Inner Healing the Franciscan Way E-Book

Wendy Murray

• Herausgeber: Paraclete Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

For those who feel broken, lost, or spiritually depleted, Inner Healing the Franciscan Way offers a roadmap to rediscovering God's presence and finding restoration and healing.  At some point, we all experience loss or disappointment—when our best efforts and carefully laid plans simply fall apart. As we struggle to put the pieces back together through sheer willpower, the intense loneliness can be crushing. Fortunately, there is another path—the healing and empowering force of the Franciscan Way of life.  Through the lens of her difficult journey through divorce and professional upheaval, Wendy Murray explores the surprising road to spiritual rehabilitation she discovered through Saint Francis of Assisi and his timeless principles of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These monastic virtues, often misunderstood in today's world, hold the power to refashion every aspect of our lives—physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual—under a new and holy re-ordering that brings us into health and wholeness. Blending memoir, theology, and practical wisdom, this book is a lifeline for anyone who feels they are sinking under the weight of hopelessness. Inner Healing the Franciscan Way is an invitation to discover that a shattered life isn't the end of your story, although it may feel that way. It is the beginning of a new story. This is a book for those who dare to believe there is hope, even and especially when life falls apart. 

Leseprobe

Praise for Inner Healing the Franciscan Way

With this volume, Wendy Murray expresses the heart and mind of the great saint to aid us in our Christian living today. I was led smoothly from life to vows but was grabbed by the insights of “simplicity” as a virtue to cultivate. This is going to be my new “special gift” to give to relatives and new friends.

—Scott W. Sunquist, President, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and author of several books, including The Shape of Christian History: Continuity and Diversity in the Global Church

In Inner Healing the Franciscan Way, Wendy Murray blends a lucid understanding of history, theology, and Scripture with threads of a compelling personal narrative to form a book that is as captivating as it is enriching. I’ve long been tutored by Murray’s journalistic work, but in the pages of this book I was challenged to walk in the way of St. Francis in our time.

—Jeff Crosby, author of The Language of the Soul and World of Wonders

Wendy Murray, in this insightful book, demonstrates how Inner Healing the Franciscan Way can infuse into our souls a clear and holy path during our own personal sorrows and victories of the spirit. This is a book that matches the wisdom of St. Francis with a contemporary writer’s personal revelations.

—Christopher de Vinck, author of Things That Matter Most: Essays on Home, Friendship, and Love

In Inner Healing the Franciscan Way, Wendy Murray insightfully notes the masculine (Francis) and feminine dimensions (Clare) of the Franciscan vision of life and how they found her after a painful period in her life. This wonderful book highlights the perennial practical wisdom of thirteenth-century Franciscan spirituality that helps re-order the soul in the twenty-first century.

—Albert Haase, OFM, author of The Persistent God: A Guide to Deepening Prayer

In Inner Healing the Franciscan Way, Wendy Murray shares a life-changing discovery: You don’t have to be a vowed religious—or even Catholic—to appreciate the sheltering constraints of poverty, chastity, and obedience, or to recognize the uplifting power of humility, charity, simplicity, and wisdom. Murray unpacks the thirteenth-century wisdom that met her in a place of despair and set her on a path of healing. Contemporary seekers bereft of consolation may draw hope and guidance from this inspiring witness to the transformative practice of Franciscan spirituality.

—Christine Marie Eberle, author of Finding God Along the Way: Wisdom from the Ignatian Camino for Life at Home

Accessibly written, this book connects ancient and modern thinkers, clarifying Franciscan theology and practice. I especially loved the way the author leads us through the Canticle of the Creatures in ways that help us understand how simplicity and profundity go hand in hand. This book will speak especially to the broken and the lost.

—Keren Dibbens-Wyatt, Christian contemplative and author of Recital of Love

That Wendy Murray wrote Inner Healing the Franciscan Way “as one whose life and belief system were shipwrecked and who found an improbable rescue through an endearing saint,” speaks to how the faith, the wisdom, and the practices of St. Francis and St. Clare have continued to shape and save pilgrims through the centuries.

