If being a pilgrim involved riding a bicycle through cold city streets to make food deliveries to people who are earning the salary you used to earn before you left your corporate job; if becoming a saint required you and your wife to move back into your old roommates crammed one-bathroom apartment because you can’t afford to live anywhere else; if learning how to embody the gospel meant making a slow march away from alcoholism and through therapy; and if along the way you had to deal with the many-headed hydra of well-meaning but generally unhelpful fellow believers—would you still be interested in becoming an every day saint? These are the challenging questions that Josh Nadeau’s punchy debut book, Room for Good Things to Run Wild: How Ordinary People Become Every Day Saints, asks its readers to consider.
Part memoir, part textbook, part diary, and part collection of quotations from a host of theologians, Nadeau’s book kept reminding me of The Catcher in the Rye. Nadeau’s vulnerable introduction to his state of desperation reveals a twenty-first century version of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, trapped in his own mind with the lion of too much knowledge and the wolf of self-aware hypocrisy. But this book is like if Holden Caulfield was passed a stack of G. K. Chesterton quotes midway through his NYC crashout (the title of the book is itself taken from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy). Like Holden Caulfield, Nadeau details his intrusive, elliptical thoughts, self-disgust, and desperation for meaning; he moves through a similarly depressing urban background to The Catcher in the Rye’s 1940s New York; but instead of ending up in a sanatorium, Nadeau learns the way toward sainthood through the lives of people he meets and by physically applying the words of wisdom that get bandied about too easily in Christian circles.
The book begins with a paragraph-length prose-poem which quickly dunks you into Nadeau’s forthright way of expressing himself:
Why are you looking for the living among the dead?
There’s no one here; no one alive, that is. Sure, there’s the pretending, the faking, the make-believe, but that’s not life, and that’s not living. Those are just the death-twitches, postmortem spasms, the continued stiffening of a body drained. It’s going through the motions, it’s the veneer, the performance. Everything we’re supposed to do, acting how we’re supposed to act. But inside? It’s a graveyard. Stiff and cold. Lifeless. It’s that space between awake and asleep, that purgatory, where it feels like you’re just falling. Where the bottom fell out, everything solid just up in smoke—the same smoke that burns the lungs and stings the eyes. The same smoke that obscures vision, making reality nothing more than a haze. It’s the panic, it’s the fear, it’s the disorientation—no up, no down, just the whistling of everything you ever thought you knew cascading by, as you drop further, and further still. And then there’s the sudden stop. Like when you shake yourself up from a dream. A body twitch, jerking awake. Eyes a bit more clear.
And that’s what a double of bourbon will do to you at five thirty in the morning.
This is a book for every young man (or young woman) who has ever hit a crisis of meaning or purpose, despite possessing boatloads of knowledge. And it is the book I would swap out for any young man contemplating reading something by Jordan Peterson about making your bed and being the king lobster. This is the story of a real young man and his real-life crisis and a slow series of encounters with a real God and a real Saviour—painfully laying a new foundation of rock after the sand has been blown away, and then beginning the real work of the lifelong construction project we all have before us: being formed into a saint.
The book is strongest when it attacks the sneakily disembodied gnosticism of the modern Christian system, pointing out all the ways the body and the flesh and the world are seen as enemies to vanquish rather than good things to set in their right place, capable of redemption when we take up our cross and follow Christ. Nadeau spends a lot of the book exploring what it means to be in his body, whether that’s learning to box, bicycling through town, drinking coffee, sipping beer, signing up to a bouldering gym, smoking cigarettes, or hiking up mountains. This is a welcome counter to the overly intellectualised religion that permeates many of our churches, places where everyone wants to be a theologian but nobody wants to be a saint. I do wish that Nadeau had balanced out his focus on the body with more criticism of how the modern world is fully engaged in body-worship, either through gluttony/lust/sloth or via egotistic vanity and a desire to live forever while looking young. Learning to physically embody our faith without giving over to the world’s glorification of the flesh is a delicate paradox to inhabit, but based on Nadeau’s essays on his Every Day Saints Substack, he’s more than capable of doing so, and I was waiting for him to do it in this book.
