Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

This is a book about discovery -- the discovery of a secret. It's the story of how heaven, which I used to think of as an imaginary realm-in-the-sky, has become more real to me than the ground beneath my feet. Real in the past, real for the future, and best of all, real right now. The book is also an invitation. An invitation to us all to look back, to look ahead, and to look around, and start discovering the secret today.

In the Italian city of Siena, I have a favorite place to stay. It's a small hostel just below the church of San Domenico. The no-frills rooms are small, and you have to go elsewhere even for a cup of coffee. What it offers is the best view in town. From the balcony I look across a ravine at the crenellated walls and towers of the medieval city.

Just below the balcony, however, is the site that means most to me. It's the birthplace of Catherine of Siena. It's strange, I think, gazing down at the narrow street where her father had his dye shop, that this Roman Catholic saint should have so much to say to me -- not only a non-Catholic, but someone to whom the very concept of "saints" was once an instant turnoff.

I get no help from the birthplace itself; the dye shop with the family home above it was redesigned as a shrine five hundred years ago. Some things, though, remain as Catherine knew them. San Domenico's is the parish church where she had her visions of heaven. I can still descend the steep-pitched street to the well at the foot of the hill where she went each day for water after her parents turned her into the family drudge for refusing an advantageous marriage. I follow her footsteps as she struggles up the slope with the heavy buckets.

It was only the first of the toils and conflicts that made up her life. As the Black Plague raged unchecked, most were afraid even to come near the victims. Catherine nursed them, consoled them, buried the dead with her own hands.

This was the fourteenth century, when Italian city-states waged bloody war on one another, and timorous popes abandoned Italy for seventy years. As Catherine's reputation spread, she was drawn into the tumultuous politics of her time, even traveling to the papal court in France to persuade the pope to return to Rome -- only to see him followed by a pontiff so avaricious that cardinals held a second election, splitting Europe for decades between rival popes. Grief-        continued >>>