Teaser Tuesday - Jan 6

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

The pod is completely dark and sound-free (although the one I used did offer customers the option of 'calming music') and you feel neither temperature nor gravity. I was generously given a double session, because my friend felt that I was more used to silence than most people and a single hour would not be enough for me to get the full benefits.

Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence - I've been wanting to read this and happened to notice it in the library - a book on the value and dangers of silence. In the teaser she's describing a session in a flotation tank at a health spa.

Teaser Tuesday - 3rd July

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

We are suddenly awakening, much too late, to the fact that we have been gorging at Belteshazzar's table, that blind pursuit of greed has made us skeletons at the feast.
At some future point in time, tar balls from a warm-water spill -- if not from the Gulf of Mexico then from some other blow-out -- will show up in Alaska waters to mingle with the crud left from the Exxon Valdez

a mediation on the damage we are doing to our world also - as last week - from Maggie Ross's Writing the Icon of the Heart. She has spent much time over the years in the wilderness and silence of Alaska.
(blogger tells me this is my 2000th post on this weblog not as much appearing here as in the past)

Teaser Tuesday - 26th June

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Within this space are silence, stillness and waiting. Discretion is what Aristotle referred to as the space where virtue is found.

from Maggie Ross's Writing the Icon of the Heart - In Silence Beholding some good thoughts on discretion in that chapter - I read it last night and there was a lot of pausing for reflection. I heard Maggie Ross at the Manchester Theological Society last month - was a bit heavy - though the Q&A afterwards were far more helpful! I intended to blog on it but seem to have forgotten...

Advent Reflections

DSCF8721, a photo by rajmarshall on Flickr.

For the second year, our church has produced a book of relections for Advent. Church members were given a Bible passage and asked to reflect and write their thoughts on it. You can read the complete booklet here.
I had the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24:43) and mine took the form of a meditation:

Weeds cover the churchyard
Moss and lichen blur the tidy sharp lines of old gravestones
Untidiness, a Hindrance? Protection? Comfort?
Green softening the old outlines.

Guy ropes snaking across the paving stones - a barrier or a support?
Bright tension and opportunity, challenging our moral tidiness
The tents of the ungodly are where? freedom? church? money?
Those with little, seeing riches on every side.

First the blade and then the ear,
Then the full corn shall appear;
And the fruitful ears to store -
But in the fire the tares to cast;

Thank God we are not the final judges
help us to live with untidyness,
but always growing into that fruitfulness.

Teaser Tuesday - 7 June

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

The television may be going, but we don't have to watch it. In this way distractions cases to be so distracting. If we let them be, we can see that they appear in something deeper: the vastness of our own awareness. This vastness is God's cloak, what the author calls the cloud of unknowing, "the dark cloud where God was" (Ex 20:21)

.. taking a few extra sentences, this is from Martin Laird's Into the Silent Land a book on contemplative prayer which our study group is currently reading, I've found it pretty helpful. Here's a review of the book.

Letting down holy socks

Here's an unseasonal thought:

..you have to accept the uncomfortable gifts that Advent offers: not gold, frankincense and myrrh, but waiting, despair, judgement. The saintly road is not so much about striving to pull up holy socks as letting them slide down. Not that you sag in holiness, be we are asked to adopt a discipline of surrender. ... The Church is for the most part in the fast lane, being driven harder than it can faithfully go. It is hyperactive with false hope.

from David Wood's 'Dark Prayer', letters written to the Community of the Three Hours

Silence

Unfortunately, our trip to Luzern in the Summer didn't give us time to see the Kunstmuseum's exhibition on the theme of Silence - there's just about a month left if you find yourself in the area! The exhibition closes on 22nd November.