Liz Walker went from being an Emmy-award winning journalist, a TV news broadcaster in Boston, to Harvard Divinity School student and then pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church. She’s a Black woman with a wealth of experience to bear on the subject of what community can do to heal pain, grief, and loss.
She opens with a story about the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, when she was the newly-installed pastor in Roxbury. Three days after the bombing she took part in a “massive interfaith prayer service.” She reflects: “I still think about it sometimes, as I consider all the mass shootings and acts of violence, wars, and natural disasters that have flashed across our screens since then. In a connected and networked world, we are all increasingly exposed to traumas that seem to replicate and multiply. There is plenty of grief going around.”
But just as this is, by Walker’s account, “an era of mass grief,” it is also a time for “wounded healers” and caretakers of all kinds to take greater responsibility for their communities of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Walker’s book inspires us to do that.
Chapters are devoted to listening, healing, talking, hope, and other spiritual practices such as “catching our breath” and “to share a meal.” She fills the pages with accounts of real-life crises, courageous healers and tips on how each of us can try to do better.
