Acknowledgments In Waiting For Godot By Barbara Crafton
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Acknowledgments
I want to acknowledge several people who have given many hours of their time and expertise in helping me make this project a reality.
One is Barbara Crafton, whose advice, support, and depth of life and ministry I greatly appreciate. She walked me through this process with clarity and gentle prodding and deftly critiqued the manuscript. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Sue Stanley, who labored for many months typing the various changes in the text. Her patience, humor, and generosity are outstanding. I am also grateful for the professional eye and suggestions of Caitlin Kelly, who is a wise and generous friend and author, and to Barry Seaman, retired journalist for Time and author, for his generous comments, for his encouragement, and for his appetite for the subject of doubt. And, finally, I am grateful to the good people of the Church of St. Barnabas in Irvington, New York, who have provided me with grist for the mill for the exercise of ministry these past thirty-six…show more content… I’m going on a walk. “Will you go with me, Lord? You supposedly led me to the icon, but now you have ditched me. I feel like Estragon in Waiting for Godot; I hated that play, and I certainly hate this one.” As the wind blows and the trees bend as if in mourning, I walk down the main road that leads to the retreat center. I begin an angry, passionate, and rage-filled conversation with the absent God. “You have let me down. You have put me through hell this week and uncovered a lot of buried conflict. I felt led to Our Lady of Vladimir—and for what? The retreat is over tomorrow, and I have no sign that I can trust you.” I curse God for forty-five minutes. “Lord, I have just lost my faith in you! That means that my job as a priest goes with it, and much of the rest of my life. You bastard, trickster-God, you phony, non-existent thug! You are not even real! You don’t exist!” Yes, I just said it, those awful words: You don’t