In the House of My Pilgrimage
Violence, Noetic Healing, and Personhood
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2023
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Publisher's Description
Don Sheehan's early life, plagued by his father's alcoholic violence, was at the same time blessed by the good stories this intelligent man read aloud to his children. In his teens, unhappy in school, Don joined a street gang and then the Army Reserves, where he found he had renounced violence. On his eighteenth birthday, happening upon his post library, he walked straight to a book of Japanese poems. It went, in turn, straight to his heart, for eight hours. He'd come home at last. The house of Don's pilgrimage encompasses a wide territory: spiritual, lyric, scholarly, usually all at once. At our best, what we can take from engaging these essays is a way of falling into the heart to embrace, suffer, and, in Christ, transfigure the world's "ruining oppositions." In doing so, we fulfill what St. Maximus the Confessor saw as our human calling: to unify the polarities embedded in God's creation and thus make, not only ourselves, but all Creation whole.
Endorsements (5)
“Donald Sheehan combined his cultured erudition and literary gifts with deep and all-embracing faith. As this volume attests, he had an uncanny ability to traverse the expanses of the biblical, patristic, and literary worlds and to present them to others with the insight and meekness of his Orthodox Christian heart. Reading him provides nourishment for the mind and a balm for the soul.”
“Greeks of the Orthodox tradition speak of a man like Donald Sheehan as a κοσμοκαλόγερος—a monk in the world. Through a life of noetic prayer, he stands solidly in the world while apprehending the invisible reality of God’s nearness. Such persons become the intimate friends of God. You might say that they become prayer. With this book, Sheehan and his beloved Xenia show us how such lives occur, how far such lives reach.”
“In the House of My Pilgrimage is so rich that to categorize it would inevitably be reductive, for it contains Donald Sheehan’s own poems, brilliant and utterly original readings of others’ poetry, autobiographical reflections, and preeminently, meditations on his own spiritual journey. The book is radically eclectic, yet also truly coherent by way of the enlightened and enlightening spirit that informs it. That spirit will be familiar to generations of colleagues and students, and welcomed by new acquaintances.”
“One man’s journey to Christ from a life of street fighting and estrangement, animated with a lifetime search for God, Donald Sheehan’s work tells a moving story of overcoming violence and confusion with love and faith. Courageous and spiritual, this book conveys both the capriciousness of human life and the awesome permanence of God.”
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