In The Gift of With: A Story of Finding the Life-Changing Wonders of the With-God Life (Thrive Media, c. 2024), Janelle McGuckin tells a wonderful story with three important dimensions: being healed from cancer, coming to terms with her parents’ divorce, and discovering the reality of God’s presence. By training a nurse, she writes with literary skill, particularly gifted in crafting the compelling figures-of-speech that mark a fine writer. Successive chapters show how God was truly with her in struggles, isolation, disappointments, the unknown, life and death, emptiness, daily salvation, etc. (Janelle was a student of mine at Point Loma Nazarene University and we have stayed in touch over the years, so I will refer to her by her first name—and also make clear I am understandably biased when evaluating her work!)
Janelle—an experienced nurse of 15 years with two little girls and a devoted husband—“a nurse who doesn’t know how to be a patient”—was, years ago, diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer and began a multi-year journey of repeated surgeries, radiation, recoveries, relapses, and ultimate healing. Living in San Diego, she found solace in the silence of a bench overlooking the ocean, her “favorite place in the world.” Her bench became an altar, “the only place I have found that makes my soul-aches feel tended. I don’t need to bring anything except my noisy and weighted-down heart” (p. 13). One day, at the beginning of her journey, she heard God speak. “A gentle breeze blows and covers me, over my whole being, soft, very present, and very real. He speaks; I write it down. Every sweet, tender word. He whispers three times, ‘I am with you, I am with you, I am with you’” (p. 13). Those words set forth the book’s message—He is Emmanuel, the God who is ever with us.
After her first surgery, requiring a a small incision on her neck, one of her daughters examined the scar and said: “Well, it looks like you just have another happy face.” Minutes later she and her sister “came back in with cherry red Mr. Sketch marker scars across the front of their own necks to match my new happy face” (p. 18). Overwhelmed by their empathy, Janelle found the Lord comforting her in the midst of her discomfort. But the cancer returned, necessitating not only surgery but a dose of nuclear medicine so powerful that she had to stay alone in a hotel room for a week lest others be adversely impacted by the radiation. Though the “effects of the nuclear waste in my body” were innervating, she found herself basking “in a peace which I cannot explain” (p. 25). Listening to music, reading, soaking in the sunsets, she found real peace in the midst of the storm. “I am, as incredible as it sounds, abiding with Him (The Vine), and I (The Branch) in this waiting place undergoing pruning to eventually become more fruitful” (p. 26).
Battling cancer challenged her faith as well as her body. She’d asked Jesus into her heart when she was four years old and naturally imagined her life would consequently be much like living in the Garden of Eden. And her childhood was truly idyllic, anchored in her parents’ active involvement in church. She “was one of those lucky girls who grew up with a dad who adored her” and provided the security every child desires. Then her grandmother, the matriarch of the family, died unexpectedly. Her world was no longer perfect! When her brother impregnated his girlfriend, some folks in the church began to shun the family, so they stopped attending church. Her mother began dealing with abuse she had suffered as a child and her father became increasingly obsessed with his business and golf tournaments. By the time she left for college (Point Loma Nazarene University) she knew her childhood Eden was gone. Reading Scott Peck’s declaration that “life is difficult” helped her acknowledge a “simple truth” she needed to embrace as she watched her parents divorce after her mother packed a small bag and walked away from her home. Fortunately, though she discovered her father’s “dark side,” they stayed in constant contact and the relationship healed before he died. “God really does bring beauty from ashes” (p. 111). She and her mother would also finally reconcile as she is restored to health by the Holy Spirit after 20 years of turning away from her faith.
Janelle maintained a busy schedule at college, doing the hard work demanded for a nursing major, but because of her parents’ problems much of her life was blurred by concern for them. “Disappointment and confusion ran deep about who my parents were, what they’d taught me, and what they now believed” (p. 36). Sadly enough: “The ripple effects of divorce never fully resolve or go away until the other side of heaven” (p. 39). Fortunately, her boyfriend Scott (who would become her husband) was a rock giving solidity to her life. He too had some transformative moments with God. Attending a men’s retreat in Colorado, he followed a suggestion and asked the LORD to give him a special name, which He did. Janelle then wondered if she could also receive a name, and she heard a whispered word—Delight. Minutes later she picked up a book quoting these words from Zephaniah 3:17: “The Lord your God is with you; He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.” The “with us” God was truly with her in her deepest moments of need.
