The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

Stephanie Saldaña writes a touching account of her personal and spiritual journey after experiencing heartbreak in her book THE BREAD OF ANGELS: A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND FAITH IN DAMASCUS. She tells her story with intense and intimate emotions that one can almost feel what Saldaña had gone through. Indeed, her vivid descriptions offer a window of discovery of what she experienced before she reached Damascus, a place she had longed to be, which includes the steps she took to overcome her painful past that has familial origins back in her hometown in Texas as well as with her close personal relationships that had a history of uncompromising aspects that did not quite mesh with her path in life. The book is very interesting and enticing. It is definitely a page-turner that once one reads each and every page, there is no turning back but to continue on to find out what will happen next. But as a hint, there is plenty of intrigue and scintillating elements to Saldaña's memoir, especially during her time in Jerusalem and Damascus where she is completing her fellowship and encounters Frédéric, a monk who happens to add another dimension to her studious way of life and also unlocks what has been missing in it as well. THE BREAD OF ANGELS may appear to be about the story of one woman's path towards salvation. However, it is more than that. There is a tinge of East meets West in terms of understanding societies that are deeply rooted with religious faith and theology, and Saldaña shows that by retelling her personal experience and the adjustments she had to make to understand who she was and the environment in which she was exposed to in her past and was beginning to understand in her present. This is a very thought-provoking book.

This is a gripping, can't-put-it-down memoir written by a twenty-something woman from Texas who has traveled the globe for many years, subconsciously hoping to escape her troubled past and keep one step ahead of death itself. The book centers around 2005, the year she spent as a Fulbright scholar in Damascus, Syria. She has just completed two years at Harvard Divinity School, and she wants to learn Arabic so she can study the Koran and learn more about the prophet Jesus. During this year, she befriends some of the locals (including those who have fled the war in Iraq, Lebanon, and other troubled spots) and also spends a month at a monastery in the desert contemplating her faith (she is Roman Catholic by birth). This description cannot do justice to this incredible book. First, the author is a poet, and her images and interpretations are beautiful. Every sentence is well-crafted and a joy to read. She makes the stories in the bible come alive, and she paints vivid portraits of the streets and people of Damascus with her words. Second, yes, she's there to learn Arabic, but she also suffers from repressed grief---there was so much sorrow in her teen years that the family believed it was cursed. She comes to realize that she has always felt so comfortable in these places of suffering because she does not really know how to live. And that some of the people she so longs to save have already saved themselves. The book is really about her own personal redemption/resurrection, and about the basic questions many of us wrestle with every day--how to do no harm, how we can help others in a violent world, what is the basis of heaven and hell. I know the book has been called "romantic"; the quote on the cover actually calls it "A love story." This is surely oversimplified, and readers looking for that will be disappointed. Instead, it is so much more: a story about learning to live with all the complications and joys and sorrows of the world, a story about falling in love WITH LIFE again. Perhaps the best way to describe this is an Eat, Pray, Love for thinking folks. Whereas Elizabeth Gilbert was paid in advance to set up her journey and record it, Stephanie's journey seems more spontaneous---it seems to truly stem from her heart. (I think Ms. Gilbert eventually succeeded in finding her own path, but this memoir seems more genuine somehow, its origins less forced.) It would help to have some background on the middle east before you read this book (and really, shouldn't we all know more about where our troops are fighting??), but the author explains people/situations/events well enough that you can get by either way. This is a book I will pick up again and again, and recommend to all of my friends.

I am particularly fond of this kind of memoir and The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith ranks high among my favorites ~ Irina Tweedie's Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master, Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, Mary Swander's The Desert Pilgrim, Flora Wood's In Search of the Way, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee's The Face Before I Was Born: A Spiritual Autobiography. I feel blessed to have discovered this beautifully written love story and I am so glad that this gifted author has shared it with the world. It is an important story of lasting value to those who tread the spiritual path beyond the confines of traditional established religion. It vividly narrates the passion of one woman's quest for her emotional healing, self discovery, spiritual awakening and personal transformation. It is brimming with soul and resonates with love. The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith is sensitively written with a poet's ear for the beauty of language and the voice which sings its lyric. It is a celebration of language and words and I appreciate so much the depth and keener understanding of the Arabic language which the author conveys so passionately and artfully. Stephanie was a lonely and depressed young woman, a true tortured soul with a broken heart when she first traveled to Damascus, Syria in the summer of 2004, not exactly the safest time for an American woman to find herself in the war-torn, often violent and anti-American Middle East. A fearless world traveler with a determination to learn the Arabic language, she found herself in Damascus in order to study Islam, specifically the Muslim prophet Jesus of the Koran, on a Fullbright fellowship which was intended to foster a greater American understanding of Islam in the post 9/11 world. As a student of divinity she was eager to learn how Christians practiced their faith in an Islamic country. With her enthralling attention to detail, her story reads like a captivating travelogue, rich with culture, the lively flavors of Damascus, the austere beauty of the desert, the soul-shaking intensity of an ancient monastery where she retreats for spiritual exercises. With touching sensitivity and affection, her narration overflows with the exuberance, courage and humanity of the remarkable and unforgettable people she met in Syria ~ those who kindly and generously took her into their homes, their mosques and churches, their shops, their hearts. She embraces with great reverence and tenderness the common themes of the Christian and Islamic faiths ~ opening up, letting go, finding peace, getting closer to God. Her mystical metaphors are beautiful and thought provoking and have left a lasting effect on me. I found one Muslim saying which her spiritual mentor the Abbot Paolo relates to her during her dark night of the soul particularly moving and perhaps for me the most powerful statement in the book ~ "No one can escape from the power of

Stephanie Soldana's book will certainly not escape comparison with Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love - both women undertake journeys of healing and self-disovery across the world after having their hearts broken. Soldana travels on a Fulbright scholarship she got while enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. She starts her year in Damascus, Syria the week before 9/11. Her memoir, therefore, is not only a retelling of first her study of Arabic so she can eventually study Issa, the Muslim name for Yesua/Jesus, but a heart wrenching and heart warming tale of the people of Damascus, some refugees from Iraq and Palestine. Saldana writes about them so wonderfully that we learn something of their essences. It is also her story, the story of a rather mystical visionary girl who has seen tragedy in her young life and seeks to understand meaning in life, going to do what some might call a "vision quest" at a recently rediscovered and rehabbed monastery in the mountains. We live with her through her struggles with a possible vocation and then later with her struggles being in love with a novitiate monk who struggles for months with his own calling. I really hope the published book contains photos, especially those she took at the mosque in Damascus at sundown, when the people walking through were bathed in light and turned into angels. Many of the scenes are poetry, the writing transcendent, and the characters unforgettable.

Having lived in the Middle East, I found Ms. Saldana depiction of Damascus and of the Arab world to be true. She is a war-weary world-traveler journalist who comes to Syria to study Islam on a Fulbright fellowship. Her memoir tells of her struggle for Christian faith and romantic love within a Syrian desert monastery located outside of her base in the Christian Quarter of Damascus. The writing is lyrical and conversational at the same time. The book covers a lot of ground (her Mexican- American heritage, her psychological flight from a family "curse", interfaith dialogue, etc.) without being cluttered. The reader should be sure to read the acknowledgements to see the "afterwards" of the memoir.