Mary Lane Potter

A Woman of Salt explores the conflict between a woman's mundane secular life and her passionate longing for spirituality.

This daring and complex novel confronts the dangers of introspection and the healing power of imagination. It is a resonant meditation and a beautiful story of one woman's struggle for wholeness and her journey toward spiritual regeneration.

How do ordinary people make sense of their often tragic and grief-stricken lives using inherited religious imagery and ideas of God, faith, forgiveness, and salvation given to them by ministers and rabbis? That's the the question every character in this linked story collection faces and answers in a distinctive voice and way, some with humor, some with hate, all with creativity and surprise. The inhabitants of Coosaway County who tell their stories of coming to grips with God and fatih in the backwater are as wild, dangerous, soft, and appealing as the Lowcountry landscape they dwell in. You will not soon forget their voices, their lives, or their hard-won wisdom.

A professor of Christian theology's account account of converting to Judaism, examining the complex reasons, fears, and dangers that accompnay major religious transformations. Spiritus 7:2 (Fall, 2007): 143-168.

In Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside. Ed. Mary Potter Engel and Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite. Orbis Books, 1999:152-64

Kindle Publishing, June 2012

Seeking God and Losing the Way is an inspirational spiritual autobiography that weaves together dramatic family history, healing from trauma, the anatomy of conversion (from Christian to Jew and from believer to mystic), vocational struggle, spiritual experience, and mystic stories and poems from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. This book will appeal to anyone who enjoys memoirs about spiritual struggle and search in the midst of ordinary and not-so-ordinary life experiences. The author’s experience as a professional theologian, feminist, mother, fiction writer, and mystic combine to give this narrative unique depth, drama, and poetic language.

Through reading the author’s account of her lifelong seeking for the One, one can find a new way to approach the relationship among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a fresh understanding of mysticism and model for the spiritual path, and encouragement and guidance for one’s own spiritual search. All along the way, the honesty, wisdom, and playfulness of the author’s deep reflections invite readers to explore the meaning of “God” and spirituality in their own lives, their own life purpose, the spiritual depth of everyday living, the obstacles to spiritual growth, and the way to an open and moist heart. Without minimizing the pain, confusion, and struggle of spiritual seeking, this book guides and welcomes the reader to ongoing personal transformation and a life lived in wonder, love, and joy.

Reading this book is like having a conversation with a friend about deep matters of meaning and the heart. It will have a profound effect on your assumptions about God, spirituality, religion, mysticism, what it means to be a human being, and the possibilities for radical change.