A search for grace in the Maine woods in "Here If You Need Me"

"Here If You Need Me: A True Story"

by Kate Braestrup

Little, Brown, 211 pp., $23.99

There are a lot of labels you could stick on Kate Braestrup — wife, widow, mother, minister, writer — but even the sum of them falls short of describing her life.

"Here If You Need Me" is an honest, endearing account of a life rerouted after devastating loss. When a car accident kills her husband, Drew, a Maine state trooper planning to become a Unitarian Universalist minister upon retiring, Braestrup picks up his dream. Despite a decidedly secular background (not to mention the challenge of raising four grieving kids), she goes off to seminary, then finds herself tramping around the Maine woods as the state's first chaplain to the wardens who run search-and-rescue missions.

This isn't deep theology, nor Faith-Lite. There's more resemblance to Betty MacDonald's "The Egg and I" than the cloying "Chicken Soup" literature. Braestrup knows how to tell a good story — the angel is in the details. She describes her many-pocketed uniform (which she admits she loves wearing) and a search-and-rescue chaplain's gear — Kleenex, two mini-Bibles, latex gloves, breath mints, snow pants and more — concluding wryly, "I am the Maine Warden Service Barbie."

When it comes to Life's Big Questions, the middle-age author focuses on what she does not know:

"I have neither the inclination nor the talent for systematic theology. In the arguments between and among competing theories, I find sport, intellectual interest, moments of satisfaction, but no grace," Braestrup writes.

Yet the willingness to search for that elusive grace in unlikely places, along with her sturdy common sense, are just the tools needed for this unusual calling. No two days are the same: One day the chaplain comforts parents wild with grief over a lost child, the next she rides in supportive silence alongside a warden who has seen too much loss on his watch. A third day finds her mentally wrestling with her notion of God's love during an investigation of a young woman's rape and murder.

Braestrup's allusions to Christian, Jewish and Muslim teachings, as she tries to fathom the miracles and trials she perceives around her, feel like authentic searching, rather than politically correct equal time for each of the Abrahamic Big Three. She isn't selling her own gospel; she's praying and thinking her way through the Down East wilderness, hunting answers and reporting on her finds with rare humility.