Kirjahaku

Georges and Pauline Vanier were the parents of Jean Vanier, the co-founder of the L'Arche communities. They lived an intensely spiritual life, influenced mainly by the Carmelite tradition. Mercy Within Mercy is the warmly-told story of their life together through World War Two and the second half of the 20th Century, drawing on many letters and journals by Georges and Pauline themselves and those closest to them. An incredible thirst for God can be seen in the lives of this couple, who were always striving in spite of (and through) human imperfection. The excerpts from letters and journals in this volume show a rare example of the contemplative life and struggles in prayer of an active and prominent married couple. The Vanier story is unique in that it forms a direct link back to the spiritual teaching that includes St. Therese and the Carmelite tradition in its emphasis on simplicity, trust in God's love, and self-abandonment to the mercy of God. After Pauline's death in 1991, an investigation began into the possible introduction of their cause for beatification as a married couple.

Georges and Pauline Vanier follows their lives and travels across the world - from Canadian military life to the League of Nations, from the inner circles of British government to their harrowing escape from Nazi-occupied France - detailing their disappointments and triumphs during social and political turbulence. With insight and sympathy, Mary Frances Coady tells their dramatic personal story. Revealing their remarkably vibrant personalities, she details the couple's support of the French resistance as well as Georges Vanier's pleas for the Canadian government to accept refugees fleeing Hitler's horrors and his effort to broaden immigration policy. She also recounts the importance of their religious convictions, their controversial standing among Quebecers, and their early advocacy of official bilingualism. An invigorating and well-told tale of their lasting legacies, Georges and Pauline Vanier is the definitive account of the enduring contributions the Vaniers made to the world and to their country.

It is 1942, and 12-year-old Laura Campbell arrives in Toronto, a city bustling with the war effort and news from abroad. While looking for something to do in the grandfather's quite neighbourhood, she meets the reclusive woman living across the street. Laura is stunned to realize she is in the presence of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the very same writer who penned her favourite novels.

This biography tells the life of the elusive 20th-century English writer, Caryll Houselander, who saved no personal letters (although, fortunately, others saved their letters from her) and left only her books, which included a short autobiography, a few classics of Catholic spirituality, and some unpublished personal scratchings. She never had robust health, and mentally she had the tendency to live in her own world. Her one aim in life, as she discovered from adolescence onward (although it would take many years for her to state it this way), was to see the suffering Christ in humanity. The opportunity for this discovery had already been given to her: a broken home, which she experienced at the age of 9, and thus she and her sister were subsequently brought up in convent boarding schools. Born in 1901, Caryll was of the generation that lived through two world wars, and by the time of the second she had already been marked by the first. In between the two were the days of wandering: art school, bohemianism (a tendency that would always remain with her), a love affair, self-torture as she desperately sought to find herself in her search for God. Living in London during the entire Second World War, she found herself at the heart of catastrophe in the form of nightly bombing, known as the Blitz. The suffering of human beings in war, which she equated with the suffering Body of Christ, led to her first book, This War is the Passion. Other books followed, all circling around the Christ-life. Her own life was cut short by cancer, about which she wrote, as if matter-of-factly making plans for the day ahead (she had long since found God--or, perhaps, in the way of the poet Francis Thompson, whom she admired, God had found her): "Well, if God wants me to die, it's all right."