The Salt of the Universe: Praise, Songs, and Improvisations

The Salt of the Universe: Praise, Songs, and Improvisations
By Amy Leach
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages
Published August 6, 2024

A reviewer described The Salt of the Universe as “a madcap, whip-smart theology of joy.” I happily agree. While her publisher classifies Amy Leach’s work as memoir/spirituality, it is greater than the sum of these. Numerous books have been written about leaving fundamentalism. No one, however, writes like Leach.

Leach is also a musician, and the lyrical essays in The Salt of the Universe change tempo and rhythm, skip subjects, and make associative leaps. Rather than a chronological narrative of her religious upbringing, she riffs on her past and present like a jazz trumpeter improvising. She tells stories from her time abroad, mothering her two young children, and hiking around Bozeman, Montana, where she and her family live.

Jazz songs do have structure, however, and Leach links individual essays to her influences, such as Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, and Bach. Similarly, she relies on the repetition of phrases, notably certain sayings of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew, including his parable of the flute-playing children from Chapter 11 and the Sermon on the Mount’s teaching about salt, from which Leach takes her title.

Her tone is delightfully humble and humorous, closing each chapter with a quirky and poignant glossary of phrases. For example, she takes the phrase “the world sailing out the window” and writes, “If you throw the world out the window, it might roll into the road and get run over by a bus. Some people would indeed throw the world under a bus.”

Fans of Ross Gay will delight in Leach’s encounters with the divine through careful consideration of small objects, describing babies, hamsters, wombats, zucchini, and fern spores in lyrical prose. Seemingly ordinary things arouse extraordinary insight: “the light that’s still there, always there, that can be collected by the tree full, by lavish profusions of leaves, or little by little, by scraggy green shoots sprigging up out of your downfall.”

Mention of her “downfall” cues readers that Leach has suffered from her Adventist upbringing and eventual break from that tradition. When she was a girl, she’d watch the sky for a cloud that would grow bigger and brighter to reveal Jesus and his trumpet-blowing angels. This Jesus would call the faithful to him then destroy everyone and everything else. While Leach never saw Jesus arrive, she never saw him walk away, either. Leach turned from this faith, and started noticing all the clouds — whether wispy, fluffy or pink, they renewed her understanding of the promise, “I am with you always” from Matthew 28.

The Salt of the Universe is a praise song of inclusive, awe-filled spirituality, a belief that all of creation is “charged with the grandeur of God,” as the poets wrote, yet accessible because of “the kingdom of heaven that is within you,” as Luke wrote. Leach contributes, “Each mortal thing … has an irrepressible impulse to be itself. As much as I wish I were someone else, more deeply do I wish I were me.”

I’m grateful that Amy Leach is Amy Leach and has given us this treasure trove of a book.