Light Years: A Spiritual Memoir

Be the first to ask a question about Protected by the Light. Lists with This Book. Jul 17, Robin Chambers rated it it was amazing. The author was horrifically abused by her psychotic, violent, drug-dealing parents and other members of her totally dysfunctional family — literally tortured into unconsciousness time and time again for their own hideous amusement. While most readers will not have suffered anything like the depths of depravity to which Debra was subjected, her personal strength, intelligence, essential goodness and enormous courage and fortitude in dealing with it are an inspiration to us all.

The lessons Debra has learned and now shares with us are lessons from which we can all profit, even though most of us have not been tested to the same degree. I recommend this short, well-written, tragic, powerful, real and uplifting book without reservation. Whether or not you have yourself been a victim of any kind of abuse in childhood, read this book and profit from it.

Nov 19, Wanda C rated it it was amazing. The author's childhood is very upsetting, but the book is brilliant as is Debra Roinestad. She writes of life lessons and Esther; I really like Esther. The author, after a near-death experience, is diagnosed with conversion disorder. Soon after the health scare, she is revisited by her horrible and scary childhood memories. H The author's childhood is very upsetting, but the book is brilliant as is Debra Roinestad. However, she and Esther are a formidable foe for these terrible memories. Based on a five-star rating, I give it five stars!

Yes 2 Did it keep me intrigued? Yes 3 Story line adventurous, mysterious, and believable? Yes 5 Did my idea of the book based on the cover remain the same after I read the book? Feb 09, Maureen rated it really liked it. Full disclosure - I was given this book as part of a Goodreads giveaway. This is a truly uplifting book about triumph over a horrifyingly abusive childhood. The abuse was so severe I thought at first it couldn't be real, but the descriptions were so vividly written I reconciled myself to the sad fact it is non-fiction. In each chapter Debra Roinestadt writes of her past and ends the chapter with a positive lesson she learned with the help of her spirit guide, Esther.

It's a sh Full disclosure - I was given this book as part of a Goodreads giveaway. It's a short book but leaves a powerful impression. Apr 13, Grace rated it it was amazing. I received this book as a Goodreads Giveaway prize last month.

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I read it very quickly. It's lovely and thought inspiring.

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It's Olga Trujillo meets Louise Hay in this short, succinct description of what healing can look like in the face of abuse. It aligns with my own spiritual beliefs about energy channeling and positive intentions. Will pass to friends of mine. Jan 09, Cheryl rated it liked it Shelves: I won this book as part of a Goodreads giveaway. The author's descriptions of her abusive childhood were awful. I'm glad she eventually found healing.

Although she describes some very wise statements given by her spirit guide and others, I found her spirit guide a little too much for me.

I'm not convinced they exist. Em rated it it was amazing Nov 14, Luisuar rated it liked it Jun 21, Cecilia Dunbar Hernandez rated it it was amazing Feb 09, Jed Solomon rated it it was amazing Jun 23, Laurie Strawbridge rated it it was amazing Feb 09, Joana rated it it was amazing Mar 10, Frederick Rotzien marked it as to-read Jan 09, Nicola Fantom marked it as to-read Jan 09, Reader marked it as to-read Jan 09, Haven marked it as to-read Jan 09, Betty marked it as to-read Jan 09, Stella Clarkson marked it as to-read Jan 09, Ted marked it as to-read Jan 09, Joanne marked it as to-read Jan 09, Some spiritual memoirs follow this track, the modern psychologized view, which celebrates the move away from the repressiveness of the group toward the realization of individual consciousness.

But this is to marginalize cultures in which the self exists as part of the whole. It devalues those whose understanding of the Christian life is relational and collective, whose identity is established not by means of difference but by participation in the group. There is another way. It leads away from the celebration of the self toward an ecclesial understanding of human beings in community. What made The Cloister Walk , by Kathleen Norris, such a groundbreaking work was precisely this counterthesis: She moves to South Dakota, joins a Presbyterian church, sings in the choir, and becomes a Benedictine oblate.

This is a hard sell these days. There are no rules for writing a life, but there are coordinates for locating God in the story. In books 10—12 of the Confessions , Augustine mentions several: When it comes to time, Augustine is of two competing minds. The past and the future do not exist. Even the present now is known only in retrospect as it departs for then. Augustine comes near to admitting that time does not exist, which is a titillating enough notion, except that its byproduct is the minimizing of suffering and sin. Fortunately, God is eternal and is equally present to today, yesterday, and tomorrow, thereby guaranteeing the significance of every life and every death.

In Christ, this temporal life assumes the forward-leaning plot with which Christians are familiar: Each Christian narrative discerns something of the divine movement in human life. First, the Word becomes flesh. Then, through the miracle of memoir, flesh becomes word.

Among modern and postmodern memoirists the redemptive arrow has faded, but the importance of time has not. The narrator is, in effect, writing herself into existence. For Augustine, memory is the gift that keeps on giving, the companion whose reliability is never tainted by falsity and self-deception. Since God dwells in memory, Augustine is able to trace the continuity that we all feel in our bones between the youngster we once were and the senior citizen we have become, between the callow Augustine who once made a joke of baptism and the chastened Augustine who is saved by it.

Writing the Christian life: The essence of spiritual memoir

Memoir is perspectival—and here is a difference between it and autobiography. The memoirist does not examine the past but his or her memory of the past. This leads to the now fashionable blur between fiction and nonfiction.

Even public occurrences, like the shooting of a president or the killing of a black teenager, are reconstructed in a fog of conflicting motives, perceptions, and memories. And personal experiences, like falling in love, getting saved, or facing death, are even more elusive; they age like good wine and become more dramatically satisfying with each retelling. Emotion that is recollected in tranquillity, which is how Wordsworth defined poetry, never quite captures the chaos of emotion in its raw state. I have engraved your name in the palm of my hand. Truthfulness is crucial not only for the sake of honesty, but because there is a connection between the truth of God and the truth of a life in which the grace of God is disclosed.

In order to tell the truth about God, the writer employs tools usually associated with fiction, such as physical description, poetic language, or extensive dialogue. For example, in The Seven Storey Mountain , Thomas Merton will make an artistic investment in order to put the reader on the streets of upper Manhattan on the morning of his baptism at Corpus Christi Church because he wants to reveal something of the character of baptism itself.

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The river glittered like steel. There was a clean wind in the street.

It was one of those fall days full of life and triumph, made for great beginnings. In spiritual memoir, the more skillfully the writer crystallizes the long process of conversion into a single dramatic moment, the greater the role of art. This garden, too, is crowded with actors. Then the figure of Lady Constance shows up to strengthen his resolve. His mother, Monica, is in the next room, no doubt with her ear to the door, monitoring events. Truth is the stuff of autobiography. Memory is its tool.

Protected by the Light: A Spiritual Memoir by Debra Roinestad

Time is its shape. Death is its precondition. One cannot help noticing how many of them are organized around the possibility of death. This is how we read Romeo and Juliet as well as Tuesdays with Morrie and everything in between. I am convinced there is no telling a life without a death. Someone has to pay. That need is met in the story of the death of Jesus, which cuts a gash in the symmetry of an inspiring story.

Every smaller story about Jesus gains its significance from his end. Every Christian autobiographer draws from the necessity of that event. The first death provides a clue to his own shallow understanding of the Catholic faith; the second provides the coda to his conversion. Now that Monica is dead, Augustine is free to write about the journey of life in its entirety. Years later, the death of his father is the last remaining hurdle before he is freed to search for the meaning of his own life.

Death is the unseen guest in every autobiography, secular or sacred.