This Flowing Toward Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers [Paperback]

Marilyn Lacey (Author), Helen Prejean (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2009

What began in 1979 as a response to a random bulletin board posting would ultimately change Sister Marilyn Lacey's life--and the lives of countless refugees. In vivid prose, Sister Lacey narrates her twenty-five year spiritual journey of work with those displaced by conflict and disaster. In the spirit of Dead Man Walking, she invites us to solidarity with some of the world's most vulnerable. Timely and engaging, This Flowing Toward Me offers fresh, personal insights into the world of refugees and international immigrants. More importantly, it stirs our hearts to remember the gospel mandate to welcome the stranger.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"With a lively mix of humor, insight, and compassion, Sr. Lacey author invites those of us living behind locked doors in a world shuttered by homeland security to risk engaging unknown neighbors near and far, and there discover, perhaps to our unending surprise, that where we most felt threatened, a wealth of blessings instead awaits us." --Helen Prejean, C.S.J., Author of Dead Man Walking

"We're living at a moment of great anxiety in America, when families are legitimately worried about losing their homes, jobs and retirement funds. Yet the Bees, like other refugees, remind us that wealth truly is relative, but hope for a new life in America is priceless...Sister Marilyn tells us that in showing compassion to refugees, we learn how blessed we are and how little we need to get by. In America, with the occasional help of strangers, there is the chance to start over." --San Jose Mercury News

"This Flowing Toward Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers conveys with energetic wit and wisdom the surprising presence of God in the dailyness of life, with all its joys and sorrows, its fears and fancies, dreams and difficulties. The starting point is the author's unexpected insertion into the world of refugees. The endpoint is nothing less than graced union with the God for whom we all yearn. Treat yourself to this book: it will surely change the way you think about strangers and aliens --and quite possibly change your understanding of who God is and where God dwells and how you two could meet."

"This Flowing Toward Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers conveys with energetic wit and wisdom the surprising presence of God in the dailyness of life, with all its joys and sorrows, its fears and fancies, dreams and difficulties. The starting point is the author's unexpected insertion into the world of refugees. The endpoint is nothing less than graced union with the God for whom we all yearn. Treat yourself to this book: it will surely change the way you think about strangers and aliens --and quite possibly change your understanding of who God is and where God dwells and how you two could meet."

Review

"This Flowing Toward Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers conveys with energetic wit and wisdom the surprising presence of God in the dailyness of life, with all its joys and sorrows, its fears and fancies, dreams and difficulties. The starting point is the author's unexpected insertion into the world of refugees. The endpoint is nothing less than graced union with the God for whom we all yearn. Treat yourself to this book: it will surely change the way you think about strangers and aliens--and quite possibly change your understanding of who God is and where God dwells and how you two could meet."

"With a lively mix of humor, insight and compassion, Sr. Lacey invites those of us living behind locked doors in a world shuttered by homeland security to risk engaging unknown neighbors near and far, and there discover, perhaps to our unending surprise, that where we most felt threatened, a wealth of blessings instead awaits us."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Ave Maria Press (March 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594711976
• ISBN-13: 978-1594711978
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #421,085 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sister Marilyn Lacey calls us to respond to the stranger among us, January 3, 2009

By 

Elizabeth Dossa (Burlingame, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: This Flowing Toward Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers (Paperback)

In This Flowing Towards Me, Mercy Sister Marilyn Lacey, former director of refugee services at Catholic Charities in San Jose, CA, has both written her own spiritual journey and brought to vivid life the tortured paths of many of the world's refugees. In her graceful telling, we meet the "lost boys of the Sudan," a Laotian family living in an American convent and many others who are bruised and battered from living in camps all over the world. They become particular people who open our hearts. Marilyn is ablaze with purpose and passion as she works in refugee camps in Thailand and in Kenya, and she brings us with her in exacting detail. As she meets suffering and violence, she struggles to understand how a loving God can exist in the face of such deprivation. In the midst of revealing cruelty, she also manages humor. She has fun with her fear of spiders who share her room and the ease with which locals in Thailand eat locusts and spider eggs. Her spiritual journey is also a wonderful read. She brings us to understand how essential it is for us as individuals and as a culture to "welcome the stranger."

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Living Spirituality, February 3, 2009

By 

W. Easley "Opa" (Colorado Rocky Mountains) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: This Flowing Toward Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers (Paperback)

(What's this?)

This Flowing towards me by Marilyn Lacey, R.S.M.

