The Tree of Healing

Now available on Amazon/ Kindle: The River of Life. Recipient of the Catholic Writers Guild Seal of Approval. This story about Rose's father is the prequel to The Tree of Healing.

Twelve-year-old Anthony is carefree until his beloved father passes away. Questioning suffering and death, Anthony grows distant from God. A heaven-sent friend helps him to see God’s tender providence within the ebb and flow of life, in currents of loss and restoration, and in the living stream of Christ’s Blood. While trying to find the burial site of martyrs and searching for treasures they hid, he finds a hidden treasure that was before him all along: Christ Crucified. Anthony comes to understand what his father meant by his last words to him, that he would always find him in the Heart of Christ, open at the cross. When Anthony pours himself out for God, water springs up from the earth as a personal sign of the pouring out of Christ’s Heart in a great river of life.

Rose spends much of her time dwelling on her troubles. She lives in a state of worry and loneliness as her mother has been harsh and distant since the death of her father when she was an infant. One golden summer, as she leaves her childhood years, her grandmother and a heaven-sent friend teach her to bring everything in her life to God in prayer and to bring His Life into her own. She comes to know and trust Him deeply, especially when she discovers a carving made by her father in a great tree that forms the crucifix of a Rosary Garden. Hidden in its depths and unfolding in layers of mystery and beauty, signs of God's Love are continuously revealed to her. A Mary’s Garden that she plants reflects her own growth in a living faith that brings a garden of souls with her to God, including her mother.

Suitable for all ages, this timeless story of forgiveness and hope shows how suffering is transformed through union with Christ. Enriched with spiritual art, poetry, and quotes from Scripture, The Tree of Healing tells of the healing of one young girl and of all wounded humanity by the Sacrifice of Jesus on a new Tree of Life.

2016 finalist for the Catholic Arts and Letters Award for fiction in the category of young adult/ children.

Filled with Scripture quotes, 33 color illustrations and 33 poems.

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Leaving Fin for Wing
Sometimes I glimpse Your glory
Before it hides and dims,
Heaven half-revealing
The sea in which I swim.
Those times, my Lord, I try
To drink and drink You in.
So cold, I rise from depths
If only for a breath
And linger at the surface,
Your warmth upon my skin.

Sometimes I’m mired in darkness
And evil that men do,
Brought down in corruption
To fathoms that I rue.
Those times, my Lord, at length
I call to You anew.
Sinking in my debts
Between the hooks and nets,
So deeply scarred from sin
And broken through and through.

Sometimes I want my soul
To blaze out into view
In glory just to prove
The praise that is Your due.
That time, my Lord, my eyes
Won’t cry and cry for You.
I'd meet a martyr’s death
And stretch out to the breadth
Of fullness of Your truth,
All for the love of You.

At last, I'd leave this sea
Of tears and would begin
To rise above the surface,
Leaving fin for wing.
That time, my Lord, I’d breathe
And breathe You from within.