About the Author:
Michael Lapsley was born in New Zealand and ordained a priest in Australia after joining the Society of the Sacred Mission. The society sent him to South Africa as a missionary in 1973. There he became chaplain to Anglican university students and became active in the anti-apartheid movement, ultimately joining the African National Congress. Exiled to Zimbabwe, he narrowly survived an assassination attempt. Later, he returned to South Africa and participated in the transition to the post-apartheid era. In 1998 he founded the Institute for Healing of Memories, a project that has taken him around the world to work with victims--as well as perpetrators--of violence and trauma. Stephen Karakashian is an American psychotherapist who has spent a number of years working with Fr. Michael and the Institute in South Africa. He lives in Portland, OR.
Review:
Although he was broken physically, he has become the most whole person I know, truly a wounded healer. --Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Michael s life represents a compelling metaphor . . . a foreigner who came to our country and was transformed. His life is part of the tapestry of the many long journeys and struggle of our people. --Nelson Mandela
--Nelson Mandela
Michael s life represents a compelling metaphor . . . a foreigner who came to our country and was transformed. His life is part of the tapestry of the many long journeys and struggle of our people. --Nelson Mandela
Not quite three months after Nelson Mandela was freed from Robben Island in 1990, Anglican priest and African National Congress chaplain Lapsley opened a letter sent in the mail. The bomb in it blew off both hands, sent shrapnel through his body, and destroyed one eye . . . . Though severely injured, his mind and tongue remain intact, producing this most amazing memoir of a man who writes he "has never made a distinction between human liberation and my Christian witness." . . . Within three years of his attack, he opened the doors of The Trauma Centre for Victims of Violence and Torture in Cape Town, in the new South Africa, and launched a global Healing of Memories program. The book's final section highlights stories from this work, from Rwanda to Northern Ireland, from Colombia to North Carolina. With dry, self-deprecating wit, Lapsley treats readers to an emotional, gripping tale of a priest, his prosthetics, and his promise, as St. Teresa of Avila put it, to be Christ's hands in the world. --Publishers' Weekly
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.