Bøger af Roberta C. Bondi

"Grief is such a messy thing," Roberta Bondi writes in the introduction. "It fills us with many ideas and images, memories and fantasies, celebration and bitter regret all at once - all superimposed upon one another. No wonder it wears us out."In this book of poetry and reflections on her mother's death, Bondi acknowledges her grief in the presence of God over the span of a few months. She expresses many conflicting feelings: love, pain, anger, guilt, emptiness, confusion, exhaustion, relief that her mother was no longer suffering. As she celebrates her mother's life and wrestles with her own sense of loss and longing, she ponders the mystery of life, death, and God's presence every day all around us in nature as well as in relationships.Even though we may feel isolated in our grief, we do not grieve alone, Bondi reminds us. In this firsthand account of her grief, she offers a gift to all who are grieving - comfort and help with accepting the forward and backward movements of grief and loss.Wild Things will also be a valuable resource for those seeking to aid and comfort the grieving: pastors, counselors, chaplains, hospice workers, and family and friends of those dealing with loss.

"Prayer is a hard topic for most of us modern folk, and we have little place to talk about it. My own first conversation partners were the great ancient teachers, the Abbas and Ammas of the Egyptian desert...These men and women have been urging me for nearly thirty years to pray and to seek healing for the wounds of my heart I carry from childhood, from my own temperament, from my culture, even the culture of my church. They have also urged me all along to write about what I have learned from them and from my own experience, for, as they tell us, nothing, neither the most wonderful nor the most humiliating thing we are given as Christians, is ever given for ourselves alone...The chapters that follow are in the form of letters to a friend. My intention, of course, is that you, the reader, understand yourself to be the friend to whom I am writing..." --excerpted from the author's Preface "What a wonderful example of spiritual guidance through letters! Out of her own rich experience and struggle and scholarship Roberta Bondi speaks about prayer as one who knows. Those who have a lot of questions about experience of God in everyday life will not want to miss reading In Ordinary Time." --E. Glenn Hinson, Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, Richmond, Virginia

Being a Christian means learning to love with God's love. But God's love is not a warm feeling in the pit of the stomach. It has definite characteristics we learn in the course of our life, in the behavior and teaching of the early monastics, as we ponder over what we can say about God as God deals with us, and finally, as we model our own lives on what we have learned.