Mary C. Earle - Days of Grace: Meditation and Practices for Living with Illness
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- Book:Days of Grace: Meditation and Practices for Living with Illness
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Days of Grace: Meditation and Practices for Living with Illness: summary, description and annotation
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Using the metaphor of pilgrimage, this book invites readers to reflect on living with illness.
The heart of the book is a collection of 30 meditations, each followed by a reflection, a short prayer, and a suggested spiritual practice. The meditations voice the difficulties and the challenges of living with illness, and call the reader toward a deepening understanding, compassion and generosity. While the meditations intend to offer comfort, they are also written from the conviction that God invites us to grow even in these circumstances.
When living with chronic, terminal, or progressive illness, discovering a way to pray can be quite a challenge. These 30 meditations provide a welcome means with practices inspired by the psalms.
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This down-to-earth and spiritually rich collection of meditations, prayers, and practices will speak poignantly to the hearts, minds, and souls of all those suffering from chronic, progressive, or terminal illnesses. Earles own experience of suffering and pain makes her an authentic and compassionate guide to the far country of disease and debilitation. This brief book is a small treasure that deserves a large audience: it is in its own special way good medicine.
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, co-authors of Spiritual Literacy and directors of SpiritualityandPractice.com
Mary Earle has helped so many find a holy path through that curious daily combination of ferocity and tedium that makes up a life of chronic illness. God be thanked for the light these thoughtful essays shine on it.
Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, author of Jesus Wept: When Faith and Depression Meet and The Sewing Room: Uncommon Reflections of Life, Love, and Work
Mary Earle knows that life is gift. Her words call us to the way of gratitude. Mary Earle also knows that life is gift shrouded in pain. Her words call us to the journey of grace. Both are essential. In Days of Grace Mary Earle wisely weaves them as one.
John Philip Newell, author of Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation
This rich, wise, and comforting guide for those living with illness is a handbook of deep knowledge gleaned through lived experience. It is a blend of realism and humility, of questions and mysteryall delivered with Marys simple yet elegant style. She unmasks many illusions and reminds us that though our lives are short and uncertain, there is unfathomable power each time we realize that we have another day.
Paula DArcy, author of Gift of the Red Bird and Waking Up to This Day (2009)
Copyright 2009 by Mary C. Earle
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
All psalms are from The Psalter in the 1979 edition of the Book of Common Prayer.
Morehouse Publishing, 4775 Linglestown Road,
Harrisburg, PA 17112
Morehouse Publishing, 445 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10016
Morehouse Publishing is an imprint of
Church Publishing Incorporated.
Cover art courtesy of iStockphoto
Cover design by Christina Hope
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Earle, Mary C.
Days of grace : meditations and practices for living with illness /
Mary C. Earle.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8192-2364-7 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-8192-2720-1 (E-book)
1. Chronically illPrayers and devotions. 2. SickPrayers and
devotions. I. Title.
BV4910.E28 2009
248.861dc22
2009019644
Dedication
For Doug, Bryan, and Jason
This work is the direct result of a question asked of me by Palmer Jones, editor of www.explorefaith.org. A couple of years ago, when we were brainstorm- ing ideas for this website for seekers of faith in a phone conversation, she asked me if Id write a series of meditations for persons who are living with illness. This website is aimed at anyone exploring spiritual issues, and Palmer was hoping to add to the forums and offerings. I told her that I would write the meditations, and then seized up with writers block. Something stalled out. Palmer was patient. I was not. Then, in February 2008, a medical procedure and a brief hospitalization somehow allowed the writers block to open, and I wrote these meditations during the ensuing recovery. Palmer waited on my timing, and received the finished work with genuine hospitality and gratitude. The meditations and practices first appeared on the explorefaith website.
The heart of this book, the meditations and practices, also exist in audio format, thanks to the creative collaboration of Elizabeth Cauthorn of Material Media, Ben Tavera King of Talking Taco Records, and Charles Garrett of Stillpoint Studios. The talents and energies of these three brought the meditations and practices into form as MP3 files and as an audio CD.
Now, thanks to the hospitality of Church Publishing/Morehouse, the meditations and practices are also available as a book. I thank the listeners who asked repeatedly if they could have the text, and I thank Nancy Fitzgerald and the staff at Church Publishing/Morehouse, who know that in the new world of publishing, an audio format may precede the written format of a work. I am also ever grateful to Phyllis Tickle, friend and mentor, for so kindly agreeing to write the foreword.
In addition, I am indebted to the staff of Vivabooks! in San Antonio, who have so graciously promoted the audio CD, which in turn led to requests for this book.
My husband, Doug, as ever, has supported this project; his good eye led to the image chosen for the cover.
My hope is that these meditations will offer you, the reader, companionship along the journey of living with illness. You wont find answers here. Perhaps you will find that you are not walking the way of illness alone.
Not one of us wants to be sick... not for a single day, thank you very much! And most certainly, not one of us wants to live out our days, or any part of them, in the grinding, relentless, compromising way that comes from having a chronic or wasting or even a terminal illness. Regardless of our own wishes and intentions, however, illness will enter the lives of more than half of us. Either we will ourselves have to suffer through a time of ill health orand perhaps even harder to bearthose whom we love and care for will have to endure the burden and pain of illness.
No book is going to make the path through illness either smooth or desirable, but this one can render it into a thing of grace as well as into a more endurable, or possibly redemptive, burden. Perhaps just as relevant to the truth of this book is the fact that even the not-ill will find here a bouquet of understandings and insights that will sweetly scent their own, more health-blessed lives; for these pages are filled with great gifts.
It is not that all the words and sentences here are filled with startling discoveries about illness and the spiritual life. They arent. They are suffused, instead, by realism and the humility that comes from honest engagement with it. As pages, they are also rife with startling ideas... not new ideas so much as old ideas re-positioned and re- imagined.
Who of us has not tossed out unthinkingly the words about our bodies being the temple of God? Yet who of us, caught in a hurting or dying body, has sought to understand that it is Gods dwelling that is in pain or distress and that its Tenant and tenant are of a piece in their enduring?
Who has stopped to articulate the obvious truth that only God and the one in physical distress are able to know completely what that agony is and, then, to experience it together?
Who has seen clearly that the impotence of serious illness does not restrict the gentle heart from the action of praying for others in equal or greater difficulty, or from studying with intention upon the kindness and expertise of those who bear illness with us?
Who of us has stopped to understand that in inhabiting a sick or ailing body, God only does in particular what He already does more broadly in inhabiting an ailing creation?
And who of usthe ill or the caregivers and lovers among ushas truly realized that the gift of candor in conversation about despair authorizes the despairing to engage and often to surmount it?
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