What to Do When Hell Is Dickerson Road

Becca Stevens’ new book, Hither & Yon, A Travel Guide for the Spiritual Journey (Abingdon, 174 pp., $11), is not for the armchair pilgrim who prefers spiritual enlightenment in the form of reassuring bed-time reading. Stevens is an Episcopal priest at St. Augustine’s Chapel on the Vanderbilt campus, but she’s also the founder of Magdalene, a residential recovery program for drug-addicted prostitutes. For Stevens, the spiritual journey includes requirements that many among the faithful might find uncomfortable: attention to the poor, compassion for prisoners, openness to other faiths, unstinting generosity and forgiveness. Her new devotional is as much a fierce call to arms against hatred and inequality as an instruction manual for deepening faith: “If we are not concerned about war, poverty and justice, we are praying hollow words. If what we contemplate in our hearts doesn’t well up in us and cause us to act, then we need to contemplate again.”

Though not a single word in it comes across as smug or self-righteous, Hither & Yon offers ample evidence that Stevens walks the walk—and not just in her work for Magdalene, or her prison visits and mission trips, or her unfathomable openness. (She and her husband, playwright and songwriter Marcus Hummon, don’t even believe in locking the doors to their house.) In 2003, Stevens spoke before the General Convention of the Episcopal Church on behalf of Gene Robinson, a gay priest whose election as bishop threatened to split the denomination. For Stevens, the issue was about more than gay rights—about more, even, than tolerance and understanding. It was also about getting past the question of sexual orientation to focus on the real point of faith: “to clothe the naked and feed the hungry and love our enemies.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people of Nashville were not pleased to have a native daughter make this speech at a national assembly: “One woman wrote that I should never again call myself a Christian,” Stevens writes.

The Christianity Stevens practices is gentler than that of her critics, but equally passionate. This is a book about the search for God in unlikely places—in a prison visiting room, in a rattlesnake beside a forest path, in the prostitutes on Dickerson Road.—and finding the heart to follow.

Becca Stevens will read from Hither & Yon at Davis-Kidd Booksellers at 6 p.m. Sept. 10.