Path of Shadows, Flickering Light
Living Toward Death as a Christian Pastor
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2021
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Publisher's Description
This is one pastor's story of the touch of death on life: how he first learned of it and what it brings upon us, how he met its coming to those he served as pastor, and how he awaits its coming to him as he ages. The book is marked by shifting perspectives, beginning with a child experiencing the deaths of others and ending with an elderly person acutely aware of frailty and loss. But those common stages of life are themselves seen from the perspective of a Christian pastor who served in older communities. The heart of the book is a ground-level description of how a working pastor deals with the approach of death and the shaping of the funeral experience; another perspective is provided by some of the sermons given in the wake of the deaths described. The book ends with a brief epilogue continuing these meditations during the coronavirus outbreak, pondering the power death has to isolate and obsess us, both physically and spiritually.
Endorsements (2)
“Funerals were frequent and prominent in Cordell Strug's pastorates. Death awaits us all, but Strug movingly engages the particularity of human passing. He knew his people and he had an authoritative word of pertinent hope for them as death came calling. Deep learning, personal struggle, and plain speaking meet exquisitely in this book, which should be in the study of every seminary student.”
“A brilliant, articulate scholar chose the pastor’s vocation: to share the lives—and deaths—of regular folk in two remote northern towns. Strug searches at each death—whether in ripe old age, by gruesome accident, slow disease, or own hand—for the word from the Word fitting the Christian communion’s presence and final rituals. A memoirist and storyteller, both candid and humorous, he illumines the universal through particular lives.”
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