Awakening

By Claudia Cangilla McAdam

Description:

Fear drives me forward as I rush down a rocky path in Jerusalem, trying to sort things out even as dusk makes it harder to hurry. Am I really an American girl, cast back to the time of Jesus? Or a delusional Jewish teen, plagued with visions of a place called America, thousands of years in the future? I don't know anymore. But I do know that something awful is about to happen to Jesus: they're going to arrest him tonight, and kill him. No one believes me; they think I'm crazy. So it's up to me to save him, hurrying down this dark path toward Gethsemane, toward the turning point of all history, the attempt to kill Jesus . . . toward the uncertainty of whether I can actually manage to change the future.

Book Takeaway:

The takeaway is that the concept of sacrifice should be embraced, not feared, and that the REASON Jesus had to die (rather than save mankind in some other way) was because God had entered into a covenant relationship with mankind (akin to marriage) that could not be dissolved unless one of the parties died. He certainly could have killed off all Israel--but to what purpose? With his Chosen People gone, with whom could He have a relationship? The only other alternative was to have the other party to the covenant die. But God couldn't die, could He? Yes, He could. And He did, enabling us to enter a new covenant with Him--an everlasting one.

Why the author wrote this book:

Three things converged to propel me to write AWAKENING: 1) I kept waking in the pitch-black middle of the night, thinking I was in the house we lived in ten years earlier. It was as if I had dreamed the last ten years, and I was really living in a previous decade. My kids were young. My father hadn't died. Life was different. When I "woke up" more fully, I realized that, no, I was really living TODAY. But what if I DID wake up in the past? What would I do differently? 2) I was student in the midst of a four-year course of study offered by the Denver Catholic Biblical School. Frequently, I'd come upon Scriptural insights I wished I'd learned when I was younger. I kept wondering how I could help youngsters gain the knowledge I was acquiring. 3) Every year during Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, the liturgies and Gospel readings became so vivid, I could picture myself THERE. I combined all three of those things in the book AWAKENING. And as soon as I started writing it, those weird middle-of-the-night awakenings of my own (where I thought I was in the past) disappeared. I truly believe the Holy Spirit was prompting me to write this book.