Lost in the Land of Oz: Befriending Your Inner Orphan and Heading for Home - Softcover

Kolbenschlag, Madonna

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9780824514020: Lost in the Land of Oz: Befriending Your Inner Orphan and Heading for Home

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0824514025 ISBN 13: 9780824514020

Publisher: Crossroad Publishing Co ,U.S., 1994

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Each age finds saints suited to its needs. In our own time Aelred of Rievaulx has received a great deal of scholarly, if not quite popular, attention. He has been called the "patron saint of friendship" and the "gay abbot of Rievaulx, " though he was never canonized a saint of the universal church and his sexual identity will always remain a matter of controversy. Aelred lived, as the Chinese proverb holds, in interesting times. Born into an Anglo-Saxon family just forty-four years after the Norman Conquest, he was the son and grandson of priests at a time when it was becoming difficult to combine priesthood and marriage. The events of his life and the circumstances of his times make colorful reading, almost as colorful as Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe or Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose. Yet without ever passing up the chance to tell a good story, Brother and Lover devotes most of its attention to Aelred's personal impact and message, especially through his remarkable work, Spiritual Friendship. Aelred's belief in the power and possibilities of human love distinguish him from almost all his medieval predecessors. His emphasis on the importance of friendship in monastic life places him outside the mainstream of that tradition. In a period of anarchy, not too unlike our own, Aelred believed in love and lived out his love. As a brother and lover, he reaches out to us. Across the centuries he is not very far away.

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From the Author:

The second in a trilogy on women as catalysts of the future.
In this book Kolbenschlag continues to explore the promise as well as the ravages of the cultural mythology of the West and the heritage of the Judaeo-Christian spirit as well as the New World. In 1988 she published LOST IN THE LAND OF OZ, another book that uses myth and tales as prisms, mirrors of deeper realities. In KISS SLEEPING BEAUTY GOOD-BYE the author focused on the personal developmental aspects of women's experience. In this, the second book of the trilogy, she expands her vision to the public and transpersonal dimension. LOST IN THE LAND OF OZ ventures into the uncharted territory between the individual and the "system" where myth--the collective archetype--functions as an inexorable force and energy. She is one of the few modern writers who can skillfully and artistically interpret the coherence between psyche and polity. As with the earlier book's use of fairy tales as frame, each chapter begins with a myth or tale. But this time it is an unfamiliar or "undervalued" tale from a variety of eras and cultures, each one revealing a unique aspect or significance of the feminine. Her critique and perspective ranges from the analysis of gender relations, to the American character; from the illumination of how systems and institutions work, to a description of the evolution of Western notions of God. In exposing the deep structure of our social arrangements she provides a guide for the modern "spiritual orphan," who has witnessed the loss of safety and trust, the disintegration of value and the threat of spiritual catastrophe. Once again, reviewers were enthusiastic: "This is the elegantly written sequel to Kolbenschlag's first major foray into feminist theory, Kiss Sleeping Beauty GoodBye. She now has her full voice and thematic dialectic...Her essay is poetic and profound." "Kolbenschlag has asked these [challenging] questions in her tenderly compelling, bluntly confrontational, hauntng story of survival as a ‘spiritual orphan.' This is a book inspired by feminist theory and fueled by female experience. It is a book both sophisticated and simple: simultaneously essay, story, confession,theory, theology and mystery." "Answering the questions posed in her earlier book, Kolbenschlag has succeeded in recovering women's cultural and spiritual power in Lost in the Land of Oz. Through ‘commitment,' ‘openness to the stranger,' ‘relinquishment,' and ‘obedience to the Earth,' she believes that women and men can find an imaginative way beyond simple autonomy to genuine community." .

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