of a memoir provides an endless feast of insights into life, creation, parenting, and delight.
I read it in one go, on a plane, but this book lends itself to dipping into, reading sentences out loud, and leaving on the shelf for months at a time and then pulling it off again. The book has no particular “relevance”—no requirement to read it in the context within which it was written, no requirement to use it to comment on current events. Rather, this is a timeless sort of book, the writing both funny and poetic.
In one sense, I’m the perfect audience for this book. Leach and I are of the same era and were raised as pastors’ daughters in the same Seventh-Day Adventist tradition. But good memoirs push and prod us outside our comfort zones. Along the way, I’ve discovered that my natural bent is pretty different from hers.
I struggle to enjoy the beauty of the world that Leach describes so well. I love a book with an argument, and Leach eschews dogma, boundaries, and restrictive language, including organizing her writing around any obvious thesis. I’m oblivious to music, whereas The Salt of the Universe is full of Leach’s own life as a musician, showing how music and musicians can provide windows into the playfulness, freedom, and wonder that God built into the world.
I’m also a historian, and memoirs are often not “true” to history, with its interest in accuracy, evidence, and chronology. Leach’s memoir is not chronological, has huge gaps, and cannot be said to be “accurate” about anything other than her interior life. This is challenging for me, since as a scholar I am always wanting to get the other side of the story, to provide context, and to resist anecdotes as a form of information.
While Leach resists a concrete argument, there are still themes underlying Leach’s gorgeous, funny, and mischievous writing. The first is that abundant life begins when we escape authoritarian boundaries. The second is that the God revealed in nature and Scripture is worthy of praise, and that humans are the beloved children of that God in all their silliness and finitude. Leach’s enchantment in her current season of mothering oozes out of every chapter of this book and provides her insight into God as a heavenly parent.
Leach’s regular insights into fundamentalism are infused with affection for human foibles. She follows her critiques of the insular Adventist church of her childhood (reflecting a very specific strain of the church) by the gleeful observation that “there is a major source of outside information in Adventism: the Bible.” She loves the literature that is Christian scripture, and it is clear that her world is infused with the characters, love, and praise that come from being steeped in the Bible. Whatever her youthful frustrations at being hammered with rules made by Ellen White, prophet and co-founder of the Adventist church, such pain does not translate to the uses of the Bible by religious authorities in Leach’s own life.
Leach chooses to be gentle with the quirky and often misled folks who tried to make long lists of rules about how to be God-fearing in the world. Except for Ellen White—she gets no context or benefit of the doubt or even humanity, and Leach gives her more credit for forming doctrine and dogma than professional historians might conclude.
But memoirs aren’t scholarship, nor are they intended to be fact-checked. I appreciate the spiritual work it took for me to consistently refrain from moving into scholar mode and to sink into Leach’s invitation to a rich interior life focused less on ideas and more on living.
Indeed, Leach’s book is more about reveling in loving Creation than it is a warning to not be a fundamentalist. I learned a great deal about stars, hamsters, birds, and the history of words from reading Leach’s stories. I even got suggestions for recipes and vegetarian eating. Every page was a reminder to live in the salty realm of our five senses. In this way, it is a very Adventist book, with less of a focus on “heaven” and more on our bodiliness and the vitality of who we are physically in the world.
I believe that affirmations are the building blocks of the Beloved Community, so Leach’s chapter on praise spoke especially powerfully to me. Praising God means being grateful and aware of all the Good Things that exist even in the Bad Things and for taking real notice of human and non-human creation, from the least to the greatest. Leach didn’t quote from Mary Oliver’s poems, but her writing fulfills Oliver’s “Instructions for Living a Life:”
Pay Attention
Be Astonished
Tell About it
Maybe it is because I’m a historian, but I have identified a third theme lurking in the writing: Time. The Apocalypse (or “apicklypse” as one of Leach’s chapters tags it) as a way of viewing time is a primary value of Adventists and her book points to many of the negative effects of a focus on the End of Days. A more positive Adventist time-related theme is Sabbath-keeping, and for this Leach is more grateful.
Her awareness of where she, at midlife, is in Time, and her observations on death in the animal world help her invest delight in the present—lived in the skin we are in, even as we look forward to a New Earth. “With their conspicuous mortality my hamsters showed me more about the future than all the prophecy cranks at church: that someday I would have four minutes of future left, three minutes, two minutes, one minute.” In this way it is also a very midlife memoir, one filled with the insights that Gen Xers have for the world before and after the internet, and the kind of pleasure in parenting that previous generations frequently failed to record.
Leach’s book has sections and chapters with titles that are organized very loosely. Each chapter is also followed by a glossary of terms/phrases that stand alone. For instance, such witty observations as: “‘The End is Nigh’ makes for a sexier sandwich board than ‘The Middle is Nigh,’” or “My children were born like fifteen minutes ago and already they are saying things like ‘I have my doubts about leprechauns.’” Leach seeks to creates a playfulness that contributes to Jesus’ call to become like children.
This memoir shows up in lists of books reflecting the current printing boom around ex-evangelicals or the “nones”, but it does this book a disservice to see it this way. The Venn diagram of genres Leach fits into gives me hope for the future of identity cross-pollination. While the entire book is a resistance to the dictates of categorization, in the end, Leach acknowledges she has in fact chosen to be part of a local congregation with particular denominational ties.
While it is not a “spiritual-but-not-religious” polemic, Leach’s book reveals the tensions for thoughtful Christians that have existed since the Protestant reformation. She points out the irony in the heart of the Adventism of her youth: “The founders of Adventism were extolled for not accepting the dogma they had inherited”—but they then formed a church with authority they expected their young people to submit to.
Individualists like Leach—those who prophetically push through the boundaries and invite us to dance with wonder on the frontiers—do a great service to Christianity. At the same time, it is the prosaic and sometimes stodgy institutions that we call “the church” that have provided the mentoring, resources, and opportunities to practice the very things she encourages us to enjoy. We don’t know what an institution-less church might be, or how we could beautifully and playfully use the English language without any organizations that publish or teach or apprentice writers. The benefits of irreverence seem to require people who took something so seriously as to create rules around it.
Leach gives one vision of the freedom that can happen when someone pivots from their experience of stifling narrowness in a formative culture. It’s a challenge to form practices to pass along to children that they won’t perceive as dogmatic, or want to throw off as falsely representing a loving Creator. What Leach has done, in a hopeful, humorous, and delight-filled way, is show us how.
Lisa Clark Diller teaches on the early modern world at Southern Adventist University in Chattanooga, TN. She researches and writes on religious minorities and the development of modern liberal democracy. She is a monthly contributor to the Anxious Bench and the incoming President of the Conference on Faith and History.
Image credit: ID 23347736 @ Dip2000 | Dreamstime.com