Book Review: Fully Alive, Elizabeth Oldfield, Hodder 2025

‘I would argue that…seeking and surrender, when done in a safe context, towards a love beyond us, is the only way to know the whole range of human experience, that it’s a risk worth taking’

Fully Alive is a personal account of how Elizabeth Oldfield has navigated these waters in her own life. Early on in the book, she recounts uttering a simple prayer during a Christian event in a cowshed: ‘God, if you’re there, show me’. That caught me off-guard as it was almost word for word the first genuine prayer I prayed as a convinced agnostic. For Oldfield, though, she had an immediate answer in the form of, as she puts it, an ‘ecstatic experience’:

‘My question had been answered with an overwhelming felt presence, an encounter with a ‘you’, defined by love and acceptance and peace’

Becoming a Christian in such a dramatic fashion changed her life, but nine years later, now working for the BBC and having been disturbed by what she read in the Old Testament, her earlier ecstatic experience failed to sustain her: ‘My faith had gone. The presence I had encountered in the cowshed had somehow bled out of the world…and I was alone’.

That aloneness, however, was to change and change profoundly.

The rest of the book is an honest, open, and vulnerable account (see the chapter on sex if you’re doubtful!) of how her relationship with Christianity has taken her not only on a personal adventure of faith but also how she and her husband, and children, live out their lives in community:

‘Our enormous table is crowded with friends…they are Marxist and post-liberal, polyamorous and celibate, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, Buddhist, stoic, atheist, confused’

If I were to use different words to describe the rest of Fully Alive than honest and vulnerable, it would be warm, intelligent, funny, and self-deprecating.

Having also lived in community for a few years, many of her anecdotes left me nodding my head in knowing agreement and laughter. For example:

‘My experience is that community kills the romantic idea. Illusions die here, especially illusions about myself. I really am petty enough to mind…who mopped the floor last. . I am snippy and critical…before 10am…(but)…anything unsaid festers like a dead mouse in a trap’

But Fully Alive is not all light and laughter. Her chapter headings announce that we’re dealing with life as it really is, not in escapism or defeat or withdrawal but head-on: Wrath, Avarice, Acedia, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Pride and ending with a chapter entitled ‘The G-Bomb’, G standing in for God.

This is a rich book. It holds a mirror up to our common human experience. It’s uncomfortable at times, deliberately challenging, and provocative. I was irritated, for example, when I felt she jumped on the stereotypical anti-Trump bandwagon, which left me yawning. Also, bracketing [God] didn’t work for me. If the tenor of the book is to make talking about the human condition and God more accessible, why imprison God in brackets? But I acknowledge that for many others who have a visceral dislike of Trump and are, like Oldfield, genuinely trying different ways to dismantle barriers to human and divine spirituality, being ‘snippy’ about brackets may seem rather pitifully trivial!

BUT…this is a great read. Entertaining, informative, disruptive, it will leave you with a fresh determination, like Elizabeth Oldfield, to be ‘Fully Alive’.

Thoroughly recommended. Maybe a good Christmas read going into the New Year?