Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(21)
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3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
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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."

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.

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.

In America, I often forget how fortunate I am. This Flowing Toward Me, causes me to remember how spoiled I am.

Sister Marilyn Lacey, R.S.M., lives her faith and relates all her experiences with the poor and refugees of our world. She relates what tragic lives those who must live in the middle of wars, must live. How can those who have so much (Americans) not realize how little others on our planet have?

Lacey uses some humor - I think this is necessary to enable readers to turn the pages, and much truth in her writing. How those who have been mistreated most of their lives find the drive to continue on is a mystery to me. Reading this book has caused me to contemplate my life, and have a new respect for those who must live under the worst of conditions, and those, like Sister Marilyn Lacey, who have the strength and compassion to help lift the tragedies of our world to a better place. An amazing book.

The world is a very large place and we play a very small part in it. But sometimes it's the small parts that are of such value. This book certainly has value and the reward came in reading it.

There are people who never leave their backyard, who know nothing of what is happening on this home we call Planet Earth. There is suffering and misery and love all mixed up and needing an outlet for us to understand that....and this author has done so with great merit and soul.

I cherished the moments I spent with this dialogue, with the divine motif running through the story and the presence of something bigger than me. Sometimes the understanding that nothing can change overnight comes crashing down and needs to be released. Other times the spirit stops in to solve something we thought would never end.....There is love, hope and sadness in this book. But there is also Divine Truth. Having a look into her world, her humor and her depth, was refreshing and forever binding.

Written in a very simple, flowing manner, this book is an amazing story about a woman who opened her heart and gave her life to loving refugees from around the world. Her story is truly inspiring and spirit-stirring. Having been a missionary in Ecuador, I could relate to many of the experiences she faced in third-world countries. This book makes me want to pack my bags again! Oh, if we all listened to God's calling for our lives the way this woman did! What amazing things would happen around the world in the name of Christ!

This book provided me with an insider's view of the refugee crisis in our world today. Written with compassion, insight, and humor, I found myself immediately drawn into the life of those who have been forced to leave their homelands. Sister Lacey's account of the "true" conditions go beyond any political agendas and instead focuses on the actual conditions that refugees live in and with.

The chapter that contains the narrative of one of the "Lost Boys of the Sudan" is one I will never forget as it describes the life of one of these boys. I know this may all sound terribly depressing--but the book isn't. It is one of hope and courage. It is a book that shows what is possible if one person cares enough to help those in need.

P.S. The chapter on the different foods she has been served in foreign countries is so humurous I have been reading those portions to my 12-year-old son! I'll never look at an ant (or an ant egg) the same way again!

I picked this up, planning to read a chapter or two before bedtime, and discovered I couldn't put it down. It's one thing to know intellectually that I've been blessed with material abundance because of an accident of birth, and quite another to see what life is like in places where the things I always took for granted (food, clothing, shelter, education, the right to worship as I please, gainful employment, etc.) are either non-existent or can be taken away without warning or recourse. "There but for the grace of God go I." This book really makes me want to go out and do what I can to make the world a better place.

Sometimes I just want to read something that was born out of a true passion for the author. All books are not hot page turners, but still deserve to be read and passed on to others for that spiritual connection. I felt that this book was a labor of love for the author and I felt a tug on my heart as I read it. It was a slow read for me, but a worthy read. I think that this book makes a great read for high school students, social workers, and those that have a belief in a higher power. It is not a page turner, but worthy of being read...buy it.

Sister Marilyn Lacey's personal journey brings us into the world of refugees. With her the reader meets unique individuals who are among the millions on every continent who have been forced by violence to leave their homes and build a new life in distant and often unfriendly places. This is the story of a high school math teacher in a privileged community who was drawn to serving refugees, first resettling them in the United States and later building a network to aid the poorest among them--the women and children in the forgotten camps of Sudan. Written with an eye for detail, humor and humility, it is a saga of our time.