Marriage and Other Acts of Charity

December 7, 2009
In this breezy, soft-pedaling exercise in spiritual empowerment, Braestrup (Here If You Need Me
) shares some of her hard-won marital wisdom. As an ordained minister, Braestrup counsels couples to love and cherish one another, even in the face of a 50% divorce rate, and asserts that of the three kinds of love known in ancient biblical Greek—eros, philos, and agape—the greatest is the last. Translated into Latin as charitas
, agape is the generous, selfless love given unconditionally and best mimics the nature of God's love. Braestrup traces her own call to the ministry to the aftermath of the shocking sudden death of her policeman husband, Drew, killed in a car accident in 1996, when her family and friends rallied around her and the couple's four children with abundant love and care. She reveals that not long before his death, the couple had suffered a marital crisis and sought counseling for what the author considered clearly Drew's “incurable character disorder”; however, she was jolted from the brink by the thought of their losing each other. Employing examples of the couples she knows, such as game warden Jeremy Judd and his betrothed, town dispatcher Melanie, who sought the author's advice as they embarked on their marriage, as well as a soon-to-be-divorced couple, Jesse and Georgiana, Braestrup offers grains of folksy, charitable wisdom. She is comfortable discussing death (“One hundred percent of marriages end”), declaring that the only recourse is Jesus' message: “Love more.”

November 15, 2009
Another volume of quietly humorous reflections from the first woman chaplain of the Maine Warden Service.

Braestrup (Here If You Need Me, 2007, etc.) again recounts both tense and tender moments with the men of the Maine Warden Service, whom she not only accompanies on search-and-rescue operations but also gently counsels on matters of the heart. The author, who described the death of her young husband in her first memoir, now reveals the stresses of the early years of that marriage and, in a self-deprecating manner, the rocky times when her anger ruled and divorce seemed the likely answer. A widow with four children, she eventually met the right man, fell in love and married again. Armed with the experience of her marital history and a religious perspective that may surprise the orthodox—she defines herself as"a post-Christian, left-leaning, nondoctrinal, noncreedal Unitarian Universalist"—she brings to her counseling of others a warm heart and an appealing frankness. Her lecture on values to a classroom of 13-year-olds moves from a hilarious bit on sexual reproduction to a moving discussion of the distinctions between various kinds of love, in which she introduces the Greek words eros, philos and agape to explain erotic, brotherly and unconditional, selfless love. One lesson Braestrup imparts is that all marriages end, that all relationships end and that the way to live in the face of this harsh reality is to love more.

Nonpreachy, a bit earthy and full of life and love.

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