—Caryn Rivadeneira, author of Saints of Feather and Fang

As I read Wendy Murray’s Inner Healing the Franciscan Way, I found myself longing to be free from the myriad distractions and ambitions that cloud my vision and keep me from being close to the God I profess to love. I found in this book practical and meaningful ways to apply Franciscan vows and virtues to my very modern life. I highly recommend Inner Healing the Franciscan Way.

—Fernando Ortega, acclaimed singer-songwriter of Christian music

With lyrical prose and deep transparency, Wendy Murray intertwines the lives of St. Francis and St. Clare with her own journey of recovery from searing heartbreak. The result is an engaging read, with much to ponder.

—Gwenfair Walters Adams, PhD, Professor of Church History and Spiritual Formation at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

2025 First Printing

Inner Healing the Franciscan Way: A Holy Re-Ordering of the Soul

ISBN 978-1-64060-974-7

Copyright © 2025 by Wendy Murray

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE. © Copyright 2011. COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE. All rights reserved. Used by permission. (www.CommonEnglishBible.com).

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.®

Scripture quotations marked NRSVue are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

The San Damiano Books name and logo are trademarks of Paraclete Press.

Library of Congress LCCN number 2025016762

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press

Brewster, Massachusetts

www.paracletepress.com

Printed in the United States of America

TO KATE

Where swaddled in strips

Of a torn shirt

Just as an angel told

He shines in the dark valley

—Anne Porter

ALSO BY WENDY MURRAY

Clare of Assisi, Gentle Warrior (2020)

A Mended and Broken Heart, The Life and Love of Francis of Assisi (2008)

On Broken Legs (2004)

Facing Forward (2002)

Sacred Journeys (2002)

Day of Reckoning (2001)

The Warrior King (2010)

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

——— Part One ———

FINDING FRANCIS

WHO WAS FRANCIS?

——— Part Two ———

VOWS

INTRODUCTION TO THE VOWS

CHAPTER ONE

POVERTY

CHAPTER TWO

CHASTITY

CHAPTER THREE

OBEDIENCE

——— Part Three ———

VIRTUES

INTRODUCTION TO THE VIRTUES

CHAPTER FOUR

HUMILITY

CHAPTER FIVE

CHARITY

CHAPTER SIX

SIMPLICITY

CHAPTER SEVEN

WISDOM

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

APPENDIX

WENDY’S RULE

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

Inner HealingtheFranciscan Way

We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.

—St. Francis

INTRODUCTION

I will make the blind walk a road they don’t know, and I will guide them in paths they don’t know. But I will make darkness before them into light and rough places into level ground. These things I will do; I won’t abandon them.

—Isaiah 42:16

It took the wreckage of my life to bring me to the place where I could see—if achingly—the healing and empowering force of Franciscan vows and virtues. It took losing all that had once defined my life—my role as a wife, my profession as a national journalist, my intimacies and my income, the power of my station, and the associated losses and humiliations. All of it. Mine was a ruined soul.

The following pages explore new themes about spiritual rehabilitation which came to me through such struggles. I write not to elevate my story (this is not about me) but to lay bare the level of human desolation I confronted in a way that might offer hope for others whose lives, for whatever reasons, have similarly collapsed. The point is, that collapse—any collapse—isn’t the end of your story, though it may feel that way. It is the beginning of a new story.

As I ponder the landscape of our times, I am seeing an ocean of seeking, damaged, and ruined souls who seem as lost as I once was, striving and asserting a form of human will in the effort to save themselves, even while nearly collapsing under the weight of so lonely an enterprise. Through it all, over time, I found the healing and empowering force of the Franciscan Way of life. I came to understand it through embodying Francis’s own vision for his movement as expressed in the vows and virtues. The model that St. Francis forged for his (then) new and innovative Order lends graces that remain operative for hungry and searching souls even today.