When Fragments Make a Whole

This is a courageous and deeply humane book describing a personal journey through healing stories in the Bible and from the standpoint of Rudolf Steiner's Christian Community. There are 18 chapters themed around New Testament healing miracles as energetic patterns of transformation. Each episode starts with a poem written from the viewpoint of the subject of the story, followed by contextual commentary and revealing personal reflections sharing the author's own challenges in life and relationships. Her understanding is grounded in the sacrificial power of love and the importance of community and wholeness. The intergenerational nature of trauma applies to the author personally, as she only later fully realises. The poetry is striking in its evocative and empathic imagery:

I knelt, and prayed, and he made me clean, cleansed by the uncorrupted Word That speaks us back to communion. (p. 48)

This divine Word 'can only be heard privately, in the innermost sanctum of our soul' as a power and presence. This is a balm for emotional and spiritual suffering. Oddly enough, I only just came across the work of Mark Wolynn on generational trauma and epigenetics, and it is worth considering one's own psychological patterns in this light. The author's final message is that love calls us all to emerge from our self-defensive structures, so that our eyes and ears are opened to the presence of the Beloved, 'that we all may enter into the kingdom, and join the sacred dance.' (p. 255)