A Healing Heart focuses on the precious relationship of a father and daughter, told with compassion and love with rigorous honesty and nothing held back. The father-daughter relationship has been a primary one for centuries, with the daughter learning early that her father is her guardian and her provider. This book; this life's journal, is a book of lessons for all of us who have loved anyone and who are reticent about admitting we all have to face one last stage of living: dying.
No one gets out of life alive, is an old, cynical saying, but true. Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross has written several books on the clinical aspects of the dying and about those that have appeared to her from the other side but this book, by Alberta Sequeira, is written for the layman to read and read again because its lessons are deep and meaningful, written from a point of view all of us can relate to. We humans, caught up in modern society and materialism, have forgotten to remember God in our lives, the brevity of our lives and the honorable memories of loved ones who have gone on. We need to keep their spirits alive in our minds, along with the lessons their lives have taught us. A Healing Heart helps us grasp this concept in a way no other book has ever done.
We follow the author's thoughts and emotions as she fights the prognosis of her father's cancer and its inevitable conclusion. We understand and empathize with her feelings about her mother's denial and fear at being deserted after fifty years of marriage; we follow her as she copes with her father?s pain and with the hard truth revealed to her by the Hospice attendants; and we grieve with her when her beloved father dies. We cheer the courage of our author when she discovers her own strength and begins to cope with this severe loss.
Without a lot of worldly experience, such as traveling to far away places, her compulsion to leave her workplace and visit Medjugorje in Bosnia is not a usual event and we sense bigger changes taking place.
She manages to muster the courage, even with atrial fibrillation, to fly to Bosnia and share the experiences of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary herself, as encountered by several visionaries. Her trip to Bosnia and her impressions of another world there and her easy adaptation to the living arrangements and foreign customs are admirable and worth a second study. We all can learn the importance of being resilient and able to blend with whatever is dealt us. After all, what is actually of prime importance anyway; having things occur as they always have or being open to change and therefore learning important lessons about ourselves and the world around us? She finds beauty in the exceptional, strong, scent of roses, a phenomenon which always accompanied the spiritual apparition of the Holy Mother.
Before her trip to Europe, she had grown away from the Catholic Church and her husband had shown very little interest in his religion. Their daily lives were in a deadly humdrum pattern of work, meals, television and fitful sleep. The same routine was repeated over and over, but now, after being in the proximity of the spirit of the Holy Mother and sensing her actual presence, Alberta's life changes forever. She develops an entirely different perception of her own life, receives an intuitive message to help her father out of Purgatory to go on, released into Heaven, by praying for him to know he's been let go. She finds peace and a more meaningful life, willingly seeks out church work and her husband quietly changes his lifestyle as well, cheerfully and willingly attending a church they both find comfortable.
There is so much to this book people of all faiths can identify with and find important to their own lives and deaths of loved ones. After this book is read, the reader will realize changes in his awareness of his own life. Each chapter is a separate gem to be handled with frequency, confident each resulting change will be even better than the last. |