Virtual Book Tour: Interview at Anam Cara

Tara Owens at Anam Cara has been hosting me at her blog last week with a guest post and a book giveaway. Last Friday (my apologies for the late post, but I was having technology issues over the weekend!) she shared an interview with me:

Christine, thank you so much for all that you do. Your resources and writings have consistently brought healing, life, resurrection and more of God into my life. My first question is this: Can you share with us a time that having “eyes of the heart” helped you to see something (a situation, a place, a person) in a different way, just as the disciples recognized Jesus in the Emmaus story?

For many years now, part of my spiritual practice is to work with family systems and the healing of ancestral wounds, especially those of my father. He died seventeen years ago, but his death in many ways only amplified my grief over his emotional absence. About five years ago my husband and I traveled to Riga, Latvia, the city where my father was born. He later had to flee to Vienna, where his mother’s family lived, because the Russians invaded. I knew this experience of being a refugee shaped the adult he became. I walked along the shores of the Baltic Sea, the same beach my father played on as a child and I had a powerful experience of seeing him there in his innocence. Years of contemplative practice, and learning to soften my vision, broke me open to a whole new layer in my father revealed by being in that landscape. I came to see him differently and myself, bringing compassion.