During this Lenten Season, I’ve been reading the 2013 paperback Love & Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters book by Andrews and Griffith.  It is about two friends who meet in a creative writing workshop and decide to write each other DAILY during Lent.

“Love & Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters” book by Amy Andrews, & Jessica Mesman Griffith  

 The one friend who is preparing to enter the Catholic Church at Easter asks her friend to be her Sponsor, so it follows their writing each other daily. It is a rich exchange of daily letter writing to each other sharing their spiritual journey discoveries. 

After the first Lent Season, they decide to continue writing through the next Lent and then we find them once again getting ready for Easter at the end of the book. The book timeline is 2005 – 2007. There are wonderful references to the Book of Ruth, with quoting “Whither thou goest, I will go”. 

Their letters express support and prayers for each other.  What I wasn’t prepared for was the amount of pain these two dear friends would end up working through expressing to each other with one of them having suffered a terrible loss. If the book had only included the first Lenten Season of letters it would have been fine, but by their sharing their letters for the following two years it brought the book and us the reader through a deeper journey.  The thread of hope woven through the letters with optimism was exceptional. It is available in paperback and ebook.

While I write a daily blog post encouraging letter writing and often times find the Yoast SEO tool telling me my writing level is at “too high” a level and I should simplify it, this book I found myself believing one is reading at the 2nd year college level. At the end of the book, one finds a comprehensive Bibliography at what reads to me as a Graduate level reading list for Religion and Literature. It is one of the few books where I read it so intently every night for a week only to now find myself these weeks later with about 10 pages to go to finish it (I did skip ahead and read the end weeks ago).   The book “…won the 2014 Christopher Award for literature that affirms the highest values of the human spirit.”