My Life as a Prayer: A Multifaith Memoir

“One of the most engaging memoirs I’ve read in ages. The wise and feisty voice I've come to know and love in Elizabeth Cunningham’s Maeve Chronicles fills these pages and carried me away. Anyone who has forged an independent path through the luminous moments and deepest shadows of a soul-filled life will recognize their own spiritual adventures reflected here.”—Mirabai Starr, God of Love

In this intriguing spiritual memoir, The Maeve Chronicles author Elizabeth Cunningham traces her dynamic faith journey and its relationship to her writing.

As the daughter of an Episcopal priest, author Elizabeth Cunningham was born into community, sacred story, and the mysteries of prayer. For her, “If a writer is one who writes, then a ‘prayer’ is one who prays.” As such, her praying is dynamic, a dance between many opposites—active vs. contemplative, community vs. individual, human vs. wild—and Cunningham sees the divine as both incarnate and transcendent, an intimate beloved and a vast mystery. When she prays, Cunningham is both audacious and reverent, asking tough questions of God—raging, listening intently, and dancing and singing ecstatically. Her storyteller’s imagination opens a path from the known to the unknowable, from despair to wonder. 

In this nonfiction debut, Cunningham recounts both her lifelong spiritual quest and her ongoing spiritual questions. Her journey takes her from her childhood church, with its ornate liturgy, to the silence of Quaker meeting; from her ordination as an interfaith minister to an eclectic, earth-centered community where she served as priestess before becoming a hermit, of sorts, making a church of her own backyard.

Candid and passionate, Cunningham’s memoir invites readers of all faiths—and doubts!—to explore what it means to live life as a prayer in the beautiful, imperiled world we share.

Novelist and poet Elizabeth Cunningham is best known for The Maeve Chronicles, a series of award-winning novels featuring a Celtic Mary Magdalen. The descendant of generations of Episcopal priests, Cunningham grew up in a small upstate New York town next door to her church and an overgrown, enchanted wood and has spent her life writing stories traversing the worlds of scripture and fairytales. After resisting the temptation to follow in her forefather’s footsteps to become the first woman in a line of priests, she was ordained as an interfaith minister and counselor in midlife. My Life as a Prayer is her debut work of nonfiction. She lives in the valley of the Mahicantuck (the river that flows both ways, aka the Hudson) on land that was home to the Lenape.