If you think a woman’s quest to find a statue from the church of her childhood wouldn’t be that engaging a mystery, you’d be wrong. In The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion, Sonja Livingston refuses simple devotion as a motive and keeps digging for the source of religious impulse. As she considers her motive for pursuing an old sanctuary statue, she asks great questions: “Why does the faith of our upbringing leave such a deep imprint?” “How does one wooden virgin’s smile capture a girl’s imagination so completely that, decades later, she will spend months tracking it down?” And, perhaps most importantly, “When else did we bow to something larger than ourselves?”

Her last question is doubly relevant today, when “bowing down” is an anathema to most common-sense Americans. Is bowing to something larger than ourselves even a self-respecting gesture? Except that Livingston recognizes its fruit: “In our neighborhood, where most fathers were absent and mothers worried over the steady onslaught of bills and raged some days and laughed the next—even on those days when we managed to be peaceful or glad—no face ever looked as tender as it did in the Communion line.” She watches Jacinia, a vibrant, brown-skinned, white-robed altar girl, seated behind the priest; Jacinia draws the eye because “that which we come to church to pray for—she’s filled with that.” Mystery is at work here, and Livingston pursues it.

I’m glad. We need writers willing to “abandon the overused helmet” of their heads in favor of following their hearts, as senseless as it might seem. Livingston’s well aware of the dangers: religious language, devotional sentimentality, brutal doctrine, crazy-making church policies, etc. She even brings a healthy cynicism to God’s existence, inserting an extra “o” to make God good, because she can revere goodness. Kudos to her for entering risky terrain for the sake of a radiant smile. Some things in life are worth pursuing, even against our better judgment.

The real gift Livingston offers readers is her attempt to narrate this pursuit of mystery. She fails, as do all writers who try to give language to language-less experience. Her effort, however, testifies to the existence of the ineffable, and in an age when many dismiss it entirely, mystery needs more advocates. Livingston asks, “Isn’t the work of the artist,to not only show the light on broken glass but to try and touch the source of luminosity itself? What an impossible and lovely proposition—to attempt to build bridges with words to the mysterious expanse where language cannot join us.” When this source appears in the forget-me-not blue of a dusty virgin’s robe hidden in storage, I may not recognize it but I’m sure grateful Livingston does.

– Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew