Love Is Stronger Than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls - Hardcover

Cynthia Bourgeault

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609604732 ISBN 13: 9780609604731

Publisher: Bell Tower, 1999

Synopsis

This is a love story like no other. It describes the incandescent relationship between two hermits--a seventy-year-old monk and a fifty-year-old woman Episcopal priest and medieval scholar--who met at a Trappist monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. Both had studied Western esoteric traditions and believed it was possible for two souls to work and grow together "from here to eternity."
        
Brother Raphael Robin and Cynthia Bourgeault had three tempestuous and intense years together learning what it means to truly love someone, and then Rafe had a heart attack and died. Cynthia was urged to let him rest in peace (as we all are on the death of a loved one) but she trusted the invincible certainty of her heart. Several years later, Cynthia remains fully in touch with Rafe, believing that whatever he may be doing in the beyond affects her, and that what she does here affects him.
        
Cynthia Bourgeault's writing is robust and clear-eyed, and it shines. Her book is the story of what happened both before and after Rafe's death, as well as a guidebook for others called to the path of conscious love.

About this title

Review:

Reverend Cynthia Bourgeault was a 50-year-old priest when she met her soul mate, a hermit named Brother Raphael Robin (Rafe). They had only three years on earth together before Rafe died suddenly of a heart attack. Accounts of these earthly days together are as intense and emotionally wrenching as any love affair could be. And yet their relationship was always graced with a higher goal--creating spiritual love over romantic possession. After Rafe died, Bourgeault was content to let him rest in peace as she began her journey of grief. But weeping outdoors on a snowy night, she felt certain that Rafe's spirit was beside her. "Although I was still crying, the emotional sting started to lose its force, and a new and tingling presence began to work its way up in me, literally starting from the tips of my toes," she recalls. "I knew in that moment I was sustained by an invisible and intensely joyous partner." From then on, Bourgeault continued her love affair with Rafe. Building on this unusual, interactive love-after-death experience, Reverend Bourgeault has assembled some exquisitely reassuring thoughts and anecdotes on eternal love and the impermanence of death. This memoir could be inspirational for grieving lovers or anyone who wants to further explore the mysteries of love, death, spirit, and reincarnation. --Gail Hudson

From the Publisher:

I've always harbored a healthy skepticism about connections with those who have departed this life, since I felt that, surely, they would now have better things to do (or perhaps not do) than stay in touch with us. However, as soon as I read Cynthia Bourgeault's account of her electrifying meeting with Brother Raphael Robin and what ensued in the three years they spent together, and then transpired after his death, I was converted. This is a love story like no other. And it is instructive for other people who feel joined to their loved ones for all eternity and yet have no model for how to stay in touch.

The world has had an increasing number of accounts recently of what happens beyond the grave but this is the first one to my knowledge that comes out of the Church and, as such, it is sure to be controversial. Still, the Reverend Bourgeault is a medieval scholar and she has done her homework well. Her book is theologically sound, as Brother David Steindl-Rast points out in his amazing foreword, "Its spirituality, far from violating monastic tradition, pushes the understanding of traditional values higher and deeper."
-- Toinette Lippe, editorial director of Bell Tower.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bell Tower
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0609604732
• ISBN 13: 9780609604731
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224