Light Through the Crack
Life After Loss
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A deeply moving and engaging work of Christian spirituality in the tradition of Henri Nouwen, written by his close friend and literary executrix.
Sue Mosteller has had a rich life as a spiritual adventurer and as a member and leader of L’Arche Community, where she first met the great spiritual writer Henri Nouwen. In Light Through the Crack, she tells her own story and the stories of the people she has known throughout her life. She writes about her family and her upbringing; the fifty years she has spent with the Sisters of St. Joseph; her thirty years of involvement with L’Arche Daybreak Community, where people with disabilities and those who assist them create a home together; and her close, twenty-year friendship with Nouwen. With grace and humor she explores the relationships she has formed and the difficulties that go with them. Through her varied experiences, she has learned that it is impossible to live with people over the long term and hide your flaws and vulnerabilities.
Leonard Cohen once wrote in a song: “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” Combining revealing memoir and the inspirational stories of others, Mosteller brings to life the meaning of that resonant phrase and illuminates why human weaknesses, the “cracks” in our personalities, are actually the greatest sources of light for the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When a "crack" forms in life, whether through drug abuse, illness or a broken marriage, Mosteller believes that an inner light often shines through, birthing new life and hope. In each of the heartrending stories she recounts in this collection, the literary executor for spiritual writer Henri Nouwen plunges readers into the dark cracks of individual lives, showing how each was restored. Mosteller, a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, drew these stories from her network of relationships in the international L'Arche community for developmentally disabled people, often disguising names and places. Several are of the two-hanky variety, including those about a couple who decide, against the advice of their doctor, to bear a child they are told will die within 15 minutes of its birth, and a man whose life is riddled with fear from having grown up under apartheid in South Africa. To each narrative, crafted from lengthy interviews with the subjects, Mosteller adds parallels with her own life and that of her family and its fissures. Readers who have enjoyed Nouwen's books and his writings about life at L'Arche will feel a strong connection to this volume not only because of the content and occasional mentions of Nouwen, but because of Mosteller's easy way of relating people's stories.
