Room for Good Things to Run Wild: How Ordinary People Become Every Day Saints

Artist Nadeau debuts with a vulnerable if sometimes overwrought account of overcoming addiction. A high-powered banker with a leadership position at his church, the author spent years struggling with an emptiness that neither drinking nor an increasingly hollow faith could fill. After hitting rock bottom, he left banking and took a string of odd jobs as he set about repairing his life. Therapy helped him realize he’d been wanting a closer connection with God, which he nurtured through an “embodied life” of serving others, decentering the self, and finding goodness in the everyday (ordinary routines like going to work, he writes, imbue “that which is finite and temporal” with virtue). Most evocative are the author’s meditations on the emotionally numbing experience of addiction, which he describes as akin to “being unable to participate in the Fullness of the world around me.” Unfortunately, his insights become fuzzier the further he strays from his own lived experience, as when he suggests that readers facing their own crises should “listen to the Hidden Music” and “have courage enough to follow it wherever it may lead.” The result is an intermittently insightful testament to the life-saving power of faith. (Feb.)