Elizabeth Cunningham

"One of the most engaging memoirs I've read in ages. The wise and feisty voice I've come to know and love in Elizabeth Cunningham's Maeve Chronicles fills these pages and carried me away. Anyone who has forged an independent path through the luminous moments and deepest shadows of a soul-filled life will recognize their own spiritual adventures reflected here."--Mirabai Starr, God of LoveIn this intriguing spiritual memoir, The Maeve Chronicles author Elizabeth Cunningham traces her dynamic faith journey and its relationship to her writing.As the daughter of an Episcopal priest, author Elizabeth Cunningham was born into community, sacred story, and the mysteries of prayer. For her, "If a writer is one who writes, then a 'prayer' is one who prays." As such, her praying is dynamic, a dance between many opposites--active vs. contemplative, community vs. individual, human vs. wild--and Cunningham sees the divine as both incarnate and transcendent, an intimate beloved and a vast mystery. When she prays, Cunningham is both audacious and reverent, asking tough questions of God--raging, listening intently, and dancing and singing ecstatically. Her storyteller's imagination opens a path from the known to the unknowable, from despair to wonder. In this nonfiction debut, Cunningham recounts both her lifelong spiritual quest and her ongoing spiritual questions. Her journey takes her from her childhood church, with its ornate liturgy, to the silence of Quaker meeting; from her ordination as an interfaith minister to an eclectic, earth-centered community where she served as priestess before becoming a hermit, of sorts, making a church of her own backyard.Candid and passionate, Cunningham's memoir invites readers of all faiths--and doubts --to explore what it means to live life as a prayer in the beautiful, imperiled world we share.

The Goddess is returning She takes shape in the hands of an Episcopal priest's shy, retiring wife. She invades the dreams of a grande dame who thinks women priests are a scandal. She lures a poker-playing ex-convict onto unfamiliar terrain, literally. Then there is the mysterious old man in the wood, who's been watching, waiting for a sign of her return. Who is the Goddess? Where has she been for so long? What does she want from the four human beings whose lives she is turning upside down and inside out?As they confront these questions, Esther, Spencer, Marvin and Fergus find themselves drawn together, forging friendships across boundaries of age, class and race, discovering--and recovering--powerful, erotic passions. All their encounters, with themselves and each other, lead them deeper into Blackwood, an old estate that shelters an imperiled grove of trees sacred to the Goddess, a grove it becomes their mission to save. The Return of the Goddess, A Divine Comedy marks Cunningham's first explicit exploration of Christianity and the power of a divine feminine, long forgotten, obscured, and suppressed by the Church. She went on to write The Maeve Chronicles, featuring her iconic, outspoken Celtic Magdalen. The Return of the Goddess takes the reader inside the world of Cunningham's origins where a gap in a wall leads from the church to the sacred grove. Twenty-six years after its first publication The Return of the Goddess, A Divine Comedy remains a classic in what has become a movement, both within established religions and beyond, to reclaim the goddess and to embody her return.

When young Katherine vanishes without a trace while visiting relatives in London, her godmother's strange, often terrifying dreams may be the only clues that can save her. Katherine has been abducted and forced into sexual slavery in a highly exclusive gentleman's club whose powerful members will stop at nothing to protect their sometimes lethal secrets. In their increasingly perilous quest to find her, all the adults in Katherine's life must confront the secrets they keep, even-or especially-from themselves. Keeper of the most terrible of all, Katherine finds a lifeline in her voice, singing psalms and Lady Soul with equal virtuosity and passion. From the racial tensions of 1960s America to the seamy underbelly of London, All the Perils of This Night offers a vivid flashback of a tumultuous era and a window into a surprising and magical reality. With a Dickensian mastery of character and plot, Cunningham sounds timeless and timely themes-innocence and loss, guilt and redemption, slavery and liberation, and love across racial and gender boundaries. Best known for her award-winning series The Maeve Chronicles, Cunningham outdoes herself with All the Perils of this Night, deftly combining psychological complexity, humor, mysticism, and social realism in this riveting thriller.

When young Katherine vanishes without a trace while visiting relatives in London, her godmother's strange, often terrifying dreams may be the only clues that can save her. Katherine has been abducted and forced into sexual slavery in a highly exclusive gentleman's club whose powerful members will stop at nothing to protect their sometimes lethal secrets. In their increasingly perilous quest to find her, all the adults in Katherine's life must confront the secrets they keep, even-or especially-from themselves. Keeper of the most terrible of all, Katherine finds a lifeline in her voice, singing psalms and Lady Soul with equal virtuosity and passion. From the racial tensions of 1960s America to the seamy underbelly of London, All the Perils of This Night offers a vivid flashback of a tumultuous era and a window into a surprising and magical reality. With a Dickensian mastery of character and plot, Cunningham sounds timeless and timely themes-innocence and loss, guilt and redemption, slavery and liberation, and love across racial and gender boundaries. Best known for her award-winning series The Maeve Chronicles, Cunningham outdoes herself with All the Perils of this Night, deftly combining psychological complexity, humor, mysticism, and social realism in this riveting thriller.

