Kaleidoscope: The Way of Woman and Other Essays

At an age when most people would be thinking about retirement, Helen M. Luke embarked on two new careers, helping found the Apple Farm Community, a retreat and study center near Three Rivers, Michigan, and simultaneously making her debut as a writer, drawing on a lifetime of spiritual and psychological counseling. These essays, published over three decades, show the breadth of Luke's experiences as a Jungian psychologist, lecturer, and author. The collection is divided into three sections, indicative of three main streams in Luke's own thinking: her distinctive viewpoint as a woman who has lived through and observed every decade of the present century; the importance of Anglo-Catholicism as a touchstone for responsibility and discrimination in her search; and her lifelong love of examining the world's great literature as a route towards knowledge. Luke's ideas are often iconoclastic to contemporary attitudes of sexual politics, religious dogma, and literary interpretation: her approach is individual and unique, rigorous and refreshing, as she combines three paths — the way of woman, the way of discrimination, and the way of story — into a kaleidoscope of the inner journey necessary to us all.