Notes from an Exhibition, and different ways to pray.
I recently read Partrick Gale’s wonderful novel, Notes from an Exhibition. It pressed all the right buttons for me. He traces a tale through the life of an artist, so vividly you can practically feel the paint under your fingernails. The artist marries and has four kids, and the story of her life, her work and her dysfunctional family is told not chronologically, but through the lens of a retrospective exhibition of her work and artefacts.
The family she marries into are Quakers, and the way Gale captures the mode of life and prayer that they live is so like my own that I began to wonder whether deep down I am a Quaker, not an Anglican at all. I say this lightheartedly, since having “dumped” religion many years ago, the recreation of a spiritual life that has both moral and intellectual integrity has meant, for me, drawing from several different traditions. Anglican theology, and the practice of public worship, is the glue in the middle, but my private prayers are mostly contemplative and wordless.
This week I came across the website of the Annunciation Trust, a group of spiritual directors. The site has a page with a list of thirteen different approaches to prayer, ranging from centring down through public liturgy to praying with the Bible and pryaing with the Imagination. Good stuff. Go read.
-
author musician theologian
Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
In an increasingly secularised society few people have a good working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - are built on Christian concepts and biblical references. The Writing on the Wall provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories. Each chapter gives some background to the text of the Bible, and shows how the stories have become enmeshed in Western culture. Adam and Eve, the ten plagues of Egypt, The Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene all feature - along with how the Bible has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Monty Python, and Caravaggio to Banksy. 
Giving It Up explores the Lenten idea of 'giving up', taking it beyond the traditional idea of simply abstaining from something, and suggesting instead that what we need to give up is our existing ideas about God. With a daily readings for each day of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, it follows the heroes of the Bible who had to give up their own too-small ideas about God.
This is Maggi’s bestselling book of daily readings for each day of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Advent is the beginning of the Church year, and marks the anticipation of the coming Messiah. These readings explore how beginnings and endings in our own lives are illuminated by the different Gospel narratives of Christ's coming.
-
Search
-
-
