It's Good To Be Here

It's Good To Be Here by Christina Chase

Maurice Billingsley writes: I had been waiting to see this book, and was by no means disappointed on reading it. Christina weaves autobiography and a profound incarnational theology with a love of language and clarity of expression.

We were led, in my pre-Vatican II childhood, to look upon Jesus as the perfect human being: 'Little children all must be / Mild, obedient, good as he.' Our teachers apparently forgot that it was at his Transfiguration that the Apostles saw something more and Peter said, 'It's good to be here.'

There are those who would contradict Chase's assertion that it is good for her to be here, since she is profoundly disabled - she readily uses the non-PC term 'crippled' - with a wasting disease that ought to have killed her years ago, and that renders her unable to feed, dress, or care for herself, depending on others for such needs.

But Christina has undergone her own transfiguration; this is her story. She had no need of a Franciscan stigmata, the wounded body was hers from birth, but she has had to come to terms with the human condition in her own self, with all the frustrations writ large. And so she can write: 'The one astonishing fact of life is that suffering, like disease, war, murder, and abuse, cannot destroy the gift that God Almighty gives, because real love never fails.' (p18) It's good to be here; to be human here, as Christ was. After his Baptism, 'He stood, rising to inhale deeply and shake the dripping wetness out of his hair and off of his drenched body.' (p38)

And this from a woman who frequently finds breathing difficult, who cannot shake her head to dry her hair! This is not a book to buy out of pity for a 'poor, disabled woman', but for its deep insights into the divine light that wills to brighten our days. All our days. Christina's vision is eternal: 'What will life be like then?' (p124)

The glimmer of an answer is to be found in our earthly, earthy lives: it's good to be here, breathing, getting wet, enjoying the sacrament of everyday in the wondrous life God has given us.

This will be my Lent book for 2020.

Christina Chase. It's Good to be here, Sophia Institute Press, Manchester, New Hampshire, 2019.

You can order it now from the publisher, Sophia Institute of New Hampshire, or via Amazon .