Review
———
Title: Counsel, Please Rise: A Criminal Attorney’s Spiritual Journey
Author: Heather J. Chesnut
Publisher: BYU Maxwell Institute/Deseret Book
Genre: Creative Non-Fiction/Spiritual Memoir/Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2024
Number of Pages: 254
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-8425-0072-2
Price: $17.99
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
Heather J. Chesnut’s Counsel, Please Rise: A Criminal Attorney’s Spiritual Journey, is a valuable addition to the Maxwell Institute’s Living Faith Series. Chesnut writes in a clear, plain prose style, likely tied to her legal training. The book reads smoothly, with Chesnut weaving together Gospel insights and scriptural exegesis with her personal experiences.
Perhaps the most unique and compelling contribution of Counsel, Please Rise to the Living Faith collection is Chesnut’s grounding in rubber-meets-the-road experience. Where many of the other Living Faith volumes involve various amounts of intellectual faith, with the authors thinking through complex ideas and exploring the theological possibilities of those ideas, Chesnut’s book is almost pure, unfiltered lived experience. Chesnut has carefully selected and structured these experiences to illustrate attributes of discipleship, drawn from 2 Peter 1, largely verse 5, but also the surrounding verses. The book presents these experiences as illustrations of what a life of discipleship, of living faith, looks like, leaving the reader to internalize and apply the messages and takeaways for themselves. This is not to say that the book is intellectually shallow or that other Living Faith books don’t incorporate lived experience, but rather to emphasize that reading Chesnut’s spiritual memoir forced me to bring my religion out of my head and into my life, to really think about how I strive to have a ’living faith’.
Counsel, Please Rise is tied to Chesnut’s professional experience as a defense attorney. The book includes a wide range of stories from Chesnut’s legal work, as well as drawing on the lives of clients, colleagues, and others she has encountered and become friends with due to her work. These stories are often moving, with the last two chapters in particular, “Becoming Partakers of the Divine Nature,” and “Escaping the Corruption That Is in the World,” filled with stories that brought tears to my eyes.
Chesnut tells the story of Paul, a drug addict who eventually goes to drug court and successfully completes it but then dies two months later. Chesnut writes, “All the work I had done to get him into the program, and the much greater work he and others had done to achieve his sobriety didn’t matter now, or so I thought. I was wrong” (229). Chesnut then goes on to describe how she came to realize that reconciliation and transformation happened between Paul and many of his loved ones in that brief period and that any small change and goodness is worth noticing.
Counsel, Please Rise: A Criminal Attorney’s Spiritual Journey is filled with experiential spiritual wisdom, presented with a hard-won simplicity and clarity. Chesnut offers an insightful exploration of what it can mean to live a life of faith that can enrich the lives of Latter-day Saints, wondering how they can be disciples, integrating gospel virtues into their lives, professional and personal. I am grateful for the way Counsel, Please Rise challenged me to bring my religious and spiritual convictions out of my head, and I hope others can be similarly moved to kinder, more patient, better lives by Chesnut’s words.