Rocks of pain can turn to diamonds of peace for children of divorce
Author Lynn Cassella speaks to the heart and soul of children of divorce in Making Your Way After Your Parents' Divorce: A Supportive Guide for Personal Growth.

As a child of divorce, Lynn describes how the grief associated with her father's leaving finally caught up with her while she was in college. After years of feeling like an outcast because of her parents' divorce, she put her faith in God and received courage to confront her loss. Her writing shines with understanding and insights gained from overcoming the difficulties of parental divorce.

Teens and young adults and those ministering to them will find Making Your Way After Your Parents' Divorce a compassionate and stimulating tool for moving through grief. Containing vivid vignettes, candid sharing, and challenging questions, it is tailor-made for support groups and retreats as well as individual reflection.

Making Your Way After Your Parents' Divorce has been endorsed by the Most Reverend Donald W. Wuerl, Bishop of Pittsburgh, Bob McCarty , Executive Director of the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, and many others. Father Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., President Emeritus of the University of Notre Dame, has written the foreword for the book. (We have included the Foreword of the book to give you a brief overview of Making Your Way After Your Parents' Divorce.)

To order Making Your Way After Your Parents' Divorce, call Liguori Publications directly at 800-325-9521 or visit www.catholicbooksonline.com.

Making Your Way After Your Parents' Divorce
ID #38870 128 pages paperback
ISBN: 0-7648-0872-9
$10.95

Foreword
This is an ambitious and courageous undertaking, and one that Lynn Cassella has pursued with love for you, her brothers and sisters of divorce. It is her effort to pull together the most meaningful aspects of her personal journey and share them in a compassionate, challenging, and insightful way. She has done this because she very much wants to make your path less difficult and help you grow; and because she believes in your ability to make this struggle work for you.

You are in the hands of an authority. Lynn not only has studied Catholic teachings but she has also triumphed over the struggles you're experiencing, relying or her faith and Jesus' example. She shows in this book the ability to both empathize and guide, to "talk the talk and walk the walk." Rather than avoiding suffering, she becomes intimate with it. She is acutely attentive, also, to the range of your feelings, largely, in my estimation, because of what her own experience has taught her.

Today, we are living in a culture in which the sanctity of marriage is often disregarded, encouraging persons to enter into this commitment without the necessary mental, emotional, and spiritual readiness. This has encouraged the present crisis of divorce and, consequently, the crisis of children of divorce. If we want to safeguard the prosperity of our nation, we all need to heighten our consciousness, not just of the problem, but of what we can do to help eradicate it.

This prosperity depends upon emotional healthiness, which I believe is achieved by seeing our struggles through the eyes of faith. Jesus' statement holds true just as much today as it did over two thousand years ago: "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves" (Matthew 11:29). I translate this to mean that it is only by embracing the pain and trials of our lives that we unite ourselves with Jesus, and thereby reap the benefits of God's grace and direction in overcoming struggles.

Certain events in my own life have led me toward faith and religion as the only answer for truly rising above difficulties. Today, I am convinced that both hold the solutions to the most important problems of human life and to personal suffering in particular.

It is this solution that this book also upholds. In it, you will meet a woman whose devotion to God has made a difference in her life, who has learned through prayer, Jesus' example, and following the dictates of her heart to let God guide her life, and thereby share her wisdom with you. In so doing, she invites you to open your heart to this same reality of Jesus walking with you. I highly recommend this book to both practicing and non-practicing Christians, believers and nonbelievers, as well as lay and professional persons. It offers not a treatise on faith or religion, but an example of what both are meant to do.

Fr. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C.
President Emeritus,
University of Notre Dame

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