A Two Books Review: The Spark of My Womb, B. Coil The Gift of Being Yourself, David G. Benner

These two books are like looking at the same subject matter but through different ends of the telescope! And even as I wrote that sentence, I’m wondering if we’re tackling two books exploring the same subject matter – coming to terms with, making friends with - loving yourself – but through different ends of different telescopes.

B.Coil has written a vivid and imaginative fiction which is deliberately semi-autobiographical and tackles the subject of overcoming trauma en route to wholeness via mysticism, psychotherapy, and psychedelics, whereas David Benner points his readers towards a similar, to discovering our ‘true-selves-in-Christ’ via gospel meditation.

I loved both books.

The Spark of My Womb often has a light touch, is humorous, with a fire motif running through it like the letters in a stick of rock. Its raw honesty and depth of compassion made reading compelling.

The Gift of Being Yourself was equally engaging, entirely theoretical but sheds light in every chapter like a good firework display, where the careful academic approach is forgotten once you are drawn into the transformational truth that Brenner’s argument that the gospel is not among us simply to re-connect us with God as a loving heavenly Father, but to re-connect us with ourselves.

Some detail.

Spark is very female-centric and has 5 main characters. Or maybe 6 if you include the candle.

Amy, a 39-year-old depressive and OCD sufferer, whose therapist, Lyz, has summed her up as someone who suffers from a ‘chronic, sometimes, debilitating, anxiety that centres around ‘your’ lack of self-worth’ almost on a whim decides to travel to London, ‘I know what I need: a paid for London vacation in which I clear my aura, become whole, and eat all the gluten’. She finds her way to Dr Lauren, who runs self-healing retreats in a tree house and uses psilocybin, a psychedelic, in her treatments.

Meanwhile, London (a person, not the place) is off to meet Buddhist Peggy, who styles herself as an ‘Expert Guide’ and also uses psychedelics. London says of herself, ‘I can not fathom a life without my triggers, I can not imagine an existence where I do not have to cater to my traumas.’ And we learn that her traumas include her mother dying when she was 6, her childhood house burning down, and having a stillborn baby in her late twenties.

The book travels with all four women, including the therapists, in their respective search for wholeness. Spark ends with an intriguing and satisfying twist for its resolution.

If Spark is grounded in an ill-defined New Age/Buddhist spirituality, The Gift is profoundly rooted in biblical Christianity with an emphasis on what Benner describes as ‘Spirit-guided meditation on the gospels’ where ‘Spirit’ refers to God, the Holy Spirit.

Benner leans heavily on Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton’s adage that ‘If I find Him (God) I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him’ and 4th/5th Century theologian, Augustine’s prayer ‘Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee’.

To illustrate this journey to knowing God and therefore finding oneself, Benner takes a close look at Peter, the apostle, and how his knowledge of Jesus grew as did his discovery of himself.

He tracks Peter from the initial ‘Follow me’ invitation, through walking on the water and sinking, and on to his bold assertion that he would follow Jesus come what may, whom he now knew as Messiah (Christ). Then his failure in his denial of knowing Christ after Jesus’s arrest. Courage and lack of courage, fruitful preaching and personal failure, all come to a climax in meeting Jesus on the beach after the resurrection, when he learns more about Jesus’s capacity to forgive, and, specifically, to forgive him and recommission him.

In a passage that is surprisingly similar in analysis to a similar observation in Spark, Benner writes that the person we call ‘I’ is really a ‘family of part-selves’ and that ‘Christian spirituality involves…exposing (our part-selves) to God’s love and letting Him weave into the new person He is making’. And, in Spark, Coil speaks through her character Amy, who is bemoaning that a book she is writing seems to belong to numerous genres and then realises ‘I realised my novel is a reflection of me. I have always been at the tiny parts of everything’ and then speaks of her hope that her encounter with Dr Lauren will result in ‘integration’, another word for wholeness.

Whereas Coil, through Spark, advocates a combination of psychotherapy, chemically assisted perhaps, Benner, himself a psychotherapist and spiritual director, testifies that ‘spending time with Jesus in gospel meditation has…put flesh on…God, who I have been seeking to know’

Two very different books. Two very different routes to wholeness from brokenness, it’s over to the reader to assess each approach.