Paula D'Arcy was raised in the church.
"I would have said 24 minutes before it happened that I had a very strong faith," she said.
But that "it" — a 1975 car crash with a drunken driver that killed her husband and 21-month-old daughter — knocked D'Arcy's idea of faith on end.
"It was a concept I had," she said. "It couldn't hold me in the face of that kind of loss."
She needed something bigger to sustain her, and so she embarked on a quest to discover meaning in the midst of devastation.
More than 30 years later, D'Arcy, now a writer, speaker and president of the Red Bird Foundation, has come to some conclusions about pain and loss and forgiveness. She'll share her lessons in Lancaster this week with the Kairos School of Spiritual Formation.
"Life would make no sense," she said, "if there was no kind of meaning behind this sort of loss."
Power and fragilityD'Arcy's presentation on Saturday, Sept. 27, is titled "The Great Lessons of the Journey." Her hardest lesson came in the wake of that crash 33 years ago.
Young and pregnant, only she and her unborn child survived.
"I look back on it now," D'Arcy, who lives in Texas, said. "My daughter [Beth Starr], who I was pregnant with — she's just a little bit older than I was then. God, I was so young; how did I do it?
"Millions of people in that sea of pain have discovered — it's one moment at a time, one day at a time."
The former psychotherapist's search for meaning set her on "an amazing course to find what really sustains life. Why does this happen to me? Why does this happen to anybody? Was I being punished?"
She asked questions. She was led "from person to person" toward answers. What she learned from others who experienced loss surprised her.
"The one commonality [was] they learned to see beauty in exactly what they were given," D'Arcy said.
And so, "instead of being an angry person who was asking for answers, I became a much more open person." She learned to accept "how fragile life is, and yet the power that is in it."
She learned to be willing to forgive the driver who killed her family: "Forgiveness was the only way my heart would soften and I would be free."
And she found, in assessing what she learned about faith as a child, "there is an enormous reality behind that."
"In the early days, it was almost continuous pain," D'Arcy said. "And yet there were intermittent moments with the knowing that it was going to be OK.
"For many years, I had to just put the questions aside and just accept what was. I had to decide if I could accept life on its terms. The peace was there all along — I knew it in flashes."
Ultimately, she concluded that meaning "was in learning to just receive life as it's given."
D'Arcy began to share the lessons with others, "taking the love I had known and allowing it to grow in a different way."
She began to write books, to lead seminars and to speak. She worked with Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's Peale Foundation from 1980-93. In 1998 she launched the Red Bird Foundation to promote opportunities for spiritual growth for those in need.
D'Arcy is now at work on a new book. The story of her spiritual journey was recounted in her 1996 work, "Gift of the Red Bird."
"Thirty-some years later, I can say I gained more from this than I lost," she said. "Ultimately, the pain really transformed.
"What I see in it is now the power and prevalence of love over the pain."
D'Arcy will speak at 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 27, at Neffsville Mennonite Church, 2371 Lititz Pike. Tickets are $15. A "Meet the Author" reception at 5 p.m. costs $50. For tickets, phone 669-2957, e-mail Kairos@on-the-journey.org, or see the Kairos School of Spiritual Formation Web site, www.on-the-journey.org.
Helen Colwell Adams is a Sunday News staff writer. E-mail her at hcolwell@lnpnews.com.
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