In her latest collection of poems, Elizabeth Cunningham takes an imaginative leap into a magical world that is also palpably real, a once-upon-a-time place that could exist just after our own time or long ago. Here we meet a motley assortment of people, a temple sweeper, a sword woman, a morose fool, a merry drunk, an enigmatic ancient dreamer, among a host of others. Human voices mingle with those of animals--the mouse who thinks it's an elephant, a flying pig--and also the voices of river, rain, tree, and stone. Through songs, dreams, and conversations, a story emerges, or many stories woven into one. Cunningham's hypnotically beautiful language draws us into this story, one we may dimly remember and long to hear again.

Angelus grew up sequestered in an abandoned mansion in the suburbs of London with her cruel father. After she ran away, a robotics genius took her in. He taught her everything he knew about technology. With this knowledge, she secretly built an advanced AI robot that would change the fate of the Earth. But her father, Chance, didn't want to let go of his only daughter. At the peak of her success, she fell victim to his century-long curse. Angelus must travel across space and time to stop Chance from taking over the universe.

In 1990, novelist Elizabeth Cunningham found herself engaged with an outspoken, irreverent, hand-drawn character who called herself Madge and demanded her own book of cartoons. Together, Madge and Elizabeth graphically (in every sense ) protested the first Gulf War, and The Book of Madge took form. This collaboration led them to write The Maeve Chronicles, a series of award-winning novels featuring a feisty Celtic Magdalen.In November 2016 Madge Returns, taking a flying leap into the 21st century, landing more or less on her feet, or at any rate collapsing on the bed in the blue-striped bathrobe that has traversed the centuries....Now, for the first time, Maeve fans can meet her as Madge in her contemporary, pictorial form. Madge, Magdalen, Maeve, she is the same, outrageous, Madgical being. And if you have never met her before, here she is in all her (naked) glory

"Juicy controversy . . . in crisply drawn biblical settings."--"Booklist"Pregnant with Jesus's child, Maeve becomes a mother on the lam (with the Virgin Mary in tow) when the early church fathers decide she is not fit to raise the savior's scion. The pair goes on to create their enduring legends in southern France.

After a life of passion and adventure that has brought her through slavery to the Resurrection garden, through the controversies of the Early Church to a hermit cave in southern gaul, Maeve, the Celtic Mary Magdalen, returns to the Holy Isles accompanied by Sarah, her daughter with Jesus. Their mission: to find Maeve's first-born child, stolen from her by the druids more than forty years ago. Since then, Maeve's homeland has suffered it's own trials--Roman invasion and occupation. The Celtic tribes to the east and south are under direct rule, and the Romans are determined to rout the resistance of the western tribes, resistance fueled by the druids of Mona. Just before she crosses the channel from Gaul to Britain, Maeve encounters a man she mistakes for Jesus's ghost. This familiar stranger is equally haunted, and the two are drawn into a moonstruck liason that will entwine their lives in "an impossible Celtic knot." For unbeknownst to Maeve at the time, he is none other than General Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, the newly-appointed Roman Governor of Britain. Maeve keeps this troubling tryst a secret even after she finds her long-lost daughter Boudica, the fierce and charismatic queen of the Iceni tribe. Druid-trained in her youth, Boudica married the Iceni king, hoping to rally him to a rebellion for which he has no stomach. Now estranged from her husband, Boudica keeps the old ways, sustained by her pride in her descent form her father (and Maeve's!) the late great druid Lovernios. Seeking to circumvent disaster, Maeve travels back and forth from Iceni country to Mona, from the heart of native resistance to a Roman fort on the Western front, steadfast in her conviction: "Love is as strong as death."

"Smart and earthy . . . richly imaginative . . . the epitome of the storyteller's art."--St. Louis Post-Dispatch, named one of "The Year's Best Books""This amazing book could well become a classic of women's literature."--Booklist, named one of the "Year's Ten Best Fantasy Books"Young Magdalen and Jesus, brimming with youthful charm and arrogance, find each other and fall in love, forging a bond that is stronger than death. Their pleasure is overshadowed by a brilliant but unbalanced druid who knows a perilous secret about Maeve's past. The prequel to The Passion of Mary Magdalen. Now in paperback

The sequel to the best-selling novel The Passion of Mary Magdalen.