SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLES: A Novel in 144 Chapters

There are one hundred and forty-four principles in this book, and Steve Scott does not learn a single one of them the way he expects to.

That is the honest part, and it is the reason the book is shaped the way it is.

Most books about spiritual principles are arranged like a ladder. You take the first one, you master it, you move up. Faith, then hope, then love, and by the end you are supposed to be a different and better man standing on a higher rung, looking down at who you used to be.

That is not how it happens to anybody I have ever known.

What actually happens is that a man gets up at four in the morning and the same principle he thought he had settled in March comes back around in November wearing different clothes, and he does not recognize it until it has already knocked him down. Patience shows up in a parts cage. Surrender shows up in a hospital hallway. Forgiveness comes at him sideways from a person who never apologized and never will. The principles do not arrive in order. They arrive in traffic.

So this book is arranged in twelve parts of twelve chapters each, and it moves through roughly twelve years of one man's life — but the arrangement is a courtesy, not a claim. Steve does not graduate from Acceptance in chapter three. He is still working on it in chapter one hundred and nine, and by then it costs him considerably more.

A word about who Steve Scott is.

He is thirty-four when the book opens and he has just come home. He is a mechanic. He is somebody's son, somebody's brother, somebody's uncle, and eventually somebody's husband and somebody's father and somebody's elder, and every one of those words costs him something to earn. He works at the Port of Oakland. He goes to a church basement on Tuesdays. He has a record he cannot outrun and a father he never got to know and a nephew who will not look at him.

He is not a hero and he is not a cautionary tale. He is a working man trying to build a life out of one hundred and forty-four small tools, most of which he has to figure out how to hold before he can figure out what they are for.

A word to the young people who pick this up.

You will meet Trey in chapter two. He is fourteen and he says almost nothing, and if you are somewhere near his age you will probably find that he is the easiest person in the book to stand next to. Stay with him. This book belongs to him as much as it belongs to his uncle, and by the end you will understand why. The things that get handed down do not get handed down in speeches. They get handed down in kitchens, in trucks, in shops, in silences — and usually the person receiving them does not know it is happening until years later.

A word about God.

Steve talks to God throughout this book, and his praying is not eloquent. He prays with his feet flat on a cold floor for thirty seconds before he stands up. He prays in a stairwell. He prays badly and inconsistently and sometimes angrily, and there are long stretches where he does not pray at all and only notices afterward, the way you notice you have been holding your breath.

The connection he is after has three directions, and they turn out to be one motion: God, self, and others. He cannot get right with God while lying to himself. He cannot get right with himself while hiding from the people who love him. He cannot get right with people while carrying something between him and God. Pull on any one of the three and the other two move.

That is the whole architecture of this book, and it took him twelve years to find it out.

Read it slowly if you can. Read one chapter and put it down and go do something with your hands. That is roughly the pace at which any of this actually gets learned.

— S. S. J., Oakland