After 60 years at Gethsemani Abbey, Br. Paul follows up his recent memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life, with a poetic collection that shows how to do just that – by writing poetry. Amounting to Nothing is both practical and metaphysical, a puzzling over the ultimate things of life, and a descending on the Benedictine ladder of humility to the earthly creatures surrounding a Kentucky monastery. This is less an exploration in self-knowledge th ...
These poems remind us that “home” is a way of being in this world. It finds expression in the inner light that carries us through dark seasons and in what inspires us to risk life in the face of death. Many of these poems come from a long looking at the familiar and the ordinary, a patient listening for traces of a beauty that might still save us. They ponder the resilience that lies at the heart of the natural world, as well as in our desire to ...
What Will Soon Take Place is an imaginative journey through the book of Revelation. It offers a poet's view of the prophetic, not in the sense of seeking out clues to the «end times,» but a means of taking this strange, fantastic book of scripture and letting it read its way into personal lives. ...
Rooted in the grit of urban Baltimore and the forests of rural Massachusetts, these poems remind us that life's tensions and polarities are energies we carry within ourselves. These are poems of witness and commentary, conversation and meditation. They offer moments of close looking, and of looking away; of loving, and of bungled attempts to be more loving. They call us to look long and hard – and generously – at our lives. Written ...
This collection of poems explores the saints of the church's history and contemporary persons who embody something of their charism. Three sections are arranged around the themes of the three «theological virtues»:—Faith, portrayed as a source of strength in times of trial— Hope, the darkest in the book, dealing with matters of the body's frailty, illness, social discrimination, and the search for a way to live with ...
"These are meditative poems that seem to rise from a long and deep looking at life, in its most ordinary and familiar moments. They invite us into the gaze, suggesting how the surfaces of things might reveal stronger truths for those who know to wait and wonder. These pages call us to consider our lives as `lent by the mystery and borrowed back,' as the poet puts it, showing us what yearning might require—and yield." —Mark S. Burrows, ...
Poet and literature professor Scott Cairns ran headlong into his midlife crisis – a fairly common experience among men nearing the age of fifty—while walking on the beach with his Labrador. His was not a desperate attempt to recapture youth, filled with sports cars and younger women. Instead, Cairns realized his spiritual life was advancing at a snail's pace and time was running out. Midlife crisis for this this Baptist turned Eastern Ortho ...
"I think that Phyllis was a poet first and foremost, before anything else. Here she has attentively gathered all of the poems she wished to preserve from the last half century. A handful of them were written in the last few years. This book should surprise a lot of people. Its honesty leaves me breathless." —Jon M. Sweeney, editor of Phyllis Tickle: Essential Spiritual Writings (Orbis), and author of the biography, Phyllis Tickle(forthcomi ...
Spiritual teacher, writer, rabbi, and poet, Rami Shapiro has taught thousands of people in workshops across North America for a quarter century. His books have sold in the hundreds of thousands. But before he did any of those things he was writing poems, psalms, and prayers that were anthologized in the Jewish siddurim of several different denominations. He did most of this work while he was a pulpit rabbi in Florida. Still today, every week at ...
