In our human weakness, we cross thresholds, curve our bodies around corners, even try walking through walls—all to avoid bumping into the Bible’s twinned rhetorical questions: Am I my brother’s keeper? Who is my neighbor? Only the questions aren’t really rhetorical. Answers come in crescendo. Yes, absolutely you are. Anyone and everyone—especially the person you least expect.

Kirsty Sain discovers anyone means anyone across the pages of Sally Thomas’s Works of Mercy. A green priest who thrives inside the confessional but falters when looking God’s people in the eye; a cheerfully oblivious family with an indeterminate number of children; an alien, eyeless creature posing as a cat—all make an unwitting neighbor of Kirsty. In their presence, she stumbles upon the unrealized meaning of Jesus’ second commandment, learning to love her neighbor and herself.

In her debut novel, Thomas—an esteemed poet and fiction writer—benevolently balances scenes from Kirsty’s past and present, portraying her across time as a complete woman yet not fully grown. Migrating from her native Shetland Islands to the North Carolina Piedmont, Kirsty roams her interior plot of heartland, beginning life as a promising young Mary before giving into the Martha tidying up within. We meet her in this sentence: “On Mondays I cleaned the rectory for the good of my soul.”

Certain virtues naturally attend this rite. Kirsty sees beauty in the swirling blue of a cleaning agent; describes the humble rectory as if recounting the splendor of Solomon’s temple; attains something like self-worth and senses intimacy through her appointed task. A lesser pen might write Kirsty as small, retiring, pathetic even. Thomas never welcomes the temptation; Kirsty might be holy or she might be full of holes, to borrow from the late songwriter Scott Hutchison—but she knows who she is.

Kirsty recalls a conversation with her late husband; hearing her express interest in loneliness (“what I’d meant… was that I’d rather long for human companionship than have it,” she remembers), he insists upon the impossibility of craving “a negative.” Ever headstrong, Kirsty proves him wrong, gathering years of evidence. “I was happy, or something like it,” Thomas writes early in the book. “All my life I had lived among people. Now, although perhaps my days sound dull, I was well enough satisfied with my own company.”

Where one sense declines, others heighten. Kirsty’s chosen aloofness co-exists with quiet rapture, experienced as her gaze turns to the outside world. She notices in poems. Moving from duty to duty, she spies “buckets of cellophane-wrapped flowers and knobbled stalks of Brussels sprouts, set outside shop doors to be rained upon”; knows “rosy clarity in the western sky, crickets holding their one thin unison note”; feels “the rain, real as real” silently stab her face; entertains a sensory memory forwarded from home, of “the long cold golden dusk of the northern springtime.”

And in two breathtaking sentences, sentences worth stilling your anxious mind to behold, Thomas looks through her eyes to sketch the Piedmont’s God-given geometry: “At the edge of this ocean, to the west, the mountains hung like low blue clouds. Above them, real clouds, cumulus thunderheads, were piling like darker, more substantial mountains.”

Kirsty’s trouble, then, lies close to the heart of my own (and perhaps yours): an almost burdensome wonder upon stepping into God’s theater, silos of faith reserved for other people spent on past famines, and too rarely replenished. In my case, palpitations arrive when minding the gap between who we are—who I am—and might yet be.

For Kirsty, life’s losses carve safe distance between her and others. The loss of her husband, a loss visited upon her decades earlier by a predatory teacher, and a third loss we learn of as the pages process, all linger, ultimately sapping her self-love. “I was haunted by my own share of ghosts… even the ghost of myself returned to me, that silly girl so fleetingly, foolishly happy,” she thinks.