Shari Brand Ray
In an age when the world can feel especially dark, Surprised By Glory is a collection of true stories and hopeful essays that invites the reader to consider setting down the fear and anger of the current moment in order to seek instead the grandeur in this most fascinating and diverse world of ours. In her stories, Ray writes of the important choice of love and connection, as well as the search for the glory of each particular moment--from stories of swim coaches and Holocaust survivors and little kids’ Christmas pageants and even sitting at the bedside of the dying, to the flabbergasting amazement of a total eclipse and the visitation of an angel in a train station in Romania in the middle of a most dangerous night. Ray asks her readers to examine how we approach each precious day, with the gentle reminder that the lenses through which we view our lives are solely our own choice. The stories in this collection prompt us to consider what we are doing, accruing, and pursuing with our limited number of mornings, evenings, and afternoons, and Ray reminds the reader how vital it is to open our eyes to the magnificence of the moment, to accept the miraculous without logic or question, and to lay down the common anger that can so easily beset us all. How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives, and we only have one life--this one. Thus, the stories in Surprised By Glory encourage us to spend our wild and precious life in search of the sublime and in the pursuit of the glorious, for such searching is worth our efforts and produces remarkable, even miraculous, results.
