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In
this extraordinarily comforting
and challenging book, Mary Earle
takes the setbacks of chronic illness or disability and reframes them as
powerful tools for keeping a rule of life. The ancient Benedictine
ways of humility, prayer, and self-knowledge counter the urge to rush,
multitask, push and shove one's way into the superficial busyness that
so often passes for excellence in the world."
Barbara
Cawthorne Crafton
author of Some Things You Just Have to Live With.
Mary
Earle, who knows from experience what she is talking about, writes,
'When we live with illness and let it help us establish a new rule of
life, we act in faith.' Earle's own re-patterning of her life has risen
out of the reality of acute pancreatitis. Hers is no greeting card
theology, but a thoughtful crafting of daily life grounded in Christian
belief and practice. You do not have to be ill to benefit and grow from
reading this remarkable account of a life transformed. If you are ill,
the book is a 'must read.'"
Corinne Ware
Asst Professor of Ascetical Theology
Episcopal Theological
Seminary in Austin, Texas
and author of Saint Benedict on the
Freeway.
Kaleidoscope: “an optical instrument in which bits of glass, held loosely
at the end of a rotating tube, are shown in continually changing
symmetrical patterns by reflection in two or more mirrors set at angles to
each other.”(p. 1043, Random House Dictionary of the English Language,
2nd edition, 1987) This is the initial image author Mary Earle
uses when she describes what serious or chronic illness does to a person’s
life; as an image it works extremely well because she is right when she
says that “illness turns the lens whether we want it turned or not.”
The Reverend Mary C. Earle is an Episcopalian cleric
whose personal life, parish ministry, and graduate studies were intruded
upon rudely in 1995 by an initial attack of pancreatitis. Occasional
bouts since, of what is now a chronic condition, have required that she
make adjustments in her life, in the way she opts to cope with most
everything. So whatever creative and lovely patterns existed in her
personal kaleidoscope up to that date, the shifting bits of glass of
illness brought unwanted new designs, but ones that have had their own
intrigue and beauty. How so?
At about the same time she took ill, Earle discovered the Rule of
Benedict, and saw it as a positive way to help her live with her medical
condition; to her way of thinking, Benedict’s Rule provides sensible,
down-to-earth guidance for living with any serious or chronic illness.
Her book presents a reader with the benefits of doing the same.
Earle indicates that her title comes from RB 73:8, and she cites it as
“Always we begin again,” from St. Benedict’s Prayer Book for Beginners,
published out of Ampleforth Abbey. Earle knows well that any serious or
chronic illness is full of new beginnings, and she addresses them
honorably. In doing so, she does not ignore the necessary dyings/losses
that inevitably accompany the new starts.
Earle delves into the Rule when she considers critical aspects of one’s
life that must be adjusted due to illness and allots a chapter to each:
work, nutrition, exercise, medication, prayer, and rest. The balance so
central to Benedict Earle finds to be just as central when a person is
adapting to new regimes demanded by an illness. At the end of each
chapter, she provides some suggestions for reflection, questions to ask
oneself on that subject, and a closing prayer.
The last portion of the book looks at the monastic vows in light of how
they can be applied to living with illness. One is reminded of the
kaleidoscope here because the notions of change plus symmetry recall the
paradox and challenge of living conversatio and stability, and
being obedient to that endeavor. Applying the vows to an illness also
compels one to see that the flexibility, resilience, patience,
perseverance, and humor required to live those vows must also come into
play when living with an illness.
This book is helpful because it is uncompromising in its approach; yet it
focuses on the transformative aspects of an illness and the extent to
which the afflicted individual can – through illness – be open to “the
deepest mystery of our faith”: that in our difficulties “God in Christ is
with us,”(25) encouraging us to hallow those difficulties and live them
“in a God-ward direction”(122) so one’s life still can bear fruit.
The book is worthwhile, as well, for those who interact with or assist a
person living with serious or chronic illness: family, friends, health
care personnel, clergy, counselors. With some creative reading, it also
has merit for those whose lives have made major shifts for reasons other
than illness: retirement, for example.
Phyllis K. Thompson, Nanaimo, BC
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