My Love Affairs with Life
A Spiritual Memoir
by
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Decades ago, I fell in love with a certain form of beauty, held in the ancient forms and rituals of the English cathedral, made new every day, in every evensong gathering. I fell in love with the juxtaposition of contemporary, secular society and ancient religious tradition. I fell in love with warmth in the midst of cold, light in the midst of vaulted recesses of darkness, God in the midst of the world. And it was not personal planning that placed me in the setting and created the readiness for that romance. I was not searching for anything special in that first visit to the cathedral. OK, then, maybe I can notice that, when it comes to true Love, the initiative lies in the Love and not in the personal sense which is seeking for something.
Perhaps I can even recognize that the Love to which we come home in the experience of beauty is always searching for us, simply by being available to any eye that is available to it. When the lover is really Love, and not just the form of the moment, there can be no question of losing it, however much “the eye of the beholder” may be veiled at that time by its complaints. The fact that my eye wasn’t available to the presence of Love in the cathedrals on the 2006 trip tells something about the beholder but nothing at all about the beauty, ancient and new. Nothing about the Lover. Nothing about Love.
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About the Book
Devastated by the death of Jan, her husband of thirty-seven years, author Ann Tremaine Linthorst felt compelled to find a fresh sense of the meaning of her own life. A longing for a new love affair surprisingly launched her on an inward journey through her past. She found her many life adventures recast as spiritual epiphanies.
In My Love Affairs with Life: A Spiritual Memoir, Linthorst takes us along on her daily nature walks, her year of seminary study in Scotland, and a family pilgrimage to medieval English cathedrals. She shares seminal insights from novels by C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams and the poetry of Mary Oliver. Linthorst introduces us to the spiritual teachers who brought healing and transformation, and opens up about the funny and painful romance that led to her marriage to Jan, a Jesuit priest from Holland.
Throughout My Love Affairs with Life: A Spiritual Memoir, Linthorst allows herself to be shown where God has consistently met her in beauty and love. Enter into the very process of spiritual self-discovery and find a fresh perspective on your own life story.
About the Author
Ann Tremaine Linthorst graduated from Antioch College, Union Theological Seminary, and the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry. She has been a licensed marriage and family therapist in Orange County, California, for forty years. She has two grown sons and five grandchildren. My Love Affairs with Life is her fifth book.