Immovable Feast

An Immovable Feast: How I Gave Up Spirituality for a Life of Religious Abundance by Tyler Blanski, 278 pages

Tyler Blanski's story begins like many other stories.  Raised in a conservative Christian home, as a young man he rejected the comfortable suburban faith of his parents in favor of a more radical, more authentic spirituality.  Gradually, however, Blanski came to understand that his new beliefs were just as complacent as those which he had rejected, only conformed to a different environment.  His quest for a genuine relationship with the living God drew him into Anglicanism, and ultimately beyond that, on into the Catholic Church.  For love demands, not a vague and nebulous (and therefore "pure") (no)thing, but something real and concrete (and messy).

An Immovable Feast is a delightful book.  Blanski has an extraordinary talent for anecdote, and the book is filled with funny, relatable, and educational moments - often all three at the same time.  This is united to the author's keen awareness of the influence of others on his own life.  Blanski does not neglect the intellectual side of his pilgrimage, but never allows the heavy theological issues he wrestles with to derail the narrative, even while providing a rich array of personal touchstones that could serve as further reading suggestions.