I Am with You Always: True Stories of Encounters With Jesus - Softcover

Sparrow, G. Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553375237 ISBN 13: 9780553375237

Publisher: Bantam, 1996

Synopsis

I Am With You Always is a stunning collection of first-person accounts of everyday people who have had visitations from Jesus that have saved or transformed their lives.  From dramatic healing encounters during near-death experiences to gentle reminders to live a spiritual life, these encounters span a wide spectrum of experience.  Yet each seems to have one central purpose: Jesus appears to those whose lives need spiritual attention, growth, or healing.  In his enlightening commentary on these experiences, Dr. Sparrow describes the spiritual nature of these remarkable stories, discusses their legitimacy, and offers a dramatic new vision of life and faith. I Am With You Always is a thought-provoking and illuminating look into transformational revelation.

About this title

From Booklist

For the past five years, transpersonal psychotherapist G. Scott Sparrow has collected and studied accounts of contemporary face-to-face encounters with Christ, including his own. In spite of the subtitle, he wisely refrains from any narrowly defined attempt to assess the objective truth of the encounters, opting instead to focus on their subjective experiential authenticity. In many cases, they have had profound impact on the persons reporting them, and in some cases they have the potential of profound impact on persons reading them. For the most part, the book simply reports the encounters, though Sparrow does provide interesting commentary that places them in a history of Christian encounter stories beginning with Mary Magdalene. He organizes the material into broad categories--awakening, physical healing and consolation, emotional healing, initiation, and spiritual instruction--that could prove useful as heuristic devices for the study of contemporary mystical experience. But the interest of the book lies more in its raw material than in its theoretical insight. Steve Schroeder

From Publishers Weekly

Sparrow, a transpersonal therapist who utilizes Tibetan yoga, has edited a collection of contemporary stories purporting to be about encounters with Jesus or Christ. The author synthesizes Eastern and Western (biblical) thought quite smoothly, but readers are left to judge credibility of unidentified witnesses about the encounters. Most, but not all, witnesses are under great stress or are disconsolate; and dramatic healings or reconciliations usually result. The Jesus who appears in these accounts is less like the biblical Jesus than like the angels of current fashion; Sparrow's Christ is simply too tame. Nor is it ever clear how the witnesses themselves know that it is Jesus whom they encounter; they seem to intuit without any way to verify or check. This uncritical identification of Jesus, while it may reflect the lingering, pervasive influence of Christianity, reflects as well the abandonment of rationalism; and the stories, although they are engagingly told, betray a deep and wide spiritual malaise.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0553375237
• ISBN 13: 9780553375237
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256