Book Review :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Facing Death, Finding Love: The Healing Power of Grief and Loss in One Family’s Life was written by Dawson Church. 1994. 140p. Aslan Publishing. Dawson Church is a publisher, editor and author. Previous books he has authored or co-authored include The Heart of the Healer and Communing with the Spirit of Your Unborn Child. He works as CEO of Atrium Publishers Group – a book distributor- and lives with his wife and two children in Lake County, California.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Dawson Church starts out with his acknowledgments of appreciation to all the people that have supported him in the writing and publishing of this book. The introduction by Church’s editor, Hal Zina Bennett, Ph.D., reflects the truths revealed in the book’s contents as reminders that in opening our hearts and minds to the greatest mysteries of all – the vast mysteries of life and death – we discover a love that is as powerful in the receiving as in the giving, transcending all our deepest and most grievous emotions. Maybe the best way to describe and sum up the contents of Church’s book that readers are about to discover is as follow†¦   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã¢â‚¬Å"It is perhaps in grief that we discover the force that carried us once again into incarnation, the reason we incarnated in the first place. It is in the tearing open of heart that we discover how guarded our lives have become, how small a cage we have traded off for safe ground. We see how our work is to be more loving, to live more fully in an often confusing world.† Church uses nine chapters together with his afterword and appendix A: Grieving Rituals as well as appendix B: Connecting With the Soul to cover all the contents of this book.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Chapter one – The Death – starts out with the vision that death can come very unexpectedly to anyone at anytime or any place when one least prepares for it. Death to Church and his wife as well as to many people in the world are hard to recognize and deal with. He keeps come up with questions such as â€Å"We felt him kicking just last night. What could have happened between then and now? We didn’t feel any struggle. Surely he would have alerted us if something were wrong? He could have communicated his distress, and we could have known and perhaps done something.† Church couldn’t get over the unexpected death of Montague because he thought that no way it could possibly be happened when he and his wife did not neglect any aspect of caring for the infant in the womb.