Heather Hamilton - Returning to Eden: A Field Guide for the Spiritual Journey

M ore and more resources are being provided to those who are questioning their beliefs and deconstructing their faith. Here, Heather offers her unique contribution with her own story by reimagining, reshaping, and reinterpreting some of Christianitys major components into food that will benefit many on their own spiritual journeys.

David Hayward (@nakedpastor), Artist, Cartoonist, Author of Questions are The Answer: nakedpastor and the search for understanding and Flip It Like This!

If youre ready to move through faith deconstruction and into whole-life transformation, Heather Hamilton is your guide. At turns disarming and incisive, Heather shares vulnerably from her journey through Bible-belt fundamentalism to a truly mythic understanding of Jesus the Christ. No matter where youre at in your spiritual journey, Returning to Eden invites you to move beyond spectator religion into the fullness of participatory living, reflecting full Divinity precisely by embracing our full humanity.

Mike Morrell, founding organizer, Wild Goose Festival; founder, Wisdom Camp; co-host, Mystics Summit (The Shift Network); collaborating author with Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation

For anyone who has found themselves increasingly incompatible with the husk of the Christian institution and hungering for a more mystical and inclusive version of that faith, Heather Hamilton serves as a compassionate mytho-poetic midwifegently guiding readers into the unknown germinating potential within.

Brie Stoner, Artist, Musician, Host of Unknowing Podcast, and Co-Host of Another Name for Every Thing with Richard Rohr Podcast

For me personally, never have the words sacred, inspired, and infallible felt more appropriate for describing the Bible than they did as I was reading this book. All of the arguments about literalness and historicity notwithstanding, Heather Hamilton transcends the fray, inviting us to take the Bible more seriously than most of us have ever imagined possible. Through page after page in this well-crafted book, Heather removes any doubt: the Biblical story is my story, your story, our story. In reading the Bible, we are not simply revisiting ancient characters and narratives. No. We are reading our own biographies, our own spiritual travel diaries. So, regardless of your relationship with the worlds long-time best-selling bookwhether that relationship is warm, strained, or estrangedthis book will be a gift in your life. I mean it when I say: get ready to have your mind stretched and your heart healed.

Stan Mitchell, Founding Pastor, GracePointe Church, Nashville, TN; Teaching Pastor, The Village Church, Atlanta, GA

The images we paint and stories we tell about our faith, church, God, the Bible, and Jesus often influence us for years or decades or even generations. As we mature in our faith, these stories and traditions can either produce strong foundations for our growth, or create gaps that need to be filled with new answers. In Returning To Eden, my friend Heather Hamilton encourages us to ask questions about ourselves, the text, our traditions and, ultimately, what we believenot as an exercise simply in deconstruction, but as an exercise in art restoration. She encourages us to strip away the dirt and dust and gunk and religion that can distort and cover over the truth and beauty of Jesus. Reading Heathers insights may not provide you with the answers you are looking for, but they will lead you to questions you need to ask.

Dave Adamson, Social Media and Online Pastor (@aussiedave), Bestselling Author of MetaChurch: How to Use Digital Ministry to Reach People and Make Disciples

This is a health-giving and refreshing book, proclaiming the Christ who comes to restore our deepest selves to wholeness. Heather Hamilton opens up the scriptures of both Testaments in such a way that they work therapeutically on our psyches. She employs biblical stories, parables, and symbols brilliantly, drawing also on saints and spiritual writers in her application. While I have always been hesitant to use the terms False Self and True Self, she defines these concepts so well and so vividly that all my reservations vanished as I read. And it was good to see her make use of invaluable insights from the writings of such important seminal thinkers as Carl Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, and Joseph Campbell, who are too often misunderstood and misapplied. The book is also beautifully illustrated. All in all, a marvelous work.

Addison Hodges Hart, author of Strangers and Pilgrims Once More: Being Disciples of Jesus in a Post-Christendom World and Silent Rosary: A Contemplative, Exegetical, and Iconographic Tour Through the Mysteries
Our ways of understanding God, ourselves, and the world need more than tweaking. They need an overhaul! In this accessible book, Heather Hamilton rethinks a host of key issues and beliefs. I felt both relieved and buoyant after reading it!

Thomas Jay Oord, Theologian, Bestselling Author of God Cant and many other books

Heather has bravely and compassionately captured her journey and shared the wisdom shes gained to serve as a lantern in the misty darkness. For anyone wanting to embrace Christian faith traditions but feels disconnected, disappointed, or disillusioned in the examination of their beliefs, this book feels like finding a decoder ring in a favorite box of cereal. Returning to Eden brings new life to familiar texts and invites us all to the important work of dying and being born anew.

Candi Shelton, Writer, Producer, Creative Consultant

In Returning To Eden, Heather offers us a thoughtful and thorough turning of the gem. Her words help us see from a deep and different perspective what has long been covered up by convenient theology, comfortable traditions, and a careless form of christianity. It is evident through this beautiful book that Heather has not only done her homework but has also done her own work. This book is the overflow of that work, and I believe it will unlock something both fresh and freeing in you.

Jarrett Stevens, Co-Lead Pastor of Soul City Church, Author of Praying Through, Four Small Words and The Deity Formerly Known as God

A ll rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Permission for wider usage of this material can be obtained through Quoir by emailing permission@quoir.com.

Copyright 2023 by Heather Hamilton, First Edition

All photos included in this work are public domain.
Illustrations included herein created by the author.
Permission granted to the author by Malcolm Guite to use the excerpt from his poem The Stations of the Cross, Poem X: Jesus is Stripped of His Garments.
Permission granted to the author by Brian Zahnd to use his quote in chapter 2.
Permission granted by the Joseph Campbell Foundation to use quotes in chapters 4, 19, and 43.
Permission granted by Stan Mitchell to use his quote in the epilogue.

Scripture quotations marked (NASB) and (NASB 1995) taken from the (NASB) New American Standard Bible, Copyright 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.