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Book Cover for: Gather the Fragments: My Year of Finding God's Love, Maureen O'Brien

Gather the Fragments: My Year of Finding God's Love

Maureen O'Brien

Paperback
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In this memoir, Maureen O'Brien reflects on the gospel story of the miracle of the loaves and fishes and what she learns about herself, the people around her, and a fragmented but still beautiful world. While she's sharing her story of finding God's love, she's also sharing the stories of so many others, known and cherished by God even when the world leaves them shattered, finding their way through the world and feasting on the fragments of grace that are always in abundance if we learn to look, to see, to accept, to share.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Franciscan Media
  • Publish Date: Mar 7th, 2023
  • Pages: 168
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.60in - 0.60in - 0.50lb
  • EAN: 9781632534231
  • Categories: • Spirituality• Christian Living - Inspirational• General

About the Author

Maureen O'Brien is the author of the spiritual memoir What Was Lost: Seeking Refuge in the Psalms. She is a contributor to St. Anthony Messenger and the online site Pause+Pray. She has also published a novel, B-mother (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and The Other Cradling, a chapbook of poems (Finishing Line Press). Her award-winning short stories and poems have been published widely in magazine and anthologies. She lives in Connecticut where she taught creative writing to teenagers for twenty-five years. She finds beauty in the contrasts of life--sunrise and dusk, crying and laughter--they never cease to amaze her.

Praise for this book

From the time, many years ago, when my mother read to me before bed, I have loved beautiful stories. This is a beautiful story, a story of many stories made of hope. It is Maureen O'Brien's own story which, as I read it, kept conjuring up Emily Dickinson's luminous words, "Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul" and whose song "never stops" and never "asked a crumb of me." And with each individual story I could feel the singing bird's feathers lifting and lifting me as I read. These stories could do that because they were not sentimental or detached from life as we all experience it which involves our own share of pain and suffering, loneliness, and despair. O'Brien's story of stories lifts hope's feathers because her words incarnate and make real these words she quotes from Thich Nhat Hanh: "Because I suffer, I need love. Because you suffer, you need love. Because we suffer, we know we have to offer each other love." And love is what O'Brien offers us in this gathering up of the fragments of the loves she has known. --Murray Bodo, OFM, author, Francis: The Journey and the Dream

With an eye for metaphor and an unpretentious but contemplative voice, Maureen O'Brien's writing is a celebration of the sacredness to be found in the minutiae of our regular old lives. Gather the Fragments paints pictures that I will return to again and again.--Shannon K. Evans, author, Rewilding Motherhood and Luminous

In Gather the Fragments, Maureen O'Brien invites us to journey with her over the course of a year through the sorrows and joys and surprises that await her. Through her writing you noticeably slow down, take a deep breath and as you do the miraculous comes into focus. This work is a intimate portrait of a lived faith. It's not concerned with proving anything to you. Rather, Gather the Fragments is an invitation; into Maureen's daily life and deep interior life. They are both woven together masterfully into a tapestry of stories honoring the hidden miracle in the most ordinary of circumstances. --Ryan McQuade