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Author Melinda Worth Popham left home for Yale Divinity School at age fifty-six after a barrage of painful life events-above all, the nightmare of her teenage daughter's life-threatening depression. These events brought her to her knees, and a monastic method of meditation became her mainstay as well as her portal to the holy. This memoir, Grace Period, tells the story of one mother's experience of a daughter's intractable illness and the discovery that pain is the Miracle Gro of spiritual growth. The radical, mystical experience that ultimately propelled Popham to Yale Divinity School at a pivotal juncture in her life did not lead to the pursuit of late-call ordination to the ministry, but quite simply to her study of God. What she discovered, though, in the course of her two years there, was that, for her, encountering God happened beyond the study of theology at an Ivy League seminary.