Professing: Rise Above Depression and Codependency

by Donald A. Carpenter

Drunken womanizer Ward Reid is given one last opportunity to save his newspaper reporter job. A chance meeting with the mysterious Professor compels Ward to chase a story that will change his life. Ward sees himself in the Professor's tales of love and betrayal, alcoholism and codependency, death and depression. He learns how to pull himself out of his misery and create the present and future he craves by applying the Professor's Great Truths. The Professing Series are a set of inspiring novels with spirituality-based self-help messages, written in the manner of The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, The Alchemist, and The Celestine Prophecy. "Professing flows and captures the readers attention in a way that makes you feel you are in the story. It appeals to the spiritual reader and to the reader who loves a love story." Libby Smith Ed.D., Ph.D., Wind Horse Wellness "Professing touched my heart and soul. I can hardly wait to read the next book in the series."Denise R. McGinnis, Ph.D., Stephen Minister"Professing refuses to provide even the least delectation in its trashy beginnings. Yet the trash gets taken out and the fragile human spirit is dignified. Carpenter accomplishes this by framing the story as teacher-and-student dialogue, in which the apparent Rishi becomes unraveled as pilgrim, and the addicted, self-humiliated seeker discovers his aspirations to be the wings of grace. Ward, the hungry news reporter finds the Professor he wants to elevate, to be much like him. Without grasping at symbols or sacraments of organized religion, Carpenter uses point and counterpoint to fool us as he exposes the smoke and mirrors of our spiritual concepts and illuminates the human salvage yard.At a point when Ward, the protagonist, sees his trashed life as utterly empty, he meets the Professor on an Alaska cruise which helps to cool Ward’s jets and also to provide minimalist café settings for the Professor’s disturbing stories. The reader tends to expect flights of extraordinary experience similar to those in the classic two-character movie, “Dinner with Andre.” But Carpenter serves up simple fare which helps the reader de-tox from addiction to experience. Unlike spiritual experience, Carpenter’s realization poses no alternatives to just what is. The tease of the book is that the master will have the answers and that the student will be able to enshrine the master to elevate his own life. The Professor leaves his student disillusioned in a healthy way, humbled by his own excuses and re-vitalized by his own ability to change. This teacher reflects the best in the student without calling himself better.Despite the suspense and successive let-downs which lead the reader into the theme of the book, Carpenter succeeds very well in sketching stations of growth, which the reader may better recognize out of the unnatural incompleteness of his or her conditioned existence, for having read Professing. The stations along the pilgrimage are waiting in the consciousness of each human, Carpenter seems to when the soul is ready, the angels of annunciation appear out of common life; the transmission is never the way one has conceived; and enlightenment is just the way it is.Carpenter’s craft is the perfect glove to hold the story in it. Each chapter entices and disappoints our desire for magic, peeling away mask after mask. The author’s appalling situations, cultured precisely from the white medium of hope, are a better vessel for the theme of spiritual recognition than chain mail questing to find grail or hold spotless white hand. Carpenter’s reverse romanticism shows the seediness of anti-heroes as God’s huckleberry patch. He brings us gradually to the hand which can’t be grasped, inside the false magician’s glove, saying, now that the reader is prepared to Everything is as it should be now.”Frederick D. Thompkins Jr., Literary Reviewer

292 pages, Paperback

Published February 18, 2017

Reviews

[Trudy Else · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful

A very well written and insightful book that kept me wanting to read way into the night. I liked the spirituality that was brought into every day living. Rather therapeutic.