Heidi Hart

In Grace Notes we are invited to view the painful but ultimately healing journey that Hart has taken to find her voice, reclaim her body, and to live a more authentic spiritual life. She carefully traces the personal history of each of her spiritual and emotional maladies, sometimes tracking its roots back several generations. She finds healing by coming to terms with the constraining voices of authority, tradition, religion, and family.

Grace Notes explores a variety of themes and weaves them together masterfully. For example, Hart struggles with accepting her body. She traces the source of her ambivalent and sometimes hateful attitude towards her body back to her grandmother, who hides her "disgusting" body under perfumes, and to her mother, whose "body was a diary of shame and fear" and who taught her daughter to hide her body under a thick mask of makeup. She uses her newfound voice to reclaim her body: "I could 'word' my way back to my body. I could try to see from inside my own skin, not as I'd viewed it from the outside since I was ten, as a bleeding burden or as church property or as my husband's private treasure...[then] I came to the poem I knew I had to write. Revisit the moment of your most passive silence, came a whisper inside of me. Give the girl you were a voice." Hart then launches into a harrowing account of her pre-marriage hymenotomy, the violent taking of her virginity by a patronizing physician. By giving voice to this girl, long silent and long silenced, Hart grants others a voice-she says the things that others may lack the courage to say.

Grace Notes poses important questions to those who find security in a structured, hierarchical religion like Mormonism. Does the institution sometimes do more harm than good to the spiritual development of some of its members? Is it possible for someone like Heidi Hart-especially women-to find a place within the Church without sacrificing authenticity? Or is silence part of the price that one who disagrees (or doubts) must pay for membership? Is there a valued place for non-conformists in the Church?

In spite of her struggles with Mormonism and the traditions of her family, I found Hart's critical treatment of family members and Mormonism even-handed and even humble. Quaker author Muriel Bishop wrote, "How can we in truth and lovingly help one another in this? Because we must remember that truth without love is violence. And love without truth is sentimentality. We do need both." Heidi Hart has followed this principle in her writing. While Hart is not afraid to be critical of authoritarian and constraining tendencies of the LDS Church, she also carefully acknowledges how she values her Mormon friends, neighbors and even (former) religious leaders. Her reflective and even introspective criticism is a refreshing departure from angrier and more violent attacks that seem to make up the bulk of other personal memoirs by those who have left the Church.

There is so much more that Hart weaves into her narrative that I could discuss: her journey across the country to find her voice; her description of the shining shards of God's spirit, shattered and scattered throughout creation for humans to discover; her discussion of female friendship and intimacy. All of this, and much more, is contained in a scant 230 pages, in beautiful but accessible lyrical language. Because of its rich layering and interweaving of themes, because of its vulnerable honesty, because of its treatment of issues of institutional religion versus personal spirituality, Grace Notes is valuable reading for a wide range of thoughtful readers.… (lisätietoja)