The road less traveled

Shoreline resident Mary Potter Engel has spent her life walking a spiritual path. From teaching at one of the most prestigious divinity schools in the country to serving as a lay leader in a rural synagogue, Engel’s journey has led her to pursue a new calling — as a fiction writer. She’ll read from her second novel May 6 at the Shoreline Library as part of the King County Library System’s Nextbook series, highlighting new perspectives on Jewish literature, culture and ideas.

Told in the first person by the inhabitants of a rural South Carolina county, “Strangers and Sojourners: Stories from the Lowcountry” is a collection of stories that are woven together by the common thread of a young Jewish doctor who tends to the community’s diverse residents. Religion, race and gender all intermingle as characters try to come to terms with personal tragedies and challenges, while exploring God’s place in their lives. As Engel describes it, the book observes “how people in a small community deal with moral complexities — especially when you have blacks and whites, Jews and Christians, transgendered people, straight and gay, who can’t avoid each other.”

Engel’s inspiration for the novel came from her own experience living in the South Carolina lowcountry for five years. But the book is also informed by a life immersed in theology and the transformative effects of spirituality.

Engel, one of 21 Washington artist recipients of a 2003 Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship, arrived at fiction writing after an established career as a theology professor. Raised in the Christian Reformed Church, from an early age Engel was intent on entering seminary and becoming a preacher, despite the church’s prohibition on ordaining women. “I was sure, being an idealist, that they were any day going to decide to admit women,” she said.

Engel took pre-seminary courses, then entered graduate school at the University of Chicago as an “interim measure,” while the church continued its internal dialogue on the matter. She completed her dissertation on the theologian John Calvin, earning a doctorate in theology. But when the church reaffirmed its ban on women in the clergy, Engel turned to the Presbyterian church, a tradition that ordains women.

After preaching for many years she got her first job as a teacher at the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey where she began to teach in seminaries and train ministers. “I kept thinking I was going to be ordained, because that was my dream, and I would keep putting off and putting it off,” she said, “and then I realized I had a calling to teach.”

Engel eventually became a tenured professor and authored two non-fiction theology books, “John Calvin’s Perspective Anthropology” and “Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside.” But during this time she began to reassess the direction of her life — professionally and personally. As the mother of two small children, her demanding work schedule limited her time with them. At the same time she also experienced a spiritual transformation, ultimately converting to Judaism. “I was raised in a tradition that was very much focused on the Old Testament,” she said. “My basic theological concepts were continuous with who I was. I was always very interested in God the father, the creator and God the spirit. And those concepts are everywhere in Judaism. So it feels like I’m home, it didn’t feel like such a radical shift to me.”

The conversion itself wasn’t as difficult as the realization she had to give up teaching. “I didn’t want to give up my job,” she said, “but I didn’t feel right training Christian ministers as a Jew, so I realized it was time to change. It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life, because I loved my job.”

During this time her husband, a research doctor, also came to reevaluate his career goals, deciding to shift his speciality to primary care. Wanting to practice in an underserved area, the family relocated to rural South Carolina. In this unfamiliar landscape Engel focused her energies as a lay leader for the small community synogogue there and became a school volunteer. “In the midst of all that, I retooled,” she said, and while working on another project, a theology text, she recognized she wanted to pursue fiction writing.

Her first fiction novel, “A Woman of Salt,” incorporated the Biblical story of Lot’s wife as a metaphor for the spiritual suffering of Ruth, a Jewish woman caught between her secular life and a longing for a deeper spiritual connection. Within the narrative Engel shifts between the central character’s story and Judaic midrashim, what Engel explains as “interpretations of biblical passages that seek to clarify Jewish law, teach spiritual lessons, or extract deeper meaning from the text.”

With “Strangers and Sojourners,” Engel found her subject all around her in the small South Carolina community she called home. What she discovered was not only a culture rich in storytelling tradition, but a culture where the Bible was alive in the daily lives of her neighbors. “I’m very interested how the Bible gets lived out in people’s lives,” Engel said. “I’d come from a seminary where everybody’s talking about the Bible, and here these people were living it. They were not illiterate, they were very sophisticated about the Bible.”

Initially it was a challenge overcoming her own “white, northern ideas” of southerners to get to the spiritual heart of her story. “People outside the South have such a limited view of what the South is. They have a homogenous view of the south, but the south is not homogenous,” she said. She finally “realized what a gift that place was to me and to my husband; the people were so lively, the language was so alive — English was alive in their mouths.

“It turned out to be really one of the best times of my life. That’s really what I tried to bear witness to in this book,” she added. “I hope that’s what people find in this book — looking at the south in a different way.”