Michelle Huneven

Author, restaurant critic, and gardener Dana joins a search committee to find her Unitarian Universalist church's new minister when the current minister, Tom Fox, announces his upcoming retirement. The search committee has a diverse array of people, which soon form into factions along age lines. Dana has agreed to be on the committee partly because she thinks she can get her next book out of it (if she changes all the names and gets permissions for the sermons); it ends up taking a tremendous amount of time and care, and in the end, although they do choose a candidate to hire, she feels the search has failed. Detailed and oddly fascinating.

Quotes

Did I know about "the rule of seventeen"? he asked.
I did not.
Seventeen, he said, is how many people it takes to instigate a coup in a church. (Tom Fox, 50)

How do we live in this world where friends disappear for years and years and reappear as if nothing has happened? (119)

Secrets work on me like splinters. I like them out. (123)

"That's what it means to have an open mind: you get to change it when you've missed something. An open mind lets in new evidence." (Adrian, 172)

In such a deluge of spiritual thought, I felt charged, inspired to be better, more generous; I felt dilated to beauty and suffering, and grateful for the slant of sunlight, the different greens of leaves... (180)

"This is why consensus is problematic," I said. "Because the intractable activist faction wears everyone else down." (Dana, 308)

"Rituals are road maps through life's transitions." (Alanna, 328)

"Systems that hazardous shouldn't be so complicated," said Jack. "If there are too many things that can go wrong, several can and probably will g wrong at once and create a scenario that nobody could anticipate." (348)… (mer)