Leaving the Saints | Martha Beck

Leaving the Saints | Martha Beck | Frustratingly inconsistent

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Leaving the Saints

	Leaving the Saints Martha Beck Portrait, 2005 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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?Martha Beck?s riveting memoir teaches us more about love, spirituality, trauma, truth telling, and hope than all the self-help books combined. It is one of the bravest, most achingly honest books I?ve read in years. Leaving the Saints is a priceless gift.? ?Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., author of The Dance of Anger

?A courageous, touching, and beautifully written spiritual journey of the heart. I applaud Martha?s candidness and perseverance in her steadfast pursuit of the power of love.? ?Judith Orloff, M.D., author of Positive Energy and Dr. Judith Orloff?s Guide to Intuitive Healing

?Very sad. Very brave. Very true. Martha Beck has written a universal story for anyone who has confronted physical and spiritual abuse and freed themselves from the tenacious grip of patriarchy.? ?Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge and The Open Space of Democracy

?Leaving the Saints is a brave book. Martha Beck shares her journey out of religion and into faith and healing with heartbreaking candor, softened by wit and uplifted by a deep spiritual longing.? ?Sharon Salzberg, author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience

From the Hardcover edition.

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Martha's Best Work

We know from seeing her on the Oprah show and from her other books that Martha Beck is nothing if not candid, funny, highly intelligent, wise, and self-revealing, and this book is the best of all of these things.

Highly entertaining and engaging, it is a "page-turner" that will keep you up all night. It is unlike anything else I have ever read, and I still think about it often and recommend it to everyone.

Here we find an inside look at what it is like to grow up in a Mormon community where your father is one of the most respected defenders of the faith. Learning about this way of life is enjoyable when Martha is the story-teller.

From here, she goes on to become "America's Best-Known Life Coach."

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Frustratingly inconsistent

For an ex-Mormon living in Utah, parts of this book will ring so true it's eerie, and this will provide a nice insight into Mormon culture for interested outsiders. Other parts, however, the author is clearly making up, though it's unclear whether she is simply lying or if she actually believes some of the things she says and is simply deluded--or delusional (for instance, her completely credulous account of her "near-death experience").

This creates a certain problem of trust for the reader regarding the parts that are not obviously true or false: one is not sure what to believe, and cannot simply take the author's word for it. This applies, unfortunately, to the central claim of the book: that Beck was sexually abused by her father, a prominent Mormon apologist. While sexual abuse certainly occurs in the Mormon church, and its officials undoubtedly downplay or even help to cover it up, it's impossible to know whether her specific claim is true.

For one thing, her "memory" of what happened is so bizarre that one ought to be skeptical. Secondly, though she tries to dismiss it, there is such a phenomenon as unscrupulous therapists implanting suggestions in the minds of already disturbed patients, and it is as plausible to think this was the case for Beck (her mantra prayers of "please...please...please..." eventually answered--really--by a talking ball of light are one example of how disturbed she is) as that her memories are genuine. For one thing, it is odd that these memories would "surface" after decades when she begins seeing a therapist--although the phenomenon of repression is also very real, especially when coupled with post-traumatic stress. And while she claims that there is actual physical evidence of abuse in the form of supposedly otherwise inexplicable scarring, the reader is simply told this repeatedly with no evidence given.

Her portrait of her father as alternately befuddled and obstinate is amusing, though, but again no evidence is given for his abuse, in turn, at the hands of his mother. His war-time experiences certainly could have messed him up, though.

I hate to belittle Beck's story, but she really gives us very little reason to believe her, and some reason to doubt her; and besides, she occasionally seems to belittle it herself, as when she inexplicably drops inappropriate jokes in the middle of the most serious moments of her narrative, one example of how obnoxious her style can be.

On the whole, her conversion from Mormonism to a New Age brand of Buddhism is almost a step backward. The search for a rational critique of Mormonism continues.

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