Looking out over Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula, Bill Henderson says he sensed he was standing on “holy ground.” Inspired by the beauty and the silence, he wanted to build something there.

Founder of Pushcart Press and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Henderson tells the story of “an aging man who builds a holy place in his backyard,” as he describes it in Cathedral: An Illness and a Healing (Pushcart Press, Oct.). The memoir features bugs, cancer, spiritual wavering, and rocks. Lots of rocks.

After a visit to Chartres in France (a “human creation of great devotion,” he says), Henderson decided to create a private cathedral on the three-and-a-half acres near Sedgwick where he had built a cabin. It would be a place to pray and think about “love and wonder”; such prayer had come to define his worship after he drifted away from organized religion and the “silent but devoted” Presbyterian faith in which he had been raised.

Henderson had never built with stone before, but he began collecting flat rocks on the property and from a nearby quarry, planning a round structure that would represent the circle of life. He and his daughter peeled back moss to reveal a 20-foot-wide rock ledge in the shape of a broken heart-- the perfect location, as it turned out. The first step was to construct a three-story tower, a process chronicled in his memoir Tower: Faith, Vertigo and Amateur Construction (Pushcart Press, 2000).

In the years that followed, Henderson wrote two more memoirs--Simple Gifts: One Man’s Search for Grace (Free Press, 2008), about hymns that moved him; and All My Dogs: A Life (David R. Godine, 2011), because “their love is the closest to Christ’s, unconditional,” he says. Inspired by reading about the humble faith of St. Francis, Henderson began building again in 2005. During construction, he was diagnosed with cancer and struggled through three years of treatment. The ordeal made him wonder whether he should go on–with the building or with his life. “It’s easy to be a Christian when you’re healthy,” Henderson says, “but when you’re sick, you don’t even know what faith is.”

His daughter encouraged him to continue. She, his wife, and many friends and neighbors--he calls them “saints”--are embodied for Henderson in some 85 stones that became part of the cathedral, like the portraits of townspeople in the windows of Chartres. Through seasons of despair and hope, Henderson’s faith was reshaped into gratitude for the things that really matter--family, friends, and love.

“Ten million Americans are cancer survivors,” he writes in Cathedral. “Each has their own story of panic, despair and recovery, and many have told these stories in support groups, blogs and books. Each has built a cathedral of hope. . . I constructed mine in words and in stone.”

Now cancer free, Henderson prays in what he calls “St. Francis’ hut,” which is dedicated to his wife and daughter. He hopes his story will encourage others “who suffer with cancer and have to keep going.”