A Delicate Fade

DeVries grew up the son of evangelical Christian missionaries, where God was as much a part of life as breathing.

all my life I've heard about salvation, how it can find us only when we need it the most. I've heard about brokenness and how God can heal us only when we're breaking apart and small. I've known this but not that it would happen to me and not that it could feel so much like pain or that need could feel so much like despair.

Yet, in his battle with depression, he questions the meaning of his life.

I wonder if this is all my life is: a default survival and some days not even that. it seems different from what it was supposed to be and from what I asked for. maybe I don't want it anymore.

He knows with his head that God still exists, yet in his heart he feels the aching void of the absence of God's presence.

I've always been told that God is what I need the most, that only he can fill this hole inside of me. but it keeps getting bigger and more removed from the rest of life, and even he doesn't seem to want to be there when I need him the most.

As he shares quotes from such diverse sources as Rainer Maria Rilke, Lewis Carroll, Leo Tolstoy, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Nine Inch Nails, DeVries seeks reassurance that others have experienced what he has and that his brokenness is temporary. He expresses gut-wrenching vulnerability, although some passages flirt with self-absorption.

some days I hold on to sadness because it's my only comfort. it's there when everyone else goes away, and I'm lonely then but not as much as when they dismiss me when I need their empathy the most.

Yet, readers who have experienced the same unrelenting dark night of the soul will forgive him for these moments as they empathize with DeVries' agonized, candid observations on suffering and his wrestling with doubt.

all my life I've heard about salvation, how it can find us only when we need it the most. I've heard about brokenness and how God can heal us only when we're breaking apart and small. I've known this but not that it would happen to me and not that it could feel so much like pain or that need could feel so much like despair.

In his search for authenticity as a creative writer and musician of faith, DeVries discovers that:

we think that the farther we go into the spiritual life the more we will fit the mold of someone who has the right to be here. but our position was always a gift to begin with and nothing is changed about that now. we're still little children, but at least we have a place to belong.

DeVries refreshingly eschews easy answers. His courageous exploration of the darker side of faith should resonate with readers looking for a companion to walk alongside them on their own journeys through the dark night of the soul to the light of God's love.

--- Reviewed by Cindy Crosby

Ben writes forthrightly. His background is clearly that of an Evangelical; some would say Fundamentalist. Yet he communicates as their discontent product and reluctant critic. Without paying homage to them, he writes with an emotional transparency that discloses their limitations and legacies as his own. Both of which he has inherited and both of which he salvages--if not harnesses (!)--as contributing to his life in ways he passes on to the reader.

Ben offers a perspective that will come alongside those who are disillusioned with the religion of our day and assist them in their groping after hope and faith and God. His voice is one most certainly awaited by the coming generation. He writes as one of them! And those of us from prior schools of thought will do well to listen--whether we are ready or not. Doing so will take us not only inside the twitching curtains that obstruct our understanding of the emerging post-modern soul, but it may even help us pull back our own layers of buried questions and struggles--perhaps forgotten for having been so long conceded or abandoned.

There is an honesty and sincerity here that is at once refreshing and disturbing. It is the frankness one should expect from a kindred seeker after Truth, but which is yet so uncommon that we may have given up looking for it. Many will undoubtedly ask themselves after reading this book why it has taken so long for these thoughts finally to be expressed. Others will marvel that such a young soul possessed the depth of insight to know how to articulate them.

I recommend this book to all those who feel as though others view them as unconventional or disenfranchised--as "on the fringe," when it comes to religion, or church, or Christianity. And I recommend it to anyone who questions, who fights against the creeping shadows of despair, or who feels alone in feeling (however numbly) that Truth and Reality are veiled by a curtain that flutters but never seems to open.