Book Review: Enjoy some pizza with Jesus

The book’s cover shows an appealing, freshly baked pizza cut into six pieces. Above it is a cross fashioned of a vertical knife and a horizontal fork. All of this is set against a gray background with the book’s title in plain white letters, “Pizza with Jesus (No Black Olives).” The cover is like the story told by its author, P.J. Frick, who shows us the very ordinary and sometimes tragic events of her life, transformed into a blessed setting where faith, hope and love have nourished her soul and allowed her to survive and grow.
 
The book is subtitled, “Finding Hope and Grace Amid Hardship & Grief,” and early on (Pg. 5), Frick looks back on her life and tells us that over the past five years, “this world has thrown me an inordinate amount of trials and abject suffering.”
 
In Ch. 2, “The Hit List,” she itemizes these trials: job loss; the loss of pets; “stress related illnesses and fibromyalgia;” stage two breast cancer that led to a double mastectomy and chemotherapy; her husband David’s stage four metastatic pancreatic and liver cancer and his ensuing chemotherapy; David’s death in 2016.
 
Early on, Frick writes about the many cats and dogs she and David welcomed into their lives, dear little friends cherished and lost. She tells us how she married David, an “expert hugger and foot rubber” in a “tiny old chapel” with a reception in “a pink, antique Victorian house,” all of it “a perfect start to our lives together.”
 
They buy a house, then find themselves caught in “the worst real estate crash in decades,” straddled with an underwater mortgage. Readers can follow her account of working “in a corporate pressure cooker” where she “hated” her job. She leaves to pursue a master’s degree in library science.
 
As her story develops, so does Frick’s spirituality. Going through what would be six rounds of chemotherapy, Frick gets to know some of the other women going through treatment and realizes that “we never know what other people are going through.”
 
Frick’s narrative is grounded in faith. Each chapter of the book begins with several verses from Scripture that gave her comfort and courage. She ends each chapter with a beautiful prayer, and this is where Frick’s faith unfolds.
 
When David confesses that he may be having a problem with alcohol, P.J. agonizes that she felt “she had failed David.” She prays to Jesus, “Thank you for holding on to me even when I lost my grip on you.”
 
When David dies, when David is gone, she asks, “What happens to a person’s love after he passes on? Where does that love go?” She finds the answer, “It remains behind.”
 
When he dies, Frick mourns her husband terribly and writes that “Grief can be a cruel task master that pummels us into paralyzing hopelessness and agony that leaves us spent, shackled and disappointed by each new day.” She says that she was “becoming an automaton just going through the motions of living, but I wasn’t living. The way I saw it, I was not even existing. I did not want to.”
 
Eventually, the unbearable becomes bearable for Frick, and she writes this book. She finishes with a “gift list.” Her final prayer is, “Thank you for carrying me when I am too weak to stand.”
“Pizza with Jesus” is much more than a simple narrative. It is the story of a soul shaped and transformed by suffering who finally comes – and takes us with her – to the sure realization that we are not alone, never alone, on our life-long journey to God.
 
J.E. Helm is a freelance writer for the Sooner Catholic.