After recovering from her first bout with cancer in San Diego, Janelle and family moved back to northern California, where the disease resumed its assault. “Project happy-face expansion gets underway with my Divine Surgeon and Chief Branch Pruner” (p. 59). She finds another bench, this time on a small lake, that serves as her altar. Living in total isolation while the radiation seeks out the invasive tumors, she finds strength in music and prayer. Somehow in the midst of utter weakness she finds strength to carry on. “All I can say is He is real and personal” (p. 66). She deals not only with her physical ills but with spiritual issues that push her to ever-deeper levels of surrender and trust. Waiting on God is a “daily salvation experience.” Another hope-fulled remission was followed by yet another series of treatments. But God stayed with her. “When I embrace the with-God life, fear fades. I soak in the most repeated command written 70 times in the Bible, ‘Do not be afraid.’ Fear is losing its grip” (p. 81).
After the third series of treatments the long wait begins again. This time however, lab tests come back good! In fact, they were miraculous. The doctors had predicted that she would have to get treatments the rest of her life, but suddenly her cancer is “‘non-detectable.’ Non-detectable means the number is zero—a number I haven’t seen in four years” (p. 81). Rejoicing in the good news prodded Janelle to even deeper spiritual surgery, wanting to be all God desired her to be, totally surrendered to His Will, transformed by His Grace. She then talked with a gifted counselor, found space in monastic retreats, and read good books as well as meditating on Scripture. She discovered the worth of truly observing the Sabbath. Finally she found that there really is an Eden—living in accord with God’s design. Therein are: “Trees of green. Giving trees that speak of the best Gift-giver. Until we get there, I hope you’ll keep looking for benches with me and clinging to the only gift that provides a taste of eternity here and now—His Presence, His with-ness. Him with-in, and with us. Always” (p. 115).
Though Janelle has probably not read St Teresa de Avila or St John of the Cross, her experiences remind me the insights set forth by these classic mystical writers. Deeply influenced by them, T.S. Eliot penned words in The Four Quartets aptly describing Janelle’s discoveries:
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
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Another friend of mine, Kay Harkins, has written a deeply probing book, Queen of the Leaves: A Memoir of Lost and Found (New York: Austin Macauley Publishers, c. 2020; Kindle Edition). Born in Des Moines, Iowa, to a Catholic father and a mother who converted to appease him, Kay early pondered religious subjects while attending a Catholic school. She was encouraged by her father’s loving mother (Grandma Helen) to engage in devotional practices. “Somewhere between the incantations of Latin, Sister Miriam’s story time, and the black and white Life of Christ films at St. Theresa’s School, I began to expect an immediate return of Jesus Christ” (p. 8). “‘What’s keeping Jesus?’” became a question I would alternately abandon and reconsider for the rest of my life” as she would journey from “the elegant and European disciplines of Catholicism to the wider Protestant frontier [including years in the Church of the Nazarene], and finally to Eastern Orthodox Christianity” (p. 43). Her early piety was, however, jolted when her father left his family when Kay was six years old. Telling Kay the bad news, her mother hugged her and said: “‘Daddy doesn’t love us anymore, honey. He’s going away to live with another lady.’” A little girl’s world shattered. The room “began to spin. I wanted her not to have said, ‘Doesn’t love us.’ A mother wouldn’t say that to a child, would she? But she didn’t say ‘doesn’t love me,’ she said ‘doesn’t love US.’ In some ways, she was right, in some ways, she was wrong, but she said those words” (p. 18).
Betrayed by her father, Kay sought solace in her inner life, spending much time alone. One day, rolling in leaves on the lawn, she felt herself a part of something bigger than herself—being immersed in Love—and: “I thought I felt, not only the love of God, but somehow being part of that love. ‘I’m the Queen of the Leaves,’ I said out loud. . . . . I thought about being the good and loving queen of all I surveyed. I cannot recall how long I lay in the leaves that day. But I know that I have found myself returning to that bank and the outpouring of love I sensed there when times of pain, sorrow or uncertainty have overwhelmed me. . . . . On that day I learned to love silence as much as I loved music, to seek it in nature, a library, or a quiet room in times of turmoil and confusion. It was a lesson that would serve me well in the coming years” (p. 22).
