Books like Experiencing Friendship with God — picked by fans

As I was researching St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila’s dark nights for my own book, May helped make sense of some of their language and ideas.

This book is a very helpful resource and guide, one of the best out there to help the reader understand the ancient spiritual concept known as the dark night of the soul. He unpacks its history, origins, purpose, and gives permission to the hurting reader to walk through a dark night without fear. May also moves the hurting, disillusioned reader to hope. 

This was a totally unexpected find at the airport, of all places, but I have read it several times, and I still page through it regularly. Written in bite-sized quotes with lovely illustrations, this book is the perfect companion for someone in grief (with “grief-brain”) who cannot imagine reading an entire book.

It has great, practical, and comforting tips for self-care, for honoring your pain and loss, all while reminding you to find ways to cling to hope, even as you grieve. A beautiful gift for others as well. 

I love Natasha’s voice and kindness when it comes to grief. She has been through so much loss herself, and so she knows what grief and unexpected loss try to steal from a person.

She invites the reader to simply be kind to themselves and teaches others how to come around grieving people with presence and without trying to “fix.” She offers a meaningful perspective on losses of all kinds. 

I had the advantage of reading an early copy of this book because Catherine is one of my closest friends. She and Jason have put their fingers on the pulse of what happens to your faith when you hit a crisis point or a trauma–and how that doesn’t have to lead to the untangling or shattering of all you believed.

Rather, there is a refining and freedom that comes from facing a mid-faith crisis and it can move you to a place of maturity, seasoning, and unburdened faith. 

I love this anthology by women over fifty because it offers such a wide range of truths about our experiences with sex and intimate relationships.

More than fifty essays and poems cover a variety of honest reflections on the exquisite, the good, the not-so-good, and the challenging parts of older women relating sexually to men, to women, and to themselves.

Feelings expressed range from the ambivalence, disappointment, and ecstasy of dating, to the pleasures of being single, to the joy of long-term sex and commitment, to the acceptance of the sometimes sudden movement between these states. Can be read in one or two delicious gulps! 

It is not easy to write a self-help book without sounding pompous or unrealistic. This is why The Dance of Intimacy became a model for my own self-help books.

Lerner’s writing is straightforward, personal, and practical. She is, as am I, an unabashed feminist who understands that strengthening and/or healing relationships require the participation of both partners. First published in 2009 I have recommended this wise book to hundreds of clients. 

If you're looking for a book that captures the zeitgeist of contemporary relationships, here it is, well before the reign of Facebook. Calling upon social commentary, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, feminist theory, anthropology, family theory, and linguistics, the author presents a broad-based, scholarly, and sobering analysis of the toxic trends and processes in our society which are casting Americans adrift from their emotional and psychic moorings, and leaving them unable to initiate or sustain meaningful relationships.

Because of the ever-growing impersonal nature of our society, it has become more difficult to begin and sustain intimate relationships. Indeed, it seems as if modern life is represented by a series of relationships of convenience that often lack substance. These kinds of insights make this book very appealing. The author contends that we're losing our overall ability to be involved in meaningful relationships and instead are relegated to something less. Most important, the author… show more.

Long familiar to me, John O’Donohue’s books became a particular solace when grief arrived. I would recommend any of his books.

O’Donohue lived on the western coast of Ireland, and he had a distinctive wisdom about threshold spaces—those places between the life we have known and the one we cannot yet see—and a compassionate way of inviting us to receive the grace that comes as we stumble our way across those thresholds.

Eternal Echoes is one of my favorites among O’Donohue’s books. I am especially taken by his chapter about absence, where he acknowledges the deep ache of loss while also emphasizing that our losses are not utterly empty; they hold a hidden eternity that does not abandon us. I am both consoled and challenged by his assurance that grief is a mystery that knows its way.

I first learned about Logan Ury listening to the podcast This is Dating. While I was waiting on the second season to drop, I learned about Dr. Ury’s book.

I’m not trying to be ageist, but it was refreshing to hear dating advice from a professional that isn’t older and hasn’t been married for decades. Ury’s dating years being more recent meant she gets the landscape modern daters are struggling to find love in. Her perspective was instantly more relevant to me.

There were also several knowledge gems that she dropped throughout her book that I’d already learned the hard way, which gave me more confidence in giving the new-to-me information she presented a shot.

This book from the early 1990s continues to speak volumes about society today. In completely accessible writing, it helped me to see how major historical developments (the spread of democracy and belief in human equality) occur in tandem with people’s daily lives (marriages that pursue the ideal of “democracy in intimacy”).

Couples who pursue “pure relationships” founded on sexual and emotional equality are doing something revolutionary—in a revolution that has been gathering momentum for over two centuries. Each of Anthony Giddens’s chapters illuminates different aspects of this large story, and each gave me insights into what it means to be a man or a woman seeking love and happiness in a changing world.