In a candid, poetic style, Karen weaves "God-rich" incidents from her four lives - eldest daughter, cloistered nun, solitary hermit and married hermit - into a tapestry sparked with humor, honesty and vulnerability, revealing the God who sets the pattern and throws the shuttle. Find love equals finding God.
Hermits are a rare breed. Married hermits are abotu as common as spotted owls. Marry a Roman Catholic priest to a former nun, nest them in a mountainside hermitage named Still Wood, and you may have a brand new species. This memoir is a three-way love saga - God, a priest and a nun joined to minister to hermits world-wide from the isolated mountaincounty of "Bloody Madison", North Carolina.
Unexpectedly, my autumn years shifted from a single woman's story to a shared journey when I met and married a Paul Fredette, my former pastor. Now we minister as a couple outside any formal institution, serving together in ways we could never do separately.
My earlier writings have generated a crowd of curious readers asking "Why would you?" and "How could you?" marry a priest and continue your commitment to eremitical life? This book is my answer. Each chapter weaves together "God-rich" incidents from four periods of my life: seventeen years in a middle-class Catholic home; thirty spiritually challenging years as a cloistered nun; six transformative years as a hermit, and sixteen surprising years as a wife. They all confirm that "where charity and love prevail, there God is ever found."
Excerpt
A Door Makes No Promises
The door I had just charged up to was certainly making no promises that july morning in 1989. A rutted lane stretched toward a cabin, barely visible in the shade of the giant evergreens I would eventually regard as my veiled sisters. I was about to take up
Professional Reviews
A Soul Unfolding Like a Rosebud
I imagine that few of us can see the inner processes that gradually shape our lives. We live each day as if it were disconnected from yesterday and tomorrow. We see no plan, no shape, no meaning. We live on the surface.
Fewer yet are able to -- or willing to! --share that innerlife with others. Whether through fear, or "humility", or being too busy, a cloak of secrecy is thrown around the soul.
Karen Karper Fredette is one of those rare individuals who not only has done the hard work of examining her life but has honored us by sharing it in her remarkable new book, "Where God is Ever Found." After 30 years in a cloistered convent, six years in a West Virginia hermit's corrage, and nowsome fifteen years as a married woman, Fredette shows how the seemingly disparate phases of her life blend together in a new creation.
Despite the tile, there isn't much "god talk" in the book. Rather, like the rich natural beauty that surrounds the North Carolina mountain home which Fredette shares with her husband, Paul, the touch of the Spirit infuses every page. The Divine, a breeze sometimes forceful, sometimes gentle, works to fashion a person who progressively - at times with great suffering - is more fully alive. As we learn about Karen Fredette through reading her book, we also gain greater insight into ourselves. By Bill Powers
A Book to Linger Over
Karen Fredette skillfully weaves four threads of her life - exuberant red-haired youth, religious life, solitude, and marriage - showing us the different patterns of a richly lived sacramental life. Her essays speak of ending and beginnings with such intriguing titles as "A Door Makes Not Promises", "Past Trust and Out of Luck" (two towns in NC!).
I found myself pondering my own life after EVERY essay. She opened a door widely into her own life, always showing us her ever-present God, not in lofty language but in images we can all understand.
I never wanted to move onto the next essay. I always lingered with her images. Doors - thresholds-locks-keys. Love-gentle-growing-blooming (with attendant horticultural problems!). Creatures four-footed and two - that enrich our lives ...
The great gift of this book is that each essay somehow invites deep self reflection - for God is also ever present within us, our decisions, our sacred moments, our sadnesses and losses, our mysteries, joys and sacredness.
We enter Karen's world only to find ourselves opening the door deeper into our own life ... a BEAUTIFUL place to be! by Bella Erakko
(Richard M. Feldman) Ever since I was a young boy, the only thing I wanted to be was a cowboy. I wanted to own and work on a real ranch, with cattle and horses. Especially horses.
While I never became a cowboy, considering everything I have done
She never felt safe at home as a young girl, and didn't understand why when she finally escaped she wasn't safe in the big wide world either ...effectively jumping out of the frying pan into the fire!
