by Michael Olin-Hitt ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 16, 2017
A dramatically charged faith memoir full of personal revelations and spiritual platitudes.
An author (and “Spiritual Messenger”) imparts advice on surviving life’s trials.
The note of surprise Olin-Hitt strikes right at the beginning of his nonfiction debut should sound familiar to any reader of religious literature. The author was an ordinary guy, an English professor, who respected the spiritual when he encountered it in other people but never experienced it directly himself. Then, one day in 1998, that all changed; unexpectedly, he was seized by what he calls a “spiritual awakening” (as in most such descriptions, the symptoms also line up with a minor coronary event): “The spiritual presence entered me through my chest, then rose into my neck. My throat tensed. My face contorted. My breathing returned.” In that instant, he writes, he was “literally knocked to the floor” by what he later decided was the sudden opening of a personal doorway to the spiritual world, through which might come messages on a variety of topics: “Prayer, human suffering, the voice of God, the reality and roles of heavenly messengers, and the dawn of a new spiritual awareness.” He later learned that he could enter this euphoric state at will, and he became aware of how elastic the term “the voice of God” could be. Rather than any one deity, he sensed “the Braided Way,” a divine ocean in which all religions were tributaries. The bulk of the heartfelt book recounts the author’s ongoing personal revelations as a prophet and how they continue to change his earlier perceptions. “Suddenly, I began to see the apparent random nature of the universe in a different light,” he writes. The various pronouncements that come through this messenger are often on the trite side (“You are sparks of light; you are a piece of the Holy”). But Olin-Hitt’s skillful use of his own life story grounds the whole thing in an appealingly human register regardless of the author’s claim of supernatural powers.
A dramatically charged faith memoir full of personal revelations and spiritual platitudes.Pub Date: March 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-7376-0
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Balboa
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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by Kerry Egan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 2016
A moving, heartfelt account of a hospice veteran.
Lessons about life from those preparing to die.
A longtime hospice chaplain, Egan (Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago, 2004) shares what she has learned through the stories of those nearing death. She notices that for every life, there are shared stories of heartbreak, pain, guilt, fear, and regret. “Every one of us will go through things that destroy our inner compass and pull meaning out from under us,” she writes. “Everyone who does not die young will go through some sort of spiritual crisis.” The author is also straightforward in noting that through her experiences with the brokenness of others, and in trying to assist in that brokenness, she has found healing for herself. Several years ago, during a C-section, Egan suffered a bad reaction to the anesthesia, leading to months of psychotic disorders and years of recovery. The experience left her with tremendous emotional pain and latent feelings of shame, regret, and anger. However, with each patient she helped, the author found herself better understanding her own past. Despite her role as a chaplain, Egan notes that she rarely discussed God or religious subjects with her patients. Mainly, when people could talk at all, they discussed their families, “because that is how we talk about God. That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives.” It is through families, Egan began to realize, that “we find meaning, and this is where our purpose becomes clear.” The author’s anecdotes are often thought-provoking combinations of sublime humor and tragic pathos. She is not afraid to point out times where she made mistakes, even downright failures, in the course of her work. However, the nature of her work means “living in the gray,” where right and wrong answers are often hard to identify.
A moving, heartfelt account of a hospice veteran.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-481-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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