If seeing her father depart was difficult, getting a step-father was worse! Her father made a deal—escaping child support payments by giving her step-father the right to adopt Kay and her sister! The new stepfather lived in Texas, so that required a move as well as related disruptions, but “the big gamble” her mother made failed. He turned out to be a “captor” rather than a savior, treating the girls like a drill-sergeant and making the mother a housekeeper who also had to work full-time. “To an outsider, he appeared completely charming.” He made a good living and his “public persona was impeccable, as were the environs of our home: manicured lawn, shiny washed cars, and a house that was cleaned top to bottom weekly by his daughters” (p. 60). But his darkest side was exposed when he sexually abused his daughters, inflicting wounds it would take a lifetime to heal.
Successfully negotiating high school, Kay proved to be a talented musician who received a music scholarship to Texas Tech University. Then mutual friends introduced her to Jack Harkins, who was both athletic and intelligent. A straight A student in high school, he found classes uninteresting and dropped out in his junior year, joined the Marines and served with distinction in Vietnam, receiving purple hearts and promotions in the process. Their courtship commenced and one day “a voice in my head said, ‘Don’t let this man get away!’” Though she was still working and sporadically going to school, “we began to swim for the rock of marriage against the tide of all that might seem against us in that turbulent time” (p. 100).
As a military wife, Kay moved with Jack as he served in various assignments and gave birth to two children. Early on, she tended to make him the focus of all her attention, but in time it became clear that she could not make him her god. During their time in Hawaii, she was “the seventies’ Earth Mother, baking my own bread, making my own yogurt, sprouting my own sprouts, taking dance classes, and volunteering at the base hospital” (p. 105). Financial realities also pushed her to finds various forms of employment but she always longed to settle near a university where she could at last complete her education. She also managed to re-connect with her birth father, who turned out to be charming and anxious to repair their broken ties. Increasingly, she also found herself more deeply embedded in the reality of her Heavenly Father. “We are held in the infinite love and grace of the God,” she says, “seen and unseen, who is always there ahead of us, always immediately with us, when we have the awareness to notice. The picture can only be borne for a few seconds, but it is enough to hold me” (p. 136).
Queen of the Leaves is a well-crafted, insightful memoir, telling the story of what many would consider an “ordinary” woman. But Kay is a woman who writes with extraordinary skill, telling a riveting story most worth reading. There’’s a great deal of pain and failure packed into her memoir, but it’s truly another illustration of “beauty from ashes.”
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Years ago I read and reviewed Sally Read’s Night’s Bright Darkness: A Modern Conversion Story (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, c. 2016). The author, a contemporary English poet, was reared in a militantly atheist home—her father a vociferous Marxist journalist—who at ten “could tell you that religion was the opiate of the masses” and that “Christians, in particular, were tambourine-bashing intellectual weaklings.” Only matter exists, so neither God nor the soul matter. Yet when she began working as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital she met patients whose sufferings and dyings gave her pause. Still more: amidst the intemperate drinking and casual sex that punctuated her work-week routine, she occasionally felt strangely drawn to old churches in the neighborhood. Then her father’s death at the age of fifty-six devastated her. “I felt as if a god had died. The creator of my world and my protector had gone” (#231). The standard cliches and quasi-scientific theories shaping the modern world proved illusive.
Abandoned and inwardly empty, she felt as if she were in hell and wondered what, indeed, life is all about. She “even considered, in a desperate and vague way, invoking God.” Perhaps some kind of faith would make life “liveable. But it seemed entirely unfeasible to believe in any God; I thought I could never lower myself to that degree of self-delusion” (#246). Looking back, she now considers that desolate phase of her life a blessing, for God was mysteriously working therein to bring her to Himself. “His absence was so painfully loud it seems, now, to prove his existence,” for He “reaches us wherever we are, even if we are so far from knowing him that we mistake him completely. His infinity always contains our finitude” (#253). She became a published poet, married and had a little girl—something that pushed her to ponder metaphysical questions. Events and relationships with some Catholic women who enjoyed a rich devotional life encouraged her to loosen her secular shackles. So she began visiting churches and got acquainted with a godly Ukrainian studying for the priesthood whose gentle counsel and literary references help nudge her to faith. He encouraged her to pray, though she had no idea how. Then she picked up T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and sensed almost immediately an inner peace, an acceptance of a Reality that unleashed a torrent of tears. Entering a nearby church she felt: “The strange calm that had come upon me that night the week before had settled into a new longing to know what to do.” Looking up, she saw an icon of Christ’s face in a window and said: “‘If you’re there, you have to help me’” (#650). And He did! “I felt almost physically lifted up. My eyes began crying instantly, my face relaxed. It was like being in the grip of panicked amnesia, when suddenly someone familiar walked into the room and gave myself back to me—a self restored to me more fully than before. It was a presence entirely fixed me as I was on it, and it both descended toward me and pulled me up. I knew it was him. This was the hinge of my life; this compassion and love and humility so great it buckled me as it came to meet me (#658).
