Dear Friends of French Affaires,
I wanted to announce the publication of the book about my wife Elizabeth and me. It has just appeared.
Some of you may have seen the serialization of Part One which I shared at the website. The book is in three parts.
The publisher alerted me yesterday that one can now purchase it. I am hoping that hardcopy will be available alongside paperback and e-book type versions. Amazon is starting to load the details.
You will recognize the cover from Cezanne’s painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Elizabeth climbed it several times in her life, including with me after her lung transplant in 2017.
I was in Aix-en-Provence ten days ago when the final endorsements came through, steps from where she and her Vanderbilt friends lodged in the Quartier Mazarin, on rue Cardinale. That seemed fitting.
I share them with you here.
My deep prayer is that this book pays cherished tribute to Elizabeth, and might aid others as they walk the path of loss after great love. A love that has no end because it is God’s eternal gift.
In this context, I know I am speaking to those who spent days with Elizabeth in France and shared her love of all things French.
This book captures just a measure of that, chronicling our own shared time together as husband and wife in our home in Courances and beyond.
Love to you all.
Christopher Seitz
Le Grand Voyage Reviews and Kudos
“The theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity apply not only to our relationship with God, but to our lives with one another. Seitz movingly depicts how this is so in this tender account of his time with his wife Elizabeth in France during the last years of her life. Imbued with gentle humor, sympathetic if sometimes wry social observation, and the deep current of love, this book is a testimony in miniature to the vivifying and sanctifying power of human affection in the eyes of God.”
—Ephraim Radner, Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto
“Chris Seitz’s Le Grand Voyage is a travelogue of a trip none of us would choose, yet every one of us must, in some way, venture. Seitz gives us a beautifully told memoir of a life richly shared together, an unsentimental account of suffering and death’s unwelcome intrusion, and a moving witness to love’s tenacity in the face of loss. This is a love story—honest, tender, and theologically wise—in which grief is not love’s defeat but its continuation. ‘Unspent love.’ In these pages, sorrow is not denied, death is not romanticized, and yet love, by grace, refuses to yield. Heartbreaking and hopeful, this book is a testimony to the resilience of human love and to the mercy of God who sustains even in the valley of loss.”
—Will Willimon, Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry, Duke Divinity School
“Chris Seitz tells a moving, profound, and cultured story of adventure, loss, and love. It is presented not in an obvious linear fashion but in a manner of re-presentation, often looping back as the priceless past interrupts the storytelling, painting vignettes in such a way that fact and meaning are mixed together. The prose is often raw, but never rough. It breathes words of life drawn from scripture and precious experience.”
—Mark Elliott, Honorary Professor, School of Divinity, University of St Andrews
“At once candid and consoling; memories of a particular love and loss which will bring tears of recognition to others who have loved and grieved. Chris Seitz’s honesty and ability to describe so exquisitely the joy of life with Elizabeth—and then its loss—is a testament to the truth that grief is indeed unspent love, and that great love has no conclusion. Seitz describes his particular experience while at the same time drawing us deeper into the Love who every grief has known.”
—L. Ann Jervis, Professor Emerita of New Testament, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto
“Le Grand Voyage recounts a storybook life in France, an unimaginable victory over a fatal disease, followed by a tragic turn—death comes for the victor(s) all the same. Part memoir, part theologically informed meditation on grief, the author interrogates disorienting loss in the light of eternity. Others will find here echoes of the particularities of their own losses and recognize those precious intuitions of one’s beloved in the eternal present of God.”
—Claire Mathews McGinnis, Professor, Theology Department, Loyola University Maryland
“Many of us have benefited from Dr Seitz’s scholarly work, combining as he does profound learning and passionate love for Christ and his church. In this book we benefit from something different: his deep love for his late wife. It is a beautiful, tragic story, an elegy to the great love of his life, now departed, an example of deep mourning, though, as St. Paul would remind us, mourning that is not without hope. It is this generation’s A Grief Observed, painfully honest and touchingly human—a book from which all of us can learn.”
—Carl R. Trueman, Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies, Grove City College