Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach
Surviving Depression shows you how to take the first steps to healing and how to build into your life practices that will help you embark on a spiritual journey through the darkness. You will learn how to reconnect with your heart, build connections with others, grow in self-esteem, stop spiraling negative thoughts, and live with more inner peace and gratitude. This edition incorporates additional material that reflects new developments in wellness with regard to depression and is more grounded in the interlinking of God’s life within us and our concrete psychological makeup.
Sr Kathryn Hermes knows the dull ache of depression firsthand and in Surviving Depression offers a practical method to progressively greater health and wholeness.
Suffering with depression is always difficult. But when emotional vulnerability is mixed with uncertainty, anxiety, unexpected hardships and crisis, it can all be overwhelming. When we consider the feeling of utter emptiness, the collapse of the will to live, the devastating loss of self-worth that fills the heart of the person who lives with the heavy burden of depression or mental illness, Sr Kathryn Hermes understands and wants us to know that Jesus holds our tears as sacred, because Jesus also cried.
Practical tips for friends and family members of someone suffering with depression appear at the end of each chapter, as well as an entire chapter devoted to companioning a depressed friend.
Things can be different. Surviving Depression will guide you from the winter of first diagnosis to the spring of new life.
Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life’s Disappointments
The meaning of suffering, personal development and holiness, self-image and inner peace, the path of prayer, making peace with your life and yourself, are just some of the themes that are threaded throughout my books. Each is characterized by a spiritual, sacramental and scriptural approach to experiencing the way the holy develops through the years of our life, in the twists and turns, in the lights and shadows, creating a masterpiece that only the Master Artist could have designed.
I’ve always looked at the real stuff of life, what we encounter daily or at certain times of our lives, as the darkness that just precedes the sunrise. In this life and death struggle—to put it dramatically—to find meaning in the numberless random unchosen sufferings that come our way we mature and the Son rises in our heart, the Dawn from on High who guides our feet in the way of peace.
If you are burdened with regret and feel that you must live with the pain, this is the book for you. Sr. Kathryn will show you a path toward healing.
—Timothy M. Gallagher, OMV, author of The Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide to Everyday Living
Some books are to be read, others savored. This book offers us a banquet table of scriptural truths and transformative experiences leading readers to taste and see the goodness of the Lord. It illuminates in personal and practical ways the paradoxical reality that in every limit there is a blessing in disguise, that in every regret there is a reason for hope.
—Susan Muto, PhD, Dean of Epiphany Academy of Formative Spirituality
This practical, hope-filled book, is beautifully written and full of wisdom gleaned from years of personal experience and ministry. In Reclaim Regret Sr. Kathryn serves as a trustworthy guide, leading you first into the heart of God and then into your own heart. I encourage you to read this book with an open heart and then enter into the healing meditations that make up the second part of the book. As you do, you will engage in a process of deep soul healing, releasing the regrets and disappointments that have prevented you from living the fullness of joy that Jesus promises.
—Bob Schuchts, founder of John Paul II Healing Center, Tallahassee, Florida, and author of Be Healed: A Guide to Encountering the Powerful Love of Jesus in Your Life
The best of contemporary spiritual and psychological wisdom, this accessible and powerfully experiential book will heal not only you, but your relationships as well. If I had one gift to bequeath my children, it would be to reclaim regret.
—Denise DeSesa-Smith, PhD, Licensed Psychologist
Just a Minute Meditations for Deeper Trust and Inner Peace
For most of us, finding time to pause for prayer and meditation can be difficult-but it’s essential for strengthening our relationship with God. In Meditations for Inner Peace, bestselling author Kathryn James Hermes, FSP, helps readers discover the great value that God places upon each one of us: she offers thoughts and meditations that will help you lift your eyes to the face of the One who loves you more than you could ever imagine. As you pray with them day after day, you will discover how God wants you to be content, as content as a baby in its mother’s arms. Each meditation is carefully chosen to amaze you with what God has done for you in his gracious and marvelous act of redemption.
The Just a Minute series of small books provides meditations on scripture, advice for daily struggles, and insights from the Gospel. This set of reflections is designed to help you develop one area of your spiritual life: finding the inner peace that only God can give. God will lead you to be interested in certain meditations, so you can go wherever he leads you.
Each meditation takes just a few minutes to read, can be chosen at random, and is filled with encouragement and simple insights. These short meditations enable readers to connect with God’s heart through scripture and listen to what he is saying to them.
Look inside:
Meditations for Inner Peace | Meditations for Deeper Trust
Jesus Speaking: A Daily Devotional Based on the Spiritual Classic He and I
I didn’t write this but heartily recommend it:
Jesus began speaking to French mystic Gabrielle Bossis when she was in her sixties. The conversations continued to the end of her life, and became the beautiful spiritual classic He and I. Jesus Speaking is a beautiful devotional taken from the original book of conversations between Jesus and Gabrielle. A carefully chosen Scripture passage complements every excerpt from the book, along with a meditation on that day’s reading.
Bossis’ intimate conversations with Christ are instructive as well as inspirational. An invaluable guide for anyone looking for growth in the spiritual life, Jesus Speaking encourages readers to cultivate a daily habit of prayer and a personal relationship with Christ through the Church. Jesus Speaking is a daily devotional that will inspire readers of spiritual classics.
Born and raised in France, Gabrielle Bossis (1874–1950) was a single woman and a nurse during World War I, who later became a playwright and touring artist. Her journals revealed a rich spiritual life. The French edition of Lui et Moi (He and I) has been translated into many languages and sold worldwide.
Look inside:
Touching the Sunrise 