Did you know that Jesus didn’t cure everyone? And, even people he did cure probably suffered again? Think of Lazarus, one of Jesus’s best friends, the one Jesus brought back to life. He died again, and maybe suffered along with his family as he did so. I re-open the wounds of the Gospels for the many people in our lives whose suffering continues or returns, for their caregivers and families, in other words, most of us. I invite us to resonate with eighteen Gospel stories that I have imaginatively transformed in line with ancient spiritual traditions like those of Saints Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola as well as Jewish midrash.
I picture that there were women whom the angel, Gabriel, approached before he asked Mary to have God’s son. Those other women turned him down because God was asking too much. I imagine Jesus being confronted by the families of the infant boys who were killed instead of him when he was born thirty years earlier.
I help readers learn to pray in a way that is true to our experiences of long-time suffering and is relationship based, focused on love. Each chapter also includes stories and prayer from my own personal experience and over forty years of work in psychotherapy, stories like the one of my mother and her caregiver. Prayer is as natural as crying out, as relational as call-and-response, and its results as experience-near as love. Then prayer is healing the way love is healing.