Mariah Helgeson

In Daring Greatly, social researcher Brené Brown tells a story about an experience she had in graduate school that surprised her. Called to a meeting with a professor, she expected to be intimidated and rebuked. Instead, her teacher was an ally. She pulled up a chair, sat down beside her, and offered Brené Brown adjustments. This is shaky ground for a lot of us: moments when our work, our ideas, and our actions are open to feedback. It is a place of immense vulnerability.

There’s a common emotional vocabulary in the writings of Catholic women, a fierce devotion strangely coupled with a startling humility. This is ever-so-present in Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal, recently published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. It’s a wonderful book: unflinchingly honest, unfailingly wise, and immensely funny: “What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately.

The poems of Mary Oliver are prayers that anyone can pray. They are spacious and simple, expansive and ordinary. They don’t require us to believe in anything in particular, but they do ask us to pay attention to that fleeting and particular space of a moment. When asked about the spiritual life of her childhood, Mary Oliver told Krista Tippett: “Well I would define it now very differently from when I was a child. I was sent to Sunday School, as many kids are.