Katie Davis and Beth Clark. Kisses from Katie. New York: Simon, 2011. Print.
Kisses from Katie is simple enough to summarize. In 2007, eighteen-year-old Katie Davis left her affluent Nashville suburb to volunteer at an orphanage in Uganda. There she sees that many of the children, even those whose parents are alive and caring for them, cannot afford the $20-$40 needed to enroll in school. She uses her money and the money of American acquaintances she solicited and helps over 200 youngsters go to school.
She notes how many of the poorest people there know or do little for personal health and hygiene. She begins cleaning, disinfecting, deworming, delousing, and otherwise restoring children to health. But most remarkably, she commits. This does not turn out to be a short-term mission project for Miss Davis. She adopts fourteen parentless girls. She becomes their legal mother. She is in it, as they say, for the long haul.
Much of Kisses from Katie illustrates Miss Davis’s remarkable faith. She is confident God is her heavenly father. She knows He will provide food and clothing when she is totally out of money. She knows Jesus loves her and loves the children she ministers to. She has to depend on the Holy Spirit for guidance—where to go, who share with, who or what to avoid, how to pray.
Perhaps what is most extraordinary is that Katie tells us that what she is doing is not extraordinary. Anyone who knows the Lord can do it. She even uses statistics to show that there are enough relatively prosperous Christian families in the world to adopt every orphan in the world.
Kisses from Katie is not mere testimony, though. It is motivational. God can use willing people. Between each chapter are short free-standing reflections like devotionals or diary entries. These reminded me of Ann Kiemel-Anderson’s books like I Love the Word Impossible. Katie asks what is really important in life? What can even one person do to make a difference? With God’s help, you may be surprised.
Katie reminds the reader that she is no one special. Her heavenly Father is the special one. Katie is no nun—at least not yet. She has a boyfriend in the states, but she is committed to Uganda. She has not taken a vow of poverty, but she is living a simple life among and with the people she is working for. According to her testimony, a good number of people where she is in Uganda have committed themselves to Christ through what she and her co-workers have done. The people are not swayed by slick preaching or financial promise, but they can see that she and those she works with are the real deal.
As she puts it:
I believe that the Holy Spirit lives in me and with me, and I talk to Him throughout each and every day….There are always hard moments and then moments that are harder still, but there are no droughts when we drink from a well that never runs dry. (278)
Miss Davis frequently quotes the Bible like a well-trained evangelical. At one and only one point, she mentions in passing that she is Catholic. Kisses from Katie demonstrates that Catholics can learn from their evangelical friends to read the Bible and take it seriously. But the book also shows that she has learned from the strengths of the Catholic Church as well, at least the strength of those who take it seriously.
She has not taken a vow of poverty or chastity, but she has probably learned from examples and teaching in her church that wealth and intemperance are no virtues. She also has learned and demonstrates what it means to live in community. No, her home of thirteen daughters (she explains how one left) plus friends and helpers is not a convent, monastery, or Catholic community. Kisses from Katie is not a meditation by Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, or Ralph Martin. If anything, it is more realistic because we see Katie in the daily grind.
Kisses from Katie is published by Simon and Schuster under their Howard Books imprint. There are few books in this imprint because it is the evangelical Catholic imprint. By that I do not mean proselytizing for the church, but that it is both/and: both evangelical (born again and Bible-believing) and Catholic (aware of that tradition’s strengths). It is possible to learn from one another.