Through emotionally charged portraits and richly layered interior views, the photographs of Chicago-based artist Paul D’Amato provide a genuine and complex perspective on life in some of the most challenging and troubled neighborhoods in the nation. This publication is supported in part by grants from the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

We live in a culture that tells us there are few things worse than aging, that we should avoid aging at all costs, and that we must shun death. And yet, no matter how much money we spend on health supplements, no matter how many gurus we consult, the fact remains unchanged: We will grow old.

In A Season of Mystery, 60-year-old Paula Huston—a grandmother, and also a caretaker for her own mother and for her in-laws—shares with readers a far more fulfilling way to approach how we live and how we think about the second half of life. Each chapter offers a spiritual practice that is particularly suited to nurturing us in ways we would never have recognized in our younger lives. For example, the practice of “listening” helps us quit superimposing our own take on every situation before we have a chance to hear and see what is truly there; the practice of “delighting” encourages us to notice and be thankful for what is small and seemingly insignificant. Each of the 10 practices serves as an antidote to the classic afflictions of old age, such as close-mindedness, complaining, and fear of change.

A Season of Mystery is not intended to be a selection of self-improvement secrets; the goal of Huston’s work is to encourage people in the second half of life to become “ordinary mystics” who are no longer bound by the world’s false ideas on aging but instead be freed by God’s grace to embrace the riches that come only with growing older.

God will always give us more than we ask for

Millions have read and benefited from this book since it was first written nearly 500 years ago. St. Teresa's message of humility, simplicity, persistence, and faith is replete with language that is at times earthy, and full of self deprecating humor.

Rendered here into contemporary English, St. Teresa's words, with their warm-hearted approach to Christian transformation, will help you look deeply into what it really means, sometimes in the smallest of details, to have a relationship with Jesus.

'Teresa lays out the time-tested path of Christian tranformation and union with God for those of us who will never be monastics, much less desert-dwelling hermits. Who among us does not need to know how to turn trouble into spiritual good, how to lovingly bear minor slights and major wounds, how to forgive and offer compassion?'
Paula Huston, from the Foreword