If you have ever lost someone you dearly loved, suffered some terrible malady, found yourself plagued with a phobia or anxiety over the abyss of your fate, or survived a natural disaster — please read The Doors of the Sea by David Bentley Hart.

For the sake of your own hope and joy, please read The Doors of the Sea.

I started it a couple years before my father died so young in 2021, but didn’t really get far. It was also pre pandemic in NYC, though I had survived the Joplin tornado, had left Tunisia before the Arab spring, my wife is from Ferguson, I moved to NYC right after Sandy. The list goes on. All of these things made everything in The Doors of the Sea — the reporting, the poetry, the Brothers Karamazov quotes I have just read this last year (still need to review that), and especially the philosophy — all the most poignant and real to me. I was laughing and pushed intellectually an cried multiple times. Had a crepuscular sleep last night. I was up from 1am to 2am). So I was finishing the book at no soul’s hour here in Brooklyn, weeping for hope, weeping for joy.

You really need to get it. It’s 100 pages, a pocketbook format. It’s basically an extended longford article. You can read it in a couple hours.

If you’ve ever encountered an atheist friend who offers a heartless and callous “that’s just the brutality of nature” to your suffering or a muslim or Calvinist friend who says of your dying child “it’s all a part of God’s plan,” this book will make both look like idiots, vindicate your rage over the evils of death, and ultimately give you deepest hope for your deepest longings in your grief.

Or at least it did for me. Miss you every day dad. See you soon.

Photo by Eduardo Drapier on Unsplash