Astonishingly relevant portraits of the lives of seven women mystics

Known to more than a million readers as the coauthor of the classic vegetarian cookbook Laurel's Kitchen, Carol Lee Flinders looks to the hunger of the spirit in Enduring Grace. In these striking and sustaining depictions of seven remarkable women, Flinders brings to life a chorus of wisdom from the past that speaks with remarkable relevance to our contemporary spiritual quests.

From Clare of Assisi in the Middle East to Thérèse of Lisieux in the late nineteenth century, Flinders's compelling and refreshingly informal portraits reveal a common foundation of conviction, courage, and serenity in the lives of these great European Catholic mystics. Their distinctly female voices enrich their writings on the experience of the inner world, the nourishing role of friendship and community in our lives, and on finding our true work.

At its heart, Enduring Grace is a living testament to how we can make peace with sorrow and disappointment and bring joy and transcendence into our lives.

In At the Root of This Longing, Flinders identifies the four key points at which the paths of spirituality and feminism seem to collide – vowing silence vs. finding voice, relinquishing ego vs. establishing ‘self’, resisting desire vs. reclaiming the body, and enclosure vs. freedom – and sets out to discover not only the sources of these conflicts, but how they can be reconciled.With a sense of urgency brought on by events in her own life, Flinders deals with the alienation that women have experienced not only from themselves and each other, but from the sacred. She finds inspiration in the story of fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich and her direct experience of God, in India’s legendary Draupadi, who would not allow a brutal physical assault to damage her sense of personal power, as well as in Flinders’s own experiences as a meditation teacher and practitioner. Flinders reveals that spirituality and feminism are not mutually exclusive at all but very much require one another.

For all of our progress,the world stubbornly retains a male-dominated, competitive streak. Certainly the emphasis our culture places on enterprise has given us much, but what have we sacrificed along the way? Carol Lee Flinders argues that the more ancient values of Belonging (mutuality, cooperation, and generosity), traditionally associated with women, have been subsumed by those of Enterprise (individualism, competitiveness, and materialism), associated with men. In the lives of visionaries, artists, and mystics such as the Buddha, Baal Shem Tov, Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Muir, and Martin Luther King Jr., Flinders offers models for a new kind of balance. Rebalancing the World urges us to incorporate the values we are missing in our lives for the sense of wholeness we all seek.