Comfort and Joy is a small book that can engender big and welcomed changes in our lives and our attitude. It's a book to keep handy, to turn to again and again. Lafia offers forty-five vignettes-small stories, pictures of comfort as simple and grand as a plush pillow, a warm cup of tea. Simply reading them is comforting and more than likely to inspire the reader to follow the suggestions in "Cultivating Comfort," which follows each passage. And because she knows that comfort taken and comfort shared make the world a very much better place, in a section called "Applied Comfort," Lafia gives us...

An unlikely friendship between Colette Lafia and a silent monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani, where Thomas Merton lived, comes to life through seven years of shared letters. Lafia's palpable openness and warm storytelling lead readers through the same compassionate process that led the author to accept herself, find peace with life, and strive for an ever-deepening relationship with God.