Frail Web of Intention is one of the most unusual books you will ever read. The story of a common man, it is also a cultural and theological grand tour of the latter 20th and early 21st centuries. While the tale itself is made of everyday stuff, the telling far transcends the materials, resulting in a memoir of rare lyricism. After a dramatic conversion experience at the age of seventeen, author Niewold embarks on a fifty-year pilgrimage to find the elusive holy grail of personal significance. Drawing from journals kept over the years, Niewold holds nothing back in laying out the failures and miscalculations of his life along the way. At the same time, he misses no opportunity to link his own experience with both the events and the thought systems of his times, and the even more mysterious movement of the Spirit through the world. Niewold invests the everyday with the divine radiance that we all suspect lies just outside our awareness. Little escapes this eternalizing interpretation of his past, even when the lights of divine grace throw but the merest flickers across the mountains and deserts of his years. It is a strange pleasure to travel with him through the back alleys and wastes of his experience, and still to recognize so much that is familiar to us. Only a life of such singular dimensions-raw, uncut, cobbled together-could carry the marks of a man both in love with God and brokenhearted by the frailty of his own intentions. The book concludes with his reflections on postmodern times and an encounter with an individual who, quite unintentionally, helps him connect past and present. For those seeking the meaning of their lives, let them begin their search with Frail Web of Intention.
