Eight lay mystics who seek the divine outside the strictly religious framework are the protagonists of this book: free and courageous women who want to go beyond the idea of God that is proposed to them.

“God is not like that, I am sure, and so I seek him on my own,” says Catherine Pozzi, and like her Charlotte von Kirschbaum, Adrienne von Speyr, Banine, Elisabeth Behr Sigel, Romana Guarnieri, up to Simone Weil and Chiara Lubich. In this quest nourished by awareness they founded movements, worked in factories, loved wi-thout reservation, exercised a profession. 

Eight stories of women who experienced new interpersonal relationships and new hierarchies inspiring churches and society. A yearning for spirituality that is also a path of emancipation inscribed in the 20th-century women’s liberation movement.

From the Conclusions:

«Of course, these women are exceptions, but exceptions that today attract many bewildered stares. In this secularised world, where religion has lost its enthusiasm and become stereotyped, individuals move to a level where faith is too weak and too distracted to lead to any inner awakening. Today, everyone is alone with his fate, alone in the face of hopeless death. There are people, however, who aspire to a higher, more intense and luminous life, who seek other ways of thinking, perceiving, expressing and dreaming. God is the seeker par excellence, says the Islamic mystic Rumi, and today this search is becoming a common experience, free of all dogma, often indifferent to traditional religious traditions.

As we see from the lives of our mystics, in the modern world religious involvement almost never stems from the elements that one’s own religion provides, but rather from individual research and occasional encounters. But, above all, from the ability and courage to embark on new paths.