In this text, Marilyn Lacey relates her experiences garnered from more than twenty five years of working with refugees and immigrants from Africa, Europe and the Middle East. The result is a wonderful work of spirituality. Anyone who has considered being a missionary, or been curious about life as a missionary, should read this book. Lacey, through stories of her experiences, makes missionary work come alive, real, vivid, exciting, and for some, the answer to a prayer.

This is no ordinary volume. This is a book about spirituality growing through living. Not living in the American sense of increasing status and collecting material objects, this speaks of living as God would teach us to live. We learn this way not through sermons or reading, but through abiding in an environment focused upon people and love. Her experiences with refugees and very poor people challenge our concepts of time, personal space, rank and seniority, and even our food.

I will relate just a few of the insights gained from pondering her stories.

Possibly the best way to help is not to rescue those I love from their personal difficulties, but to just be with them - walk with them in their journey.

The concept of "control" takes on new meaning. She quotes Richard Rohr as saying that the opposite of love is not hate, but control.

She suggests we are often impatient. We pray to God repeatedly and wonder why God is not removing the problems we complain to Him about. She counsels that we need to learn more about God and how He acts in creation. But eventually, in our impatience, we consider how we could take the problem and solve it ourselves.

I strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in developing their spirituality. This Flowing towards me inspires my spiritually and my concept of God.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable, and deeply moving. Not typical schmaltzy inspirational writing., April 19, 2009

By 

WichacpiHoskila (United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: This Flowing Toward Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers (Paperback)

(What's this?)

Do I review the book only, or do I find a way to express what the lives in it mean to the reader? This is the rare book that pulls the reader into connection with cultures, struggles, and emotions that are not within the confines of our typical modern experience. Marilyn Lacey, a Sister of Mercy, has written a powerful journal about her work with refugees throughout the world.

It would easy to dismiss the topic as too far removed from most modern readers to be of any interest, but that would be a huge mistake. Lacey's writing is full of wit and insight, and she is able to draw the reader into her story by opening with honest--and humorous--descriptions of her own headstrong tumble into Catholic relief work with refugees as they arrive in America. The obstacles they face upon arrival--not understanding a toilet, fearing the gunshots heard in TV soundtracks, widely divergent concepts of beauty--make for entertaining reading, but she never reduces her subjects down to mascots or buffoons. She treats them with complete respect, and the humor is drawn from her own process of coming to understand them, rather than turning them into a series of Borat-like anecdotes of foreign misadventure.

As the book unfolds, Lacey is careful to lead the reader slowly into a more difficult analysis of the lives of refugees. She lures us in with fascinating descriptions of foods, wildlife, and customs of other cultures, and as we read we also begin to understand the broader point she makes: that refugee status is a result of direct oppression and injustice, not of circumstance, misfortune, or some global "oops!" But Lacey doesn't treat refugees as anthropological study subjects; she loves them. She cherishes them, weeps with them, prays with them, and even angrily battles against God during her crisis of faith in their behalf. At no point does she indulge in sentimental, superficial "inspirational Christian writing"; this is not "A purpose-driven Refugee life." This is not "Chicken Soup for the Refugee soul." What she describes is fascinating, but painful. And maddening. One cannot read her clear-headed writings that directly link refugee poverty, torture, war, and famine with the deliberate actions of nations bent on access to oil, dominance, or just plain ethnic cleansing, and still cling to haphazard politics like we find in most churches.

Lacey ends the book with two chapters that explain her theology. And they don't come off preachy. She is refreshing in her understanding of religion as a tool of liberation and justice, rather than the half-hearted "God has a plan!" rhetoric that fails to take seriously the role of faith in social justice. She refuses the easy answer, and instead draws on diverse wellsprings of insight: the poetry of Rumi (and others), teachings of other faiths, and the social gospel.

As a book, this is a well-done project. I found only two editorial errors (scholar Andrew Harvey is mis-named "Haney", and a missing period on page 167). But the design is beautiful--a captivating cover photo--and the title, while not self-evident, is shown to fit the book's premise as Lacey explains "This flowing toward me" as a line from an ancient poem about the God of the Stranger and the Poor. Highlights of the book include a haunting and profound first-person journal by Gabriel, one of the Lost Boys of the Sudan, describing his trek across desert (his peoples' own Trail of Tears), and Lacey's own seething battle with a God she has accused of failing to love, or even notice, the suffering refugees all about her.