THE CURIOUS CALLING OF LEONARD BUSH (REVIEW)

If you’ve ever seen the series Sex Education on Netflix, you may remember that the first season centers on Otis’ well-intentioned but mostly ill-advised career as a peer sex & relationships therapist for his schoolmates. There’s a need that’s not being filled, so rather than see his friends, acquaintances, and enemies continue to spin their wheels or perpetuate destructive cycles, he steps in and attempts to meet those needs to the best of his ability. 

I couldn’t help but get major vibes from this show while reading the brilliantly and poignantly ordinary Curious Calling of Leonard Bush by Susan Gregg Gilmore. Now, where the former is often fast-paced to depict the often chaotic feeling of adolescence, the latter moves slowly and deliberately, exactly at my imagined pace of a mid-twentieth century Tennessee. And where the former is deeply centered in the teen coming-of-age perspective, the latter takes the point of view of various central adult characters just as much (if not more) than that of Leonard and his friend Azalea. But not unlike Otis’ peer therapist motif, Leonard’s peer priest (he’d call it preacher) journey acts as an achingly compelling premise through which this story can explore what we do with grief, and how what we do with grief compounds and redoubles our grief. 

There were at least two occasions while reading this book when I lamented out loud to myself, “All of this could be avoided if someone, anyone, would just say, out loud, “I’m sad!” And there were several occasions towards the end when I yelled at the page, “He/she is trying to open up to you!! The thing you’ve wanted this whole time! Let them! Please!!!” The author wrote these yell-at-the-book scenes in such a way that I couldn’t help but deeply identify and empathize with every character in their own tragic trap of seeking connection through coping mechanisms that only lead to alienation. The genius of Gilmore in this book, to me, is how, without heightened or larger-than-life characters, without extraordinary events, she portrays the negative feedback cycle of shame in such a concentrated, relatable, unavoidable, yet still somehow subtle way. 

I also loved the way Gilmore explores the concept of vocation. In the beginning of the narrative, Leonard goes through a tragic experience, and his gut tells him to begin to cope with that grief through a public ritual. Through this rite, his natural talent for theological reflection and pastoral presence emerges, and reinforces his experiential authority as a very obvious and public knower of grief. These communal perceptions, combined with his community’s traditional interpretations of his experience as ordained by God, construct an externally-imposed vocation that would be near impossible for anyone, let alone a well-intentioned preteen boy, to resist. So, the narrator spends the rest of the story exploring the dynamics of calling– internal vs. external motivations, calling as coping mechanism vs. calling as beauty wrested from ashes, time-bound vs timeless– through the eyes of (and eyes on) a boy whose impressive intuition can only take him so far beyond the spiritual limitations of the people and culture around him. 

This eddy churns and churns until “the man’s face turned pale. ‘What do you mean you gave it up? You can’t give up what you’re called to do…”, to which Leonard replies, “I just ain’t sure what I been doing up there is my calling really. At least not anymore it ain’t.” In this climactic moment, we receive a message that is one of the loveliest gifts of this story. Our callings may be thrust upon us by circumstance and/or communal perception. We may believe in that imposition, we may even long for it. We may cling to it when there seems to be little else to grasp onto. But ultimately, that which is divine is our choice to do the very best we can do with what we have, vocation or non-vocation. Called or not called. 

I am grateful that being editor of this column means I get sent moving, beautiful reads like this to take in and share with our readership. I can’t recommend this story enough.