Laurie Brock is an author many of us know has a love for horses. She creatively wrote about the spirituality of her life with horses in her first book, Horses Speak of God (2018). For her, horses are part of everyday life.
In this book, she extends the everyday and ordinary into what is quotidian for everyone, horses or not. Here, we encounter objects like shoes and pots and photographs, with Brock’s wisdom about how they point toward what is sacred for us in this life. Her introduction sets the stage: “We humans need things. We need items, objects, and belongings that we can grasp and touch and grab and even fearfully hold to remind us. We need reminders that we are here and that God is here.”
A little while later: “Things speak of our story. They are souvenirs of our holy journeys. Treasure them. Listen to the truths they whisper.”
For her, these things or objects include a cast iron skillet that was seasoned for years by her grandmother and her grandmother’s cooking, in which Brock and her sister cooked up scrambled eggs the morning after their grandmother died.
In addition to the “items, objects, and belongings” mentioned earlier, Brock also includes marks among Souvenirs of the Holy. Numbered among these are scars — on her cowboy boots, and on her body. In that chapter she turns toward the reader after telling her own stories and asks, “Has anyone ever noticed your work lines or your scars — something well worn about you or your soul that’s the result of living, the result of striving? Are you proud of your scars, or uncomfortable with them, or both?”
She offers extended reflections/chapters on fifteen groups of things. Garden shears, for example, become a lesson in pruning. And quilts, interestingly, are revealed as objects that “speak of redemption.” Brock: “God always finds our scraps: the pieces and parts that don’t seem to fit anywhere. God does something that God can do: recreates something of exceptional worth.”
Brock is an Episcopal priest in Kentucky, and occasionally this comes into view. She clearly loves the stories of the Bible and the prayers of the Book of Common Prayer, and points to these riches on occasion. But she wears the vestments lightly. This is a book for many.
