a novel by Jeff Berryman...
Loreen is her name--the old woman in the angel costume who accosts Cyrus Manning near the dance floor of the Down Under. A gift is coming, she tells him. "The gift to die for."
For Eleven years Cyrus has pastored First Church of Ruin, a small city deep in the barrens of West Texas. He has come upon hard times. His congregation doesn't want him anymore, and he is questioning not only his call but his very identity.
And God is quiet.
In this richly textured novel, Jeff Berryman enters the world of the small town congregation, revealing its natural wonders, its natural cruelties, and, here and there, breathtaking moments of unnatural grace.
reviews...
". . . an exuberant romp through the territory of the spirit that has as many laughs as moments when it pulls at the heart. LEAVING RUIN embraces the life of the religious and lets it sing with humor, pathos and, ultimately, true significance."
--Albert Haley, author of Home Ground: Stories of Two Families and the
Land, and Exotic: A Novel, winner of the John Irving First Novel Prize.
"Cyrus Manning is a compelling character not because of his physical appearance (completely bald) or his rhetorical skills (cannot boil a sermon down to three points) or his rigid moral scrupulousness (has a temper, occasionally swears, and admits to lust), but because he earnestly tries to seek God and serve his fellow Christians in spite of it all."
--Jeremy Lott, Christianity Today
"Jesus wept!"
A voice spits an oath, crackling with irritation, as if it's been in the business of hate for decades, and I look up. The non-haloed angel drops into the chair across from me, her flimsy wings falling around her waist. I grin. This gnarly cherub is an old woman, a tree-stump of a woman, seventy if she's a day. A cigarette dangles from her mouth, a mouth stretched with frowning, and it looks like the rest of her face followed. Ears sagging, nose drooping, turkey skin under her neck. Sun baked wrinkles crisscross her face, with cheeks pockmarked in crevasses etched in childhood. Her chin is a round moon, and dark circles under black eyes frighten me, scaring me into thinking this could be me someday.
Her right hand even fingers a cane--plain brown wood, drugstore variety--her twisted digits clinging to its handle like tree roots. . . . She barks at me . . . .
"First Church of Ruin."
I've never seen this woman before in my life.
"You see the wings, don't you?" It hurts my legs to hear her talk. Now she's laughing, and that's worse.
"Cyrus, God tells us these things."
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