Learning to Speak God from Scratch by Jonathan Merritt. This book begins with Merritt's realization that making a move from Atlanta to New York City silenced his ability to have spiritual conversations. The phrases and ideas behind them that made perfect sense in the south often were completely undiscovered by the New Yorkers that he was suddenly surrounded with. Through this, Merritt begins to think about the decline of spiritual conversations, spiritual language and the feeling that some words are either too fraught with baggage to even come to a consensus their meanings. What does it mean for our faith if we withdraw from using these words and from having spiritual conversations? After pondering the reasons for use of sacred words and where we are linguistically, Merritt continues by sharing several words and how those words have been altered in his spiritual vocabulary, using personal anecdotes and reflections.

This is truly a beautiful book, and I think it is an important conversation. We come to words like God, sin, suffering, lost, and grace with our own backgrounds and our own presuppositions, and we often don't realize that someone else's background and connotations surrounding those words are very different. When we add in meanings through church history and in the biblical languages, things can get very confusing indeed.

It was just such a book as this, Kathleen Norris's Amazing Grace, that made me see, when I was close to rejecting my faith that I needed to wrestle with God rather than run away from him. God was big enough to handle my doubts, fears and often, accusations. (That book still has a place in my top five favorite books ever.) Merritt's book is perhaps not as well done as Norris's, but his book digs into the idea of lost languages and speaks to modern issues in a way that is much appreciated, and that young seekers may even relate to better. His personal reflections are top notch, and I might have really found a few things that hit me where I live, especially in the chapters on "disappointment," "neighbor," "self-esteem," and "lost." In fact, I copied so many quote from the chapter on disappointment into my commonplace book that I might as well have copied the whole chapter.

I am thankful that I paused to read this book, and I will definitely be exploring the bibliography, probably starting with Borg and Taylor's books, so I expect I will be taking up this topic of spiritual words on my blog often in the coming months. This book receives my highest recommendation. (Book 41 of 2019)