"Gerry renounces the facile role of guilty bystander to wrestle with the dark angels of his own and the world’s sins. He is on his knees, waiting for a mercy he knows he can’t manufacture for himself, much less for those whose impoverishment cannot quickly be relieved. He has discovered a mirror for his spiritual dereliction in the thousands of faces his camera has recorded." —Jonathan Montaldo, editor, Dialogues with Silence by Thomas Merton
"In his Rule of 1221 St. Francis says that the friars can go among nonbelievers in two ways: they can simply live the Gospel among them and be subject to every creature, or if God wills it, they can go and preach the Gospel among them. Gerard Straub has chosen both options. He preaches the Gospel in his prolific writings and films, but he also lives the Gospel in his day-to-day life, particularly with the poorest of the poor, with those whom others have chosen not to see. In his latter years he has found God in the poor of Haiti, particularly in the abandoned children he found in the rubble of a real and symbolic earthquake that inspired these eloquent words:
I do think God was hidden in the rubble of Haiti. But God was also visibly present in the arms that pulled others out of the rubble, in the hands of those who treated an injury. God is in the messiness of human life, reaching out in love to lift us from the rubble of our lives, rubble created by our faults, failures, and mistakes. God is with us in our suffering.
This is why this book is worth reading. It tells the truth. It challenges and at the same time forgives our cowardice and lives of convenience and comfort. We read this book knowing how far we are from God’s poor and therefore from God, and at the same time we see page-by-page that we ourselves are one of God’s poor. We live broken, imperfect and messed-up lives, but, as Straub says in many different ways in The Sunrise of the Soul, God is in the messiness of our lives. And if we but reach out and lift up others in love, God will lift us up from our own self-confining rubble." —Murray Bodo, OFM, author of numerous books on the life of St. Francis of Assisi and on Franciscan spirituality and mysticism, including Francis: The Journey and the Dream, Francis and Jesus, The Way of St. Francis.
