Elise Boulding is professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, and is a practicing Quaker, teaching in the Boulder Friends Meeting. Her interests have led her beyond sociology and teaching peace, to a deep spiritual awakening. This pamphlet is her spiritual autobiography, tracing her embrace of the holy from a tender age to her fundamental transforming experience.

"Everyone has had some experience of early childhood remembering: remembering an otherness not to be explained by family experiences, stories heard, events witnessed. Why is it that we are born remembering, and live forgetting? Is this a joke that God would share with us, but that we can only laugh at in the moment when we have come full circle, and remember again? That coming full circle and remembering again is no laughing matter however. It is a conversion experience, literally, and life cannot go on as before. This happened to me very recently, and I am going to spend these pages in reflecting on the remembering, and the forgetting, and the remembering, as I have experienced it in my own life."

With these words Elise takes us gently through the mysteries of her life, through her awakening to Jesus, to God, to Mary and the saints, through her sharing of both Quakerism and Catholicism, and finally through her espousal of solitude. Remember your own silent place, a quiet you have never left, in this journey with Elise Boulding.

close