BOOK REVIEW: "This is My Body" tracks a soul in conflict

Cameron Dezen Hammon has weathered more than a few sea changes.

Born half-Jewish in New Jersey, Hammon spent her early 20s in Manhattan coffeehouses, composing and singing "angsty folk-pop." Her private life was a mix of Carrie Bradshaw and Grunge: all-night raves, cocaine and a nasty HPV infection.

Since childhood, however, Hammon had been "hungry for spirituality," turning from the synagogue shul to a vague blend of New Age beliefs.

Eventually, she met members of a hardcore evangelical home church, accepted Jesus and was baptized (total immersion) on a cold, rainy day on Coney Island.

Afterward, she followed her guitarist-boyfriend to Houston, married him and embarked on a decade as a music minister in a succession of Texas mega-churches. Her songs, in her own words, went from "slightly ironic post-grunge" to "Jesus-is-my-boyfriend-themed pop."

In a conventional spiritual memoir, especially an evangelical one, this would be the Happily Ever After. Instead, in "This is My Body," Hammond copes with what happened after Ever After.

Having to pay bills and raise a child, Hammon and her husband gravitate from the small, edgy churches meeting in warehouses to the massive suburban edifices ministering to well-off suburbanites. They find their music shepherded toward what Hammon calls "the soundtrack for a Christian game show" with production numbers with smoke machines.

The marriage suffers as the husband, after being fired two or three times too many, withdraws into himself, staring at his computer. The family cat in his lap gets more physical contact than Hammon does.

Meanwhile, her spirituality suffers bruises. To fit in with the suburbanites, Hammon hides some of her personal practices, such as speaking in tongues.

Increasingly, she finds herself bristling at what she sees as male chauvinism among the men running the church. At first, it's little things: The missionary who orders her to make sandwiches for the mission team. The pastors who talk over and around her at staff meetings. Then. after a Sunday pledge service, she's groped by a respected but randy senior pastor.

Meanwhile, Hammon finds herself slipping into a long-distance, un-consummated romance with an artist. carried on mostly by texting (and occasional semi-sexting) and emails.

Her life builds toward a crisis, especially as her father -- the angry, distant father she could never please -- falls ill and demands her help.

There have been other modern spiritual memoirs, such as Richard Gilman's "Faith, Sex, Mystery," and other treatments of church sexism, such as Linda Kay Klein's "Pure," Hammon, however, strikes a note that seems unique and new.

As a veteran songwriter, her prose has the direct punch of a well-written lyric but is often capable of flights of poetry.

"This is My Body" (a direct evocation of the ritual of Holy Communion) reads at times like a lightly satirical novel, with characters such as the young, tattooed, ponytailed pastor (whose theology and approach is not that different from his polyester-suited brethren) to the Church Growth Consultant who drove his luxury car in from the secular marketing world.

Portions of "This is My Body" appeared in Ecotone, the literary magazine at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In her Acknowledgements, Hammon thanks current and former UNCW faculty, including Emily Louise Smith, Beth Staples and Anna Lena Phillips Bell.

Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-343-2208 or peacebsteelman@gmail.com.

A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession

By Cameron Dezen Hammon

Wilmington, Lookout Books, $17.95 paperback.

WANT TO GO?

What: Book launch and reading with author Cameron Dezen Hammon

When: 7 p.m. Nov. 5

Where: Lumina Theater, Fisher Student Center, UNCW campus.

Details: Free. Part of UNCW Writers' Week

Information: 910--962-7063

“THIS IS MY BODY”