During the heat and fire of this journey, I wrote in a journal. I wasn’t trying to create art or craft anything. I was reduced to a life of expression that was helping me to live. While struggling to be here, I never thought of putting any of this into a book. It was a few years later, while drifting back into the stream of life, that I felt a need to bear witness to the journey I’d been through and to give voice to the common experience I’d been exposed to. What I’d endured was the journey that everyone endures, in different circumstances and with different names.

In 1994, I self-published a small fifty-seven-page edition of this book under the title Acre of Light: Living with Cancer. That early edition quickly sold out. Two years later, Ithaca House Books, a small press in upstate New York, offered to publish a second edition. Later that same year, Parabola published the first audio version of the book, under the title Inside the Miracle: Enduring Illness, Approaching Wholeness. The master tape took a week to record on reel-to-reel in a studio near Lincoln Center in New York City. It resulted in two intimate audiocassettes, which Publishers Weekly named as one of the best audiotapes of the year.

We originally recorded the Parabola edition to make it available to those who could no longer read in the roughness of their journey. We were humbled to learn that the book and the audio program had a far greater reach. The lessons surfaced by the acuteness of being ill proved useful to everyone in the bump and flare of their ordinary days. This is why I’ve changed the subtitle in this edition from Enduring Illness to Enduring Suffering. Because, ill or not, everyone experiences suffering of some kind that we each have to endure. The stories and lessons here are for everyone.

Those original editions, published twenty-one years ago, have long since gone out of print. And I’m deeply glad that this work is available again in this expanded form. So what you have in your hands is a thematically integrated work that draws from three sources that span almost three decades of writing: the original poems and prose from Inside the Miracle (1994, 1996, now out of print); ten relevant essays from my collected personal essays, Unlearning Back to God (2006, now out of print); and thirty-nine new poems and prose pieces not yet published. While I’ve put all this together in the arc of a life’s journey, the book is not chronological, but follows an inward evolution. I’ve also let each piece remain in the present tense and mood of when I wrote it, to preserve the immediacy of the experience.

A STORY THAT CONTINUES TO BE LIVED