The Shattering of Loneliness

Author: Erik Varden
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472953274
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Book Description
The experience of loneliness is as universal as hunger or thirst. Because it affects us more intimately, we are less inclined to speak of it. But who has not known its gnawing ache? The fear of loneliness causes anguish. It prompts reckless deeds. To this, every age has borne witness. No voice is more insidious than the one that whispers in our ear: 'You are irredeemably alone, no light will pierce your darkness.' The fundamental statement of Christianity is to convict that voice of lying. The Christian condition unfolds within the certainty that ultimate reality, the source of all that is, is a personal reality of communion, no metaphysical abstraction. Men and women, made 'in the image and likeness' of God, bear the mark of that original communion stamped on their being. When our souls and bodies cry out for Another, it is not a sign of sickness, but of health. A labour of potential joy is announced. We are reminded of what we have it in us to become. That our labour may be fruitful, Scripture repeatedly exhorts us to 'remember'. The remembrance enjoined is partly introspective and existential, partly historical, for the God who took flesh to redeem our loneliness leaves traces in history. This book examines six facets of Christian remembrance, complementing biblical exegesis with readings from literature, ancient and modern. It aims to be an essay in theology. At the same time, it proposes a grounded reflection on what it means to be a human being.

Loneliness as a Way of Life

Author: Thomas Dumm
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067403113X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

Entering the Twofold Mystery

Author: Erik Varden
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472979443
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Erik Varden published The Shattering of Loneliness in 2018. Now, with the world in the throes of uncertainty and turbulence, he helps us interpret the signs of the times, convinced that the perennial experience of monks and nuns has much to teach us. The principles of monasticism have become attractive to many, awakened as we are to the importance of integrity, the pursuit of peace, asceticism as a path to freedom, hospitality and contemplative seeing. After a deeply personal introduction, Varden invites us to consider what makes a monk. He then takes us on a pilgrimage through the Church's year, drawing on Scripture, tradition and literary and religious figures of our time. Varden lets the reader discover the generous breadth and depth of a monk's outlook on life. In so doing he provides inspiration, enjoyment and enlightenment in equal measure.

Love in a Time of Loneliness

Author: Paul Verhaeghe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429915926
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
The first essay, "The Impossible Couple", is both a humorous and razor-sharp analysis of the contemporary relationship between man and woman. In the second essay, "Fleeing Fathers", the author demonstrates that today the Freudian Oedipus complex has disappeared, with a resulting shattering of classic gender roles. Post-modern morals are strange compared to previous morality, because they convey an obligation to enjoy. Things become even stranger when one finds that the expected enjoyment fails to come and, instead of that, we are faced with boredom, anxiety, and anger. The author reconsiders the opposition between Eros and Thanatos as an opposition between two forms of sexual pleasure. The fact that this opposition is ever present in heterosexual love demonstrates that gender differentiation goes beyond temporal cultural forms. Accessibly written and provocatively argued, Love in a Time of Loneliness is a polemic whose very informality belies its serious intent. In these three fascinating essays, The author leaves the ordinary paths of thinking and sets out to discover what drives us in sex and love.

The Joy of God

Author: Mary David
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472971337
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Sister Mary David Totah was a nun of the Benedictine contemplative community of St Cecilia's Abbey on the Isle of Wight. American by birth, she was educated at Loyola University, the University of Virginia and Christ Church, Oxford. After a distinguished teaching career, she entered religious life in 1985. For 22 years until her early death from cancer she guided the young nuns of her abbey with enthusiasm, wisdom and wit. The spirituality to be found in the pages of this book demonstrates to the reader why her influence should have been so great and so deep. Her notes to the novices deal with issues of relevance to a world beyond the cloister: What is the meaning of suffering? How do we cope with living with people who annoy us? How do we relate to a God we cannot see? How do we make the big decisions of life? Sister Mary David's teaching was both profound and intensely practical, suffused with faith in God's joy in our work, leisure, community and family life but above all in our view and understanding of ourselves. This book, with an introduction by Abbot Erik Varden OCSO (author of The Shattering of Loneliness) shows us how to realize the Joy that is God.

Washed and Waiting

Author: Wesley Hill
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458723941
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
Yet many who sit next to us in the pew at church fit that description, says author Wesley Hill. As a celibate gay Christian, Hill gives us a glimpse of what it looks like to wrestle firsthand with God's ''No'' to same-sex relationships. What does it mean for gay Christians to live faithful to God while struggling with the challenge of their homosexuality? What is God's will for believers who experience same-sex desires? Those who choose celibacy are often left to deal with loneliness and the hunger for relationships. How can gay Christians experience God's favor and blessing in the midst of a struggle that for many brings a crippling sense of shame and guilt? Weaving together reflections from his own life and the lives of other Christians, such as Henri Nouwen and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hill offers a fresh perspective on these questions. He advocates neither unqualified ''healing'' for those who struggle, nor their accommodation to temptation, but rather faithfulness in the midst of brokenness. ''I hope this book may encourage other homosexual Christians to take the risky step of opening up their lives to others in the body of Christ,'' Hill writes. ''In so doing, they may find, as I have, by grace, that being known is spiritually healthier than remaining behind closed doors, that the light is better than the darkness.

The Song That I Am

Author: Elisabeth-Paule Labat
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0879076801
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
The Song That I Am: On the Mystery of Music is a short but full-to-the-brim essay on the decisive role that great music (whether Bach, Tavener, or Gregorian chant) ought to play in the spiritual life. With admirable restraint Élisabeth-Paule Labat shares her interior experience of music and thus continually opens up fresh vistas through worlds of sound and spirit. With her uncanny gift of language, Labat precisely describes soundings and yearnings of the soul that many of us glimpse fleetingly. Because "only the lover sings" (St. Augustine), her final illumination is that the experience of profound music ought to transform us into the beauty that we hear.

Touched by God

Author: Luigi Gioia
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 147295100X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
Luigi Gioia's second spiritual book deals with the art of contemplation.

I Understand

Author: Vonnie Woodrick
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467460303
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
Time doesn’t heal—love heals When Vonnie Woodrick lost her husband Rob to suicide in 2003, she was faced with a series of decisions. How would she move on? How would she support and raise her three children as a young widow? How would she talk about Rob and honor his memory? These questions had no easy answers, but Vonnie found herself longing for one thing in particular: understanding. The stigma of mental illness loomed large over Rob’s death and made healing difficult. But Vonnie found the common assumptions surrounding suicide to be false. Rob was not “crazy.” He did not choose to take his own life. He was in agony and only wanted the pain to end. His death was a direct result of his mental illness. Why didn’t more people understand this? Over a decade later, Vonnie and her children created the nonprofit organization i understand to help others enduring this same grief and loneliness. Since its founding in 2014, i understand has become a haven of compassionate comfort and a powerful voice in the movement to change the way we talk about suicide so that it can be seen for what it truly is: a terminal effect of mental illness, rather than a deliberate choice. This is the story of how love transformed Vonnie’s brokenness into hope—not only for herself and her family, but for anyone struggling to emerge from the darkness of suicide.

The Bright Nails Scattered on the Ground

Author: Allen R. Grossman
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811209762
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
A series of poems traces the course of a love affair from both the man's and the woman's point of view.