AWAKENED FAITH

Name: AWAKENED FAITH
Author: Mary Clare Wojcik
ISBN: 978-1499276008

LEARNING TO LIVE THE LORD'S PRAYER

by Mary Clare Wojcik Susan Anthony ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 9, 2014

A gracefully executed exploration of the interconnectedness of different types of spiritual and scientific thought.

bookshelf

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

GET IT

Wojcik, in her debut with co-author Anthony, shares her spiritual journey and the deeper meanings she’s found within the Lord’s Prayer.

This memoir’s first chapter touches on the author’s life struggles, which included a divorce and antidepressants. Her difficulties led her to Anthony, “an ordained minister and intuitive healer.” Wojcik found that the information Anthony shared “was the foundation for the prayer Jesus taught his disciples in Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:2–4—the Lord’s Prayer.” The bulk of the memoir delves further into this discovery, using each of the prayer’s lines as a pivot for reflection; along the way, she sprinkles in additional autobiographical details. She asserts that Jesus’ “so-called ‘lost years’ ” were spent studying in Eastern countries, “suggesting compatibility between Eastern and Western philosophies.” She also emphasizes the importance of meditation and the existence of spiritual guides and angels, while providing examples of the latter in her own life. She even touches on physics and quantum theory, and how the earth’s “electromagnetic grid” is "[o]ften referred to as the Christ consciousness grid.” In a chapter on one of the Lord’s Prayer’s key phrases (“and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”), she makes the case that the line is an acknowledgement of reincarnation and karma. She concludes by noting how she realized that part of her life’s mission was to write this very book. Wojcik, a Wisconsin-based marketing-communications consultant and writer, offers a sincere, smooth-flowing narrative that will hold particular appeal to those readers who seek links among traditional religion, science and New-Age spirituality. Many other works on these different topics are already available (some of which are cited in this book’s bibliography), but Wojcik’s use of the Lord’s Prayer is a compelling organizing construct. Overall, she offers a positive message and relatable, well-reasoned musings on her various themes.

A gracefully executed exploration of the interconnectedness of different types of spiritual and scientific thought.

Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014

ISBN: 978-1499276008

Page Count: 260

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

SELF-HELP

bookshelf

HELPING ME HELP MYSELF

ONE SKEPTIC, TEN SELF-HELP GURUS, AND A YEAR ON THE BRINK OF THE COMFORT ZONE

by Beth Lisick ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 2, 2008

Funny, perceptive and surprisingly open-hearted under the cynicism.

bookshelf

A delightful, Plimptonesque exercise in immersive journalism exploring the strange world of “self-help.”

Lisick (Everybody into the Pool: True Tales, 2005, etc.) devoted a year to various gurus in an attempt to self-actualize. She endeavored to become a Highly Effective Person under the auspices of Stephen Covey, to fortify her soul with Jack Canfield’s Chicken Soup, to get fit with Richard Simmons on a cruise ship, to straighten out her perilous finances with Suze Orman, to consistently discipline her young son with Thomas Phelan’s 1-2-3 Magic method, to figure out John Gray’s Mars/Venus gender dichotomy, and generally to live a better, happier life. It is to the reader’s great benefit that Lisick is: 1) a mess, 2) cynical and horrified of cheesiness, and C) effortlessly funny. Her visualizations didn’t go right, she didn’t have the right clothes for the ghastly seminars and on Simmons’s cruise she got high and made inappropriate advances to a surly young musician accompanying his mother. Lisick makes keen use of comic detail, as when she charts the deflation of Simmons’s hair over the course of the cruise. She is tough on the well-paid experts, but fair, sincerely laboring to suspend her skepticism and game to put their advice into action. Some of it works: A home-organization expert helps Lisick’s family emerge from their chaotic clutter, and Phelan’s discipline strategy tames her truculent toddler. But of course the book is funniest when things don’t go so well. The author’s revulsion over Gray’s retrograde sexual stereotypes (and disturbingly smooth, buffed appearance) is palpable and highly amusing. Her articulate hatred of the anodyne platitudes in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way provides a tonic for anyone dismayed by fuzzy New Age smugness. None of that from Lisick, who is sharp, irreverent and endearingly screwed-up. Her experiment may not have solved all of her problems, but she got an enjoyable book out of it.

Funny, perceptive and surprisingly open-hearted under the cynicism.