Anti-Catholic, pro-choice atheist finds love … and God
SAN FRANCISCO – One would have been hard-pressed to find a person more secure in her anti-Catholic beliefs than author Sally Read. Heralded as one of the bright young writers of the British poetry scene, Read was a die-hard feminist and staunch atheist. However, all that changed when “[she] found Him who [her] soul loves.” Read’s fascinating conversion to the Catholic faith is masterfully chronicled in her new book, NIGHT’S BRIGHT DARKNESS: A Modern Conversion Story.
Read makes no secret of her original disgust and revile of Catholicism in NIGHT’S BRIGHT DARKNESS. She provides an abundance of recollections of how much she despised the Catholic Church, including how she went through a period in which she collected images of the Blessed Mother in a mocking fascination of the woman she believed stood for everything she had been brought up to reject: “submission, docility, chastity.” In fact, Read was in the process of writing a book about female sexuality when she first met the priest who would help change everything. And even when Read first realized that she believed in God, the idea of becoming Catholic was out-of-the-question.
Reads relates her encounters with the Holy Trinity, and how the transformative events threw new light onto the experiences of her past — her father’s death, her work as a psychiatric nurse and her single years in London — while they illuminated the challenges of marriage and motherhood in a foreign country.
Read’s story lays out a landscape of the complicated human heart. It is the story of how God knows us and desires us — how He probes the very recesses of our being. In short, it is a story of grace.
“Sally Read’s story is the best and liveliest account of a conversion for a generation,” Paul Murray, O.P., Angelicum University, says of NIGHT’S BRIGHT DARKNESS. “It is a story of divine grace as moving and unexpected as it is luminous and profound.”
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