Book: “Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation”

Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation

By Fr. Adam Bucko



“The kind of spirituality Jesus calls us to is less about withdrawal, protection, safety, and preserving our lives as we know them, and more about risk, vulnerability, and even mutual dependence. On this path, we make progress not by practicing ‘shelter in place’ but by being able to touch what frightens us in the world. We make progress by removing the protective walls, the clear boundaries dividing the world into good and bad, and engaging with it, struggling with it, and in the process, discovering new levels of God’s expansiveness.”

Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation by Fr. Adam Bucko is a collection of reflections, stories, and lessons on how to bear witness to our trying times. Written against the backdrop of the COVID 19 pandemic and America’s reckoning with growing poverty, injustice and systemic racism, many of his reflections originated from sermons delivered via zoom during the early days of the pandemic when we were all sheltered in place. He is hopeful that the lessons he learned as he prayed through the events of the last three years and reflected on his own life journey, will help people connect with their own hearts, and support those seeking guidance on how to respond to the challenges that we are facing in our world in a way that doesn’t just create more noise but rather evoke what’s deepest in our hearts.The book is divided into three parts: Listening to Life, Touching What Frightens Us, and Interrupting Silence. Each chapter offers readers an invitation to pay attention to God who is eager to accompany us through our challenges and hopes. Throughout, Father Adam invites readers to draw from his rich personal experiences, beginning with his youth in Poland where he witnessed courageous priests use nonviolence to fight a totalitarian system, to his work with homeless LGBTQ youth on the streets of NYC, to his interactions with interfaith communities across the globe. Alongside these diverse experiences, Father Adam weaves in wisdom gained from mentors, scripture, and spiritual activists and mystics, such as St. Teresa of Avila, Howard Thurman, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Catherine Doherty and Thich Nhat Hanh.The book ends with a powerful roadmap for individuals and communities looking to integrate a “rule of life” in service of compassion and justice for all. The book also includes an appendix of contemplative practices to help readers develop discernment, courage, and receptivity to God who is always guiding us towards healing and liberation.

Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation

AVAILABLE NOW

 for purchase at Powell’s Books

Fr. Adam Bucko, Episcopal priest, spiritual director, author, activist and inttereligious pioneer, has been a committed voice in the movement for the renewal of Christian Contemplative Spirituality and the growing New Monastic movement. 

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