“Words leap off the page in Mark Gauvreau Judge’s passionate memoir of a counterculture-era Catholic education in which nearly everything went awry,”
Pope John Paul II, Edmund Walsh, and Father “Nails” Herliby get it. The “pro-choicers” at Georgetown University don’t. Frank Sheed, G.K. Chesterton, and Sister Stephanie get it. The sex-ed teachers at Georgetown Prep don’t, and neither does Andrew Sullivan.
“A compelling account of a young man’s rediscovery of Catholicism, this story is at times poignant, bitter, and angry as it moves, step by inexorable step, toward the author’s surrender to the mystery of love that is Christ in his Church. After decades of flawed and failed “renewals,” another generation is embarking on the high adventure of truth ever ancient, ever new.”
“This book will likely cause an uproar.”
When she was only 27 years old, tragedy struck Paula D’Arcy’s life, when an accident took the life of her husband and her daughter, leaving Paula a young, pregnant widow. She gave birth the following spring and began a profound journey of grief and spiritual discovery, beautifully chronicled in this deceptively simple book. The Gift of the Red Bird is suffused with nature mysticism in the best sense of the word, culminating with a vision-quest retreat in the Texas wilderness, nearly fourteen years after the accident. D’Arcy understands that spiritual writing ultimately tells a love story between the author and God, and she does so beautifully in this short but rich book, filled with longing, insight and wildness. When the author emerges from the wilderness and writes that she has been changed, we the readers can feel it — and perhaps we have been changed as well.