Mutual Accompaniment in the Divine Ruah: On Discernment and Spirituality at Uncertain Times

"This book promises to inspire a new generation of spirituality practitioners, invited to take long journeys to the many matrias of humanity to learn anew to make friends with the earth and its creatures.” –Susan Abraham, President, Concilium: International Journal of Theology

“Wonderful glimpses of a new pneumatology: we catch a glimpse of how the Spirit produces rebirth, possessing us from the interstices and leading us to modes of presence and possibilities of donation not yet glimpsed. Rich nourishment for a holy and ‘embodied’ imagination.” –James Alison, Chair of the Education Committee, Imitatio.

In times marked by uncertainty, horror, and global violence, this dialogue invites us to let ourselves move (discernment) and be moved (spirituality) by the divine Ruah “in friendship, in mutuality, receiving in our own wounds, often hidden, the wounded stories of those who courageously confess their deepest rebellions and aspirations from the invisible margins and discarded by power.”

In this four-handed book –which collects the epistolary dialogue between Juan Carlos La Puente-Tapia and Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez in conversation with the illustrations of Paulo Medina and prefaced by Carmenmargarita Sánchez de León– the authors invite us to embody each other through “mutual accompaniment because our bodies, as if they were ancestral sounding boards, harbor an infinite number of wise transgressions that resist and creatively re-exist with Mother Earth in the face of the violation of our deepest aspirations and rebellions by the hegemonic powers.”

The dialogue collected in these pages explores paths of communion that emerge from becoming together in liberating spiritual friendship, “where the diversity of our spiritualities embraces our vulnerabilities and enlivens the courageous steps that global challenges demand of us” to untie the knots of rivalries that lead to violence. Spirituality and discernment lead us into the friendship offered from the ignored margins to re-imagine a world in which many worlds can fit: a new birth together in a new time and a new land.”