FINISHED READING - Don't Forget We're Here Forever by Lamorna Ash

After completing reading a novel, I press the pause button on literary imaginative fiction, and deep dive into a book that is literal, about something current and vital, that I in someway care about. Lamorna Ash's, Don't Forget We're Here Forever was such a book. An investigative endeavour that takes the temperature of Christianity and researchs the reasons for young people's recent renewed interest in it. It is rare these days to pick up a book, that becomes so all consuming you need to read whilst the hunger for it is still raging.  This is an extremely honest, yet kind hearted book, written with great care and sensitivity towards it's subject matter. My interest  in Christianity has never quite gone to the extent that Lamorna pursues here. Obviously she was writing a book, so she has that as her driver, initially it's her desire to understand more fully the variety of forms of Christianity she encounters, underneath this is her own nascent faith seeking for a place it might rest. 

This book is not then another crude hatchet job on Christianity, that puts it one book nearer to obsolescence. You can tell she is open to the experience of whatever she finds is there. Yes, she has her doubts, even in situations and with people she loves, she has her own self interogating questionings. She meets everyone where they are with a degree of respect and a desire to understand where they are coming from. There are interviews with committed Christians, recent converts, people who left and then returned, people who have had visions, inexplicable encounters with God, those who run Alpha courses or lead Christian retreats. She covers the broadest gamut of approaches from Quaker, through Pentacostal, Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, to newer worship phenomena like Soul Survivor, Youth With A Mission or One Church. And many of these organisations are, or were, far from perfect and she doesn't hide or excuse that. But they are all, whilst not exactly reviving, are receiving more interest these days from younger people of Lamorna's generation in their mid to late twenties. Open to Christianity as something that might fill a significant gap in their lives, that society has nothing substantial to fill it with, other than more distractions and analgesics.

The thoroughness in her writing, keeps digging for something one step deeper than a quickly dashed off sketch will provide. The process by which her task to document her own generations struggle with a world apparently going to pot, and the solutions it is trying to find  is a journey that is fluently and compellingly written. It is also full of humanity, with all the flaws, clumsy feelings, cackhanded efforts to engage with a new form of prayer or communal practice. We all recognise the self consciousness and awkwardness of being in unfamiliar contexts. Gradually as you progress through the book, you get a clearer sense of Lamorna as an individual seeking personal answers, as well as the eloquent descriptive writer. As she discovers the contexts she's been unknowingly searching for. She finds herself standing up in a silent Quaker meeting and 'ministers' for the first time. There are obviously those situations and people she has an instant rapport with and those she does not. But you the reader are always with her.

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8