A Goodness I Cannot Explain: A Medical-Spiritual Memoir
Ebook
"We found something." With these words, a Presbyterian minister is thrust into a medical crisis: a tumor is pressing on her brain. Doctors cannot offer a preferred treatment plan: radiation and surgery are equally valid but carry vastly different risks and consequences. She herself must choose. She plunges into a maze of medical research, but the analytical mode of Western culture cannot help her find peace in her decision. Instead, she is unwittingly led along an ancient prayer path called Lectio Divina, and transformed by inexplicable and repeated encounters with goodness. Still a community's shepherd in faith, she shoulders the question they too ask: "Can God be found here?" The maze becomes a labyrinth: a spiritual journey that brings her to a center that holds. Her decision made, she undergoes treatment. "You must have been terrified," a friend says. That is when the author realizes that her experience is unusual: she had not been afraid. How to explain that? This memoir recounts how her ideas of God and self are reshaped as she discovers a place of deep knowing and trust. Humbled and surprised, she experiences in her body the gospel she has preached for years.
"This book is an honest, searching, reflective account of how
its author met the crisis of a life-changing condition, and through
the resources of her religious tradition and the support of friends
old and new, lived that crisis with courage and faith."
--J. Gerald Janzen, Author of At the Scent of Water: The Ground
of Hope in the Book of Job
"This is not just one more book on near-death experiences. Pastor
Cathy Stewart skillfully writes this book showing us how to meet
God through our very own experience. The pastoral goal is not to
tell an interesting story, but to instruct us how to meet and greet
our experience as a revelatory text. The most satisfying teaching
embodied in this book is on the value and promise of sustained
listening."
--Mary Margaret Funk, Benedictine Sister, Our Lady of Grace
Monastery, Beech Grove, Indiana
"All we have are stories." Catherine Stewart's compelling story is
one of anguish, vulnerability, honesty, and hope. It is also a
story of healing and wholeness. Catherine serves as a guide to help
us ask the all-important question of Who am I? In answering the
question, she moves from despair to integrity thereby gaining in
wisdom and compassion and deepening her understanding of what it
means to be in relationship with self, others, and Other (the
Divine). An inspiring account of a very personal journey, with
relevance for all of us."
--David Kuhl, Professor, Department of Family Practice, Faculty of
Medicine, University of British Columbia; Author of What Dying
People Want: Practical Wisdom for the End of Life
"In contemporary bioethics, there is much talk about relational
autonomy: how individuals make medical decisions within a social
context. But precisely how patients do this is poorly described in
the literature. A Goodness I Cannot Explain is illuminating
in its close description of the complexity of medical
decision-making for patients--including the influences of personal
psychology, spirituality, family, and community. This book will
help healthcare professionals to glimpse into the unseen struggle
of patients facing terrible choices, and provide solace to those of
us who, as patients, have confronted difficult choices. The book is
a literary instantiation of grace. In deeply poetical language,
Stewart recruits a surprisingly wide range of Christian theological
resources to illustrate one woman's struggle to hear the voice of
God…and in the process, to honor her own."
--Andrea Frolic, Director, Office of Clinical & Organizational
Ethics, Hamilton Health Sciences; Assistant Professor, Faculty of
Health Sciences, McMaster University Medical Center
Product Details
- Title : A Goodness I Cannot Explain: A Medical-Spiritual Memoir
- Author: Stewart, Catherine
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Publication Date: 2015
- ISBN: 9781498209205
Catherine Stewart has served as an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in Canada for twenty-five years. A graduate of McCormick Theological Seminary (Chicago), she is also a Benedictine oblate (Our Lady of Grace Monastery, Indiana). To answer a seven-year-old's question, "Why did Jesus have to die?", she authored the book God Laughed (2011). She teaches a form of listening prayer called Lectio Divina, and shepherds congregations going through transitions.