There are critical times in our lives, moments of profound loss, grief and fear in which our frameworks of sense seem to collapse and no longer enable us to convey meaning to overwhelming events or even to life itself. In this work Sarah Bachelard suggests that the practice of meditation and contemplative living may help us endure and integrate such turning point experiences, and bring our life and identity into a deeper wholeness. Crisis, Bachelard indicates, may be seen as a call or opportunity to genuinely encounter the reality of God, a God who is and is a completely OTHER, who reshapes our identity by bringing our life into a much deeper level of relatedness with all that is, freeing us from the dominion of death, making us more capable of being with the reality, and opening us to our deepest possibilities. The journey is painful and involves letting go of our old ways to enter the unknown realm of poverty of spirit, but it also offers us the possibility of going back into the world free and courageous, with a new sense of being alive, and with a radically deepened capacity to be with and to love other human beings.
