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Community of the Heart

By Debra Dean Murphy
Stained glass window representing the Trinity, Nancy Bauer / Shutterstock.com
Stained glass window representing the Trinity, Nancy Bauer / Shutterstock.com
May 30, 2012
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A dear friend recently reminded me of David Ford’s gem of a book, The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life. On the back cover, Nicholas Wolterstorff describes it beautifully: “[This book's] spirituality is profound and reflective, yet always concrete, and never dishonest or evasive; it uses not only Scripture but literature with creative facility. Simple, yet rich. A jewel of the spiritual life in its everyday manifestations. I want to savor it with repeated readings.”

Ford traces the “multiple overwhelmings” in our lives — the forces that shake us and shape us, those with the power to wound or crush and those that are life-giving and transformative. At stake in reckoning with such tumult is the whole of our lives and our living. “How,” he asks, ”in the midst of all our overwhelmings, are our lives shaped?”

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Stained glass window representing the Trinity, Nancy Bauer / Shutterstock.com
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