Thenceforth she frequently prayed, reciting the Our Father, knowing she was safe in His arms and feeling “as if the Birth, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection were plunged into my being in one gorgeous blow—this is how it is to all of a sudden know the meaning of reality: the heart kick-started to sense its intrinsic architecture of logic, love, and reason” (#658). She inwardly sensed the Presence of the Living Lord. “There was a feeling of being known in every cell. My aloneness was taken away from me; and though it has often since returned, I know that loneliness is the illusion and Christ beside me the reality. This was my earliest prayer: being attuned to Christ’s presence, which by grace I perceived in those early days as strongly was my daughter’s breathing or the sound of the blackbird singing at night in the garden. Prayer became essential,” and she sensed “being touched—if so pale a word can describe the sensation of being broken and healed—touched that he had come to me when I had rejected him and spoken against him and published lies about him in my books” (#680). Then she began reading the Gospels and found the Jesus revealed therein quite unlike the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” proclaimed in liberal churches. She came to see that the Truth was something given to us, not something we fashion,. It was firmly established and preserved in the Church of the Apostles. And the Truth she encountered led her, step by step into the Catholic Church. Night’s Bright Darkness reveals a poet determined to discern and beautifully describe Reality in all its fullness. Rather recently Sally Read published Annunciation: A Call to Faith in a Broken World (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, c. 2019; Kindle Edition). Pondering her daughter’s birth led her to consider Mary’s Annunciation—an event that provides “the possibility of Christ in our lives or the bleakness of a world without him.” She says: “The Annunciation was a part of my own consciousness long before I believed in God—even then I recognized it as a pivotal encounter.” Writing this book for her daughter, she “saw how those few lines of Luke contain everything of my own relationship with God, and most phases of the spiritual life.” So she wrote Annunciation as “a meditation on the universal close and remote dance with God” that was “written by a mother lovingly guiding a daughter,” hoping it “will speak to anyone who has felt pain or experienced doubt, or indeed those who know well the mystery and bliss of faith. The Annunciation is an invitation to a deeper relationship with God for each and every one of us” (p. 13). So she moves slowly through Luke’s account, applying words spoken to Mary to her own child. Gazing at her little girl, she wrote: “your heart is a vast and quite frightening thing. It was designed for God, and so, like a vertiginous and beautifully carved stone cathedral, it cries out to be filled with a voice, with love; it aches to be animated by a Spirit large enough” (p. 25). Anticipating that her daughter will read the book when she is grown up, Read cites the angel’s words to Mary (“do not be afraid”) she hopes her little one will “remember how many times I told you as a child, ‘Do not be afraid’? That, and ‘Don’t worry’ and “I love you.’ Sometimes they are interchangeable. ‘I love you,’ I will say before the math test, meaning ‘Do not be afraid.’ ‘What if I fail?’ you say. And I answer, ‘Don’t worry.’ God tells us not to be afraid repeatedly through Scripture (Dan 10:12; Is 41:10; 1 Jn 4:18) and continues to tell us so through private revelation (Julian of Norwich, Saint Faustina). If, for mothers, “Do not be afraid” is another way of saying “I love you”, it has to be much the same way with God” (p. 33). Given courage to conquer fear, Mary was able to accept her calling—to be a “handmaid of the Lord.” We all struggle to discover “who we are.” The answer for Mary was to be a mother—the mother of God’s Son incarnate in Jesus. We too find ourselves when we totally surrender to God and His will, and prayerful openness “the light of his gaze will give you coherence and some understanding of the person you really are. This sense of yourself is far from the modern notion of discovering your ‘identity’. It is a glimpse into the mystery of your soul in creation” (p. 57). In Christ we find who we are and ought to be, and in Him we find peace and joy beyond measure. That’s what Sally Read has found, and we’re grateful.