Love is the Way: Holding to hope in troubling times

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry
Penguin Random House, 10/2020, HARDCOVER
ISBN: 978-0-5255-4303-9 
$27

From the title, it would be easy to write off Bishop Michael Curry’s new book as vague, feel-good musings on love. Of course love is the way—love is the way of Valentine’s Day, and pop radio, and the soft-focus Jesus of Hallmark Easter cards. But that’s not the love that Bishop Curry is talking about. While this memoir-based book has plenty of musings, they are neither vague nor soft-focused.

Written before the pandemic and before the racial and political strife of 2020 came to a head, Love Is the Way provides a series of anecdotes from Bishop Curry’s life that speak so directly to these painful social challenges that it seems prophetic. When one of his daughters asked him what he was writing about, he said he was sharing some of what he’d learned from “faith, family, community, and ancestors.” The life lessons he shares here get to the heart of his life, “those people and experiences that led to [his] conviction that the way of love can change each of us, and all of us, for the better.”

He presents them as stories, beginning with losing his brilliant and loving mother to a devastating stroke, and the many ways his father, his extended family, and their community stepped up to not just show love but to be love. He tells about various churches where he served, and individuals who acted as the hands of Christ and others who were changed by the touch of those hands. He explains experiences in his own life that led him to understand his calling as a priest and that eventually put him on the path to become elected presiding bishop. He laces these stories with threads from the rich fabric of his life—the soul food, spirituals, jazz, theologians, poets, historic figures, and scripture that have influenced and inspired him.

Each story could stand alone as an interesting anecdote, but he deftly uses them to either define or illustrate his basic premise about what love is. As Bishop Curry explains, love is not a feeling. It is a specific commitment to living in an unselfish way. In the Way of Love teachings that he has shared with the Episcopal Church, he has taught that love is a step-by-step process that replicates the desire of Jesus’s earliest followers to live in a new way, for “we” rather than for “me.” Love is a verb, and it is challenging to do it. Here, he fleshes out what it has looked like in his life.

To those who say that love is not strong enough to form a way of life, Bishop Curry says that the current focus on selfishness is not working. His experiences show that love can be a strong guiding principle, and that those who practice it can be strong, too. He ends with guidelines on how to put love into action—a daily planner, or a rule of life.

Love Is the Way is engaging and moving, inspiring and prescriptive. In sharing the stories of his heart, Bishop Curry provides clear and specific ways to hold on to hope in these troubling times. Thanks be to God.


Reviewed by Lucy Chambers, EBA Assistant Secretary and Manager, Christ Church Cathedral Bookstore, Houston, Texas