Reading Nadeau is always a fast-paced experience, the prose clipping along in a compelling way, and there’s just enough narrative in this book to prevent the life lessons from becoming too dry. The chapters are short and come with pithy epigraphs to summarise the central idea Nadeau is focusing on, which does help the reader glean the broader point instead of getting lost in the details of Nadeau’s individual journey. Each of the five ‘acts’ or parts of the book come with their own ‘liturgy.’ For example, “Act 1 (The Anatomy of Anguish)” provides us with the following list once we have completed reading the details:
Find Life; depart the realm of the dead.
Hypocrisy is lethal, hostile to the path of Life.
Learn from those who have walked the Path before, they are Guides.
Fear eviscerates the vital organs necessary for Sainthood.
Rigorous embodied practice, under tutelage, cultivates maturity.
Do not scorn childlike wonder with mere explanation.
Arrogance chokes growth before it can begin.
Desires are signposts that lead to rest.
Souls are enchanted through the food of Love and Wonder.
It is a gift that life doesn’t go as planned.
Souls cannot be restored while bodies are neglected.
Take these as your mottos, as your liturgies, Nadeau seems to be saying, and maybe you will see the gospel with fresh eyes.
Nadeau has certainly imbibed enough Bible scholarship to last a lifetime, and the best sections of the book are when he goes beyond pointing to a pithy quote by Lewis or Chesterton or a sixth-century church father, and shows us how he applied the truth in his own life. Late in the book, Nadeau is homing in on the nature of our God-given bodies, and he dances between James K. Smith, Pope John Paul II, and Chesterton, eventually finding a true understanding of the gut-punching aphorism from Chesterton’s book on Aquinas:
Man is not a man without his body, just as he is not a man without his soul. A corpse is not a man, but also a ghost is not a man.
By the time Nadeau lands on that quote, he’s already living it out. He’s taking daily hikes up and down a nearby mountain, he’s watching people eat and talk and laugh and swim, he’s working out at an outdoor calisthenics gym, he’s walking around town holding his wife’s hand. He’s discovered that soul-craft isn’t purely mental, and the faux-ascetism he was raised on was the way of death, whereas the unity of body and soul is the way of life.
This is a deeply vulnerable book, especially for a debut author mostly known for his digital art and design, but it doesn’t rest on unearned shock value. It draws you very close into Nadeau’s own swirling mind and churning heart, with an interiority that usually only novels can provide. We are with Nadeau when he makes bad decisions and when he falls into confusion or self-despair, when he tries to bite his tongue as people quote Christianese catchphrases at him, when he expresses his love to his wife, and when he finally understands an oft-quoted piece of wisdom. And we are there with Nadeau as he finds his way toward the truth of ordinariness, of releasing trite ambition to grab hold of a greater desire. The sensation for the reader is that of being the angel on Nadeau’s shoulder as he boxes and bicycles and boulders his way toward an embodied experience of Christ’s love.
Much of what Nadeau is writing about isn’t particularly new (most of the quotes are from books written before 1960), but the major takeaway for me was how the villainisation of our bodies and emotions leaves us less than fully alive. Which is not to say we should be slaves to our flesh, but that we can rightly and deeply enjoy our humanity, our feelings and sensations, the joy of romance and sex and eating and drinking and exercising, when we have subjected ourselves and our lives to God. That we can have an emotional love relationship with Jesus, and discipline our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit, without making either our emotions or our bodies into idols. There is a right order to the embodied life of an every day saint, but it’s not a stifling order; it’s not a rigid model built for appearances and approval. Nadeau has discovered that it’s a life with acres and acres of room for good things to run wild.
Image Credit: Caspar David Friedrich, “The Sea of Ice” (1824)
