Amy Andrews - Love & Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters

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2013 Amy Andrews and Jessica Mesman Griffith

All rights reserved.

Portions of these letters have appeared in Its a Wonderful Life, Image No. 50, and on Good Letters, the Image Blog.

At the Bus Stop; Eurydice by David Ferry, from Of No Country I Know, is used by permission.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

1999 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1999

Printed in the United States of America.

INTO MY ARMS

By Nick Cave

1997 Mute Song Limited (PRS). All rights for US and Canada administered by Embassy Music Corp. (BMI)

International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

Reprinted by Permission.

Cover art credits: iStockphoto.com/diane555, iStockphoto.com/CSA_Images, Keattikorn/Veer, Leigh Prather/Veer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Andrews, Amy.

Love & salt : a spiritual friendship shared in letters / Amy Andrews, Jessica Mesman Griffith.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8294-3831-4

ISBN-10: 0-8294-3831-9

1. Andrews, Amy--Correspondence. 2. Griffith, Jessica Mesman--Correspondence. 3. Andrews, Amy--Religion. 4. Griffith, Jessica Mesman--Religion. 5. Female friendship--Religious aspects--Christianity. I. Griffith, Jessica Mesman. II. Title. III. Title: Love and salt.

BR1713.A63 2013

277.30830922dc23

[B]

2012037646

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8294-3832-1

13 14 15 16 17 EPUB 5 4 3 2 1

In 2005, when we first began writing letters, we barely knew each other. We had no idea where this antiquated practice would lead, or what we would write. We only knew that we were both seeking God, that we both struggled with persistent doubt, and that somehow it would be better to seek and struggle together.

We had met several months earlier in Pittsburgh, at the end of graduate school, at that crucial last moment before everything changesbefore jobs, marriages, houses, and children pin life down. We were away from home, jobless, and single. Jess arrived in Pittsburgh with a truck full of all her worldly possessions. For the first time in her life, shed left Louisiana. Amy, on the other hand, had arrived already exhausted from a long line of moves, Pittsburgh being her fifth city, her eighteenth apartment since leaving her childhood home in rural Pennsylvania.

We met in a creative writing workshop. On the first day, all of us were enduring one of those awkward introductions, going around the table, describing our projects. We both confessed to writing about GodJess about her Catholic and evangelical upbringing, Amy about growing up naturally religious in an agnostic household. We were both careful to conceal any current conviction, sensing we wouldnt be taken seriously if we admitted to belief. But for a second our eyes met across the table: What, you too?

When our workshop took an end-of-the-year trip to New York, we decided to stay on an extra day, just the two of us, crashing in the empty apartment of a friend. Wed been waiting for this chance to walk through the world alone and share our thoughts.

And thats what we did: we walked and talked, from one end of Manhattan to the other. It seemed unimportant where we went or what we did. There are vague memories of a bizarre black-and-white art flick, a play (something to do with angels), and a hot sandwich we bought from a street vendor and passed back and forth as we walked. We covered miles, pouring out our stories.

The day ended with what seems to us now almost a miracle. We walked into a bookstore for a few brief moments, just long enough for Amy to pull off the shelf a small pocket edition of the Old Testament Book of Ruth. What led us to that book? We cant remember. Its almost as if we walked in and someone said, Oh, yes, here it isthe book you have come for.

That night, we sat shivering on the rooftop of our friends apartment. The meatpacking district hummed below, but we felt cloistered from the world. We read the book aloud, passing it back and forth, alternately reading and listening with almost breathless attention. When Ruth, a widowed Moabite woman, is joined to the Israelites by proclaiming her undying loyalty to her mother-in-law, Naomi, we were electrified by the power of her ancient promise:

Whither thou goest, I will go.

Thy God shall be my God.

We were praying together for the first time, though we hardly realized it. In these two womenremoved from us by centuries and cultureswe received a vision of friendship, a way of walking with each other toward God. But we could never have imagined the path we were starting down together.

A few weeks later, we left Pittsburgh: Jess for South Bend, Indiana, where she took a job at Notre Dame writing thank you letters to high-ticket donors; and Amy for Chicago, to return to teaching mathematics at DePaul. In a few months, we would both be married, Amy to a philosophy grad student, Jess to another writer. Our friendship was so new, and we both had such bad track records of keeping up with long-distance friends, that it seemed our connection would dim as quickly as it had flared.

Then Amy declared that she was converting, a decision that seemed somehow traceable to our long walk through New York. She asked Jess to be her sponsor.

How could we go down this path together, across a distance, in the midst of establishing new marriages and new careers? We decided to write lettersone letter for each day of Lent that would culminate in Amy entering the Church at Easter. But what began as a Lenten discipline soon became a habit, and we continued to write for years.

We wrote to preserve and make sense of our daily lives; we wrote to confess and console, to rant and grieve. But more than anything else, we wrote because it was the only way we knew how to pray. After a pause in our correspondence, the old alienation would creep back in, the sinking sense that there is no God, that its all a big ruse of biology or history, and that we are fools. In our letters, we wrote ourselves back to belief.

After five years, we had between us over a thousand pages of largely handwritten letters. We compiled and bound them, photocopying each page, as a Christmas gift for each other. Reading them for the first time in their entirety, we saw that they told a story of two young women walking together through the trials of daily life, trading back and forth the role of guide and pilgrim, doubter and believer. Again and again, if one of us stumbled in the darkness, the other lit the lantern that helped her to make out the path to God.

When we faced tragedy together, our letters became the fulfillment of the vow we had made, however unwittingly, that first night in New York: Whither thou goest, I will go.

I

Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls; for, thus friends absent speak.

John Donne