Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation

A moving collection of reflections, stories and practices from the life and experiences of Father Adam Bucko--interreligious pioneer, new monastic leader, priest, spiritual director, and activist. They are designed for every person trying to live at the intersection of contemplation and justice.

Written against the backdrop of the COVID 19 pandemic and America's reckoning with growing poverty, injustice and systemic racism, Let Your Heartbreak be your Guide is uniquely positioned to accompany readers through the disillusionment and violence of these times. Father Adam writes from the heart, offering practical guidance on how to adopt an "engaged contemplation," a lived spirituality responsive to suffering and injustice.

The book is divided into three parts: Listening to Life, Touching What Frightens Us, and Interrupting Silence. Each chapter offers readers an invitation to pay attention to God who is eager to accompany us through our challenges and hopes. Throughout, Father Adam invites readers to draw from his rich personal experiences, beginning with his youth in Poland where he witnessed courageous priests use nonviolence to fight a totalitarian system, to his work with homeless LGBTQ youth on the streets of NYC, to his interactions with interfaith communities across the globe. Alongside these diverse experiences, Father Adam weaves in wisdom gained from mentors, scripture, and spiritual activists and mystics, such as St. Teresa of Avila, Howard Thurman, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Catherine Doherty and Thich Nhat Hanh.

The book ends with a powerful roadmap for individuals and communities looking to integrate a "rule of life" in service of compassion and justice for all. The book also includes an appendix of contemplative practices to help readers develop discernment, courage, and receptivity to God who is always guiding us towards healing and liberation.

Father Adam Bucko has been a committed voice in the movement for the renewal of Christian Contemplative Spirituality and the growing New Monastic movement. He has taught engaged contemplative spirituality in Europe and the United States and has authored Let Your Heartbreak be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation, and co-authored Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation (with Matthew Fox), and The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living (with Rory McEntee). His work has been has been featured by ABC News, CBS, NBC, Harper’s Magazine, New York Daily News, and Sojourner Magazine and he currently serves as a director of the Center for Spiritual Imagination (spiritualimagination.org) and the Cathedral of the Incarnation serving Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island in New York.