Return from Exile

A true story of two women speaking from self-imposed exile. Separated by seven centuries and an ocean, their stories intersect when Marie Laure makes a solo pilgrimage. She wants to understand why Julian of Norwich lived from age fifty in a cell, an anchorage, attached to a church during the Black Death plague. Her own so-called anchorage is a river porch attached to a Florida townhouse. How had she ended up in quasi-exile? Trying to make sense of it, she writes, just as Julian wrote to understand what had happened in a near-death experience. Alone in Julian's anchorage, Marie confronts words etched in stone: "Thou art enough for me." The words nag at her. Truth is, she could not say those words. Why had she come? Her handwritten words, "For my heart to heal," speak across time when read aloud in the anchorage by a priest. Upon returning home, a global pandemic shutters the world, throwing everyone into exile, creating distance and longing for reunion. This second book in Marie Laure's Serendipity Series continues to follow explorers of serendipitous moments on the continuum of shared spiritual stories.