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Days of Grace: Meditation and Practices for Living with Illness

Days of Grace


Meditation and Practices for Living with Illness

Mary C. Earle Foreword by Phyllis Tickle

List Price: $12.00

PAPERBACK , 128 pages , 4 x 6

  • Morehouse Publishing
  • Aug/2009
  • ISBN-13: 978-0-81922-364-7
  • 922364

  • In stock (Ships in 1-2 days)

Using the metaphor of pilgrimage, this book invites readers to reflect on living with illness. The heart of the book is a collection of thirty meditations, 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 thirty meditations provide a welcome means with practices inspired by the psalms.


Excerpt:
                         Day One
“You will show me the path of life” —Ps. 16:11


If you are reading this meditation, in all probability you
are learning to live with illness. Your illness may be
chronic or progressive or terminal. In any case, you are
entering a school of experience for which our culture
offers little wisdom. You are seeking to find a way to live
with the stresses and the discomforts of a body that is
somehow weakened. You are trying to live within new
limitations. You are also coming face to face with the fact
of your own mortality.


The wisdom tradition of scripture tells us that this kind
of experience, as harsh and painful as it may be, also
offers us the opportunity to come to terms with reality.
We begin to remember that we are creatures. We begin
to recognize that our lives are fragile and that our bodies
can suffer from many different maladies. We begin to
reorient and reframe our lives, within a new context —
a context of difficult days and unexpected physical
disruption. And we may begin to ask deeper questions
about meaning and about life, about death and about
eternity. When we ask those questions, we are beginning
to take the first steps on a path of life. We are beginning
to live at a deeper level, though it may not be the path
we would have chosen.

 

Mary C. Earle is a poet, author and spiritual director, who teaches at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. She is also author-inresidence at the Work+Shop, a ministry of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio, Texas. She resides in San Antonio, Texas.

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