Make Your Home in My Love
Live in My Joy
Foreword by Tilden Edwards
Imprint: Resource Publications
Are you living as God's burning bush, without being consumed? Or might you be headed toward burnout?
We will rediscover the blessing of this mutual love relationship with God, overflowing to others, as God's sheer gift. Could it be that the first and greatest commandment is for our greatest joy, and not some mysterious burden to fulfill?
One metaphor is the vine and the branches from John 15:1-11. Jesus is the vine and we are the branches; apart from the vine the branch can do nothing. God wants to be our supply, our source, in an intimate encounter of the finite with the infinite.
God was the source for these heroes of faith: Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Clairvaux, Catherine of Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, John Calvin, and Teresa of Avila. Using a descriptive process called the Classic Three Ways, including the purgative (letting go), illuminative (seeing with the heart), and unitive (intimacy), dating back to around 500 CE, we now add a fourth way, the unitive/active (the dance). From that dance of mutual love, ministry overflows. We do it together; it is participatory, humankind following God's lead.
It's not a formula. It's our living God!
Catherine Skinner Powell, raised in Clearwater, Florida, discovered that God is love, and knew she was to encourage others to encounter God. After thirty years of computer programming, she founded The Anchorage: A Contemplative Community. The Shalem Spiritual Guidance Program, the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, and training to lead eight-day retreats provided her formation. Her DMin at LTSP was in spirituality. Catherine lives in Greenville, South Carolina with her husband, Skeeter, and their pets.
“Catherine Powell is clearly a seasoned spiritual guide. Adding a distinctive emphasis on the active engagement issuing naturally from contemplative practice, she expands the classic threefold path of purgation, illumination, and union to its graced fruit of love expressed in the world. . . . May this book further God’s dream for open-hearted human participation in the divine life permeating this world.”
—Marjorie J. Thompson, teacher, retreat leader, and author of Soul Feast
“Catherine Powell’s deep and joyful love of God shines through every page of Make Your Home in My Love. Gleaned from her years as a trustworthy spiritual guide and retreat leader, Catherine has generously shared with us the fruits of her love affair with the Holy One. She makes explicit what is implied in the classic ‘three ways’ of the spiritual path: that ultimately the journey must, to paraphrase Catherine of Siena, ‘face us with Christ Jesus towards our suffering world in loving service and just action.’ Her book will be an inspiration for anyone seeking a deeper spiritual life, but especially for ministers who are yearning to ground their life and ministry more deeply in God’s abiding love.”
—William C. Dietrich, Hospice Chaplain; Retired Executive Director, Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation
“A wise spiritual guide, Catherine Powell has brought home, love, and joy together—those things that allow life to flourish in luminous ways. Her understanding of the mutuality of participation with Christ, a full sharing of life, offers a pathway to mature spirituality. Richly textured with insights from the great teachers of Christian spirituality, her writing issues a warm invitation to grow in love of God and neighbor.”
—Molly T. Marshall, President and Professor of Theology and Spiritual Formation, Central Seminary
“Experience is a key word for the saints treated in this book and the same can be said of its author, Catherine Powell. She has spent the major part of her life living the reality described in these pages. What we have here is the result not so much of an academic pursuit as it is of a continuing lived experience. This book will produce fruit when we approach it in the same way.”
—Stanislaus Gumula, OCSO, Chaplain for the Trappistine Nuns of Esmeraldas, Ecuador
“The great medieval abbot and reformer, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), taught us that love is the only virtue that we share mutually with God. God loves us first and we love back. As Catherine Powell concludes in this wonderful volume, ‘From that holy place of mutual love, action springs forth.’ Being opened by the Spirit to the love of God in prayer, meditation, and contemplation leads to loving action towards the neighbor.”
—Philip D. Krey, Ministerium of New York Professor of Church History Emeritus,
United Lutheran Seminary; Pastor, St Andrew's Lutheran Church, Perkasie, PA
“Union with God, the focus of Make Your Home in My Love, belongs in the mix of a Christianity searching for bedrock today. Grounded in Scripture, the author, Catherine Powell, walks through Christian history with some great mystical-and-monastic figures. Union with God (in Christ), says Powell, is primarily about God in whose love we make our home and joyfully participate in God’s own active life. This book will make you want to walk along.”
—Merwyn S. Johnson, Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology Emeritus, Erskine Theological Seminary
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