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A Blessing and Comfort Prayer Book
Creativity, Scripture & PrayerA collection of original prayers and complementary Bible passages. Use the prayers in this book to bless people at significant moments in their lives, the words of comfort in the second part of the book may be used at any time. The booklet comprises of prayers, Bible passages and pictures which can be coloured in.£3.99 -
From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on male spirituality
Influences & Suggested Reading, Seasons of Life, The Inner JourneyFrom Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality is a revised and updated edition of Richard Rohr's earlier best-seller, The Wild Man's Journey: Reflections on Male Spirituality. For this new work, Rohr added three chapters that discuss John the Baptist, Saint Paul and grief. An appendix provides a structure for a men's group, based on Rohr's work with M.A.L.E.S (Men as Learners and Elders), a program of the Center for Action and Contemplation, which Richard founded and now directs in Albuquerque, New Mexico.£14.50 -
Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer
Scripture & PrayerIn Everything Belongs, Richard Rohr offers a personal retreat for those who hunger for a deeper spiritual life but don't know what contemplation is. Fr Rohr helps us understand that intimacy with God cannot be achieved in the rational mind. By practising contemplation, we learn not to reason better but to see everything – including ourselves and other people – differently. As our perspective becomes wider, we discover that everything belongs. This edition includes a reading guide for individual and group reflection.£15.99 -
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Discernment – reading the signs of daily life
Everyday Life, Influences & Suggested Reading, The Inner JourneyHenri Nouwen understood the spiritual life as a journey of faith and transformation that is deepened by accountability, community and relationships. And the practice of discernment is about how to read the 'signs of the times' in daily life in order to know what to do next. Nouwen believes our calling and mission may be made clear through the people we meet on our path, the circumstances that each day brings, the books and sacred texts we read and meditate on, and through current events. Discernment seeks the will of God, requiring the disciplines of contemplative prayer, compassionate action and theological reflection. Discernment has been compiled by two of Nouwen's longtime students, Michael Christensen and Rebecca Laird, from coursework, journals and unpublished writings.£13.99 -
Streams of Living Water
Influences & Suggested Reading, The Inner JourneyIsn't it a shame that the rich tapestry of Christian belief and practice has so often been rigidly carved up, crammed into denominational boxes and padlocked shut? Richard Foster addresses this by identifying six major strands of Christian spirituality within the worldwide church that have contributed at various times and places across the centuries. They are: The Contemplative tradition - or the Prayer-filled life, The Holiness tradition - or the Virtuous life, The Charismatic tradition - or the Spirit-empowered life, The Social Justice tradition - or the Compassionate life, The Evangelical tradition - or the Word-centred life, The Incarnational tradition - or the Sacramental life, Foster's celebration of spiritual life incorporates history's most significant Christian figures and movements. It serves as a refreshing example of how real peopl have evaded preconceived ideas and lived wonderful Christ-centred lives in spite of constricting labels.£10.99 -
Into the Silent Land: The Practice of Contemplation
Spiritual Exercises, The Inner JourneyAn introduction to contemplative prayer that draws on insights from the Eastern Orthodox tradition of the Jesus Prayer, from the Western Carmelite tradition, from poets and novelists and from the author's own experience as a retreat director and confessor.£11.99 -
Contemplation in a World of Action
The Inner JourneyThe spiritual and psychological insights of these essays were nurtured in a monastic milieu, but their issues are universally human. Thomas Merton lays a foundation for personal growth and transformation through fidelity to "our own truth and inner being". Our desire and need to attain "a fully human and personal identity" is the focus of Merton's concern.£24.99 -
Finding our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices
Spiritual Exercises, The Inner Journey'Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.' Jeremiah 6:16 Most of us suffer from spiritual disorientation. Our souls are untended. And in this fragmented world, a soul left untended quickly loses direction. It forgets itself and becomes an insubstantial thing, disoriented and unavailable to the truth. And neither scientific secularism nor religious fundamentalism nor vague spiritualities have been able to offer any real answers. That's why a growing number of Christians are turning to early spiritual practices as a means of tending their souls. For centuries, believers have eagerly submitted to disciplines such as fixed-hour prayer, fasting, sacred meals, observing the Sabbath, or pilgrimage to create everyday sacredness, a spiritual rhythm for living within the well-worn grooves of a workaday life. In Finding Our Way Again, Brian McLaren serves as guide to a wide variety of these disciplines, showing how they form character, awaken us to life, and help us to experience God, and each other, in new and fresh ways.£12.50 -
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Blessing Europe: The Legacy of the Celtic Saints DVD
Celtic Sites & Saints, Celtic Studies & SpiritualityJoin Rainer Wälde as he sets out on a fascinating journey through Europe in the trail of the Celtic Saints. Discover the origins of Christianity in Ireland and journey with the Irish monks as they embark on their great adventure through France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy. Following the success of his multi-award winning documentary film, My Journey to Life, Rainer tells the stories of four major Celtic saints narrated by Roy Searle of the Northumbria Community. Set out with Columbanus, regarded by some as the 'first European', on his incredible journey that will take him from Bangor in Northern Ireland to Bobbio in Italy. Relive the story of his companion, Gallus, who founded a monastic cell on the banks of Lake Constance out of which emerged a great religions and cultural centre that become the present day town of St Gallen. Accompany Pirmin on the island of Reichenau and join Magnus on his bold adventures into the Allgau region of Southern Germany. Receive fresh inspiration from the beautiful music and soul-stirring prayers of the Celtic tradition. Discover the great legacy of the Irish monks and accompany Rainer on a moving journey to the source of life.Original price was: £14.99.£2.00Current price is: £2.00. -
Magnificat: A6 greetings card
Creativity, Spiritual GrowthWords: My soul magnifies the Lord My spirit rejoices in God my Saviour Background: Artist Mary Fleeson comments that this design is based on the words attributed to Mary, the mother of Jesus, her praises to God for His blessing and wonder at the great responsibility He has given to her. The figure in ‘Magnificat’ was designed to be deliberately androgenous so that anyone could confidently repeat Mary’s words. The woven strands rising like incense smoke from the vibrantly coloured figure are prayers coming from all parts of the body to symbolise that prayer is an energetic, body, mind and spirit activity. The plant drawn behind the wording grows upwards to represent the fruitfulness of a life steeped in prayer and wholly given to God’s purpose.' Printing and Sizing: This item is 105mmX148mm and is printed on 300gsm gloss card stock. Each card is blank inside, has its title and copyright details on the back and is individually wrapped in cellophane with an envelope.£2.25 -
Simplicity: The freedom of letting go
Spiritual Growth, The Inner JourneySimplicity – The Freedom of Letting Go by Richard Rohr St Francis’s ancient call to the simple life of freedom and happiness, as seen by America’s foremost Franciscan. Richard Rohr shows you how to: Recognize your radical dependence on others Understand why less is more Break through to contemplation Embrace a deeper spiritual freedom “Rohr’s kind of contemplation is an adventure in the wilderness, letting God call me by name and take me to a deeper place of peace that the world cannot give.” St. Anthony Messenger£16.99 -
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Into the depths: A Journey of Loss and Vocation
Everyday Life, The Inner JourneyIn January 1984, Sr Mary Margaret Funk, a Benedictine nun from Indiana, paid a visit to Maryknoll missionary nuns working in Bolivia. On what should have been a routine trip to the local town for a convocation ceremony, a flash flood swept away the jeep in which she, three nuns, a priest, and a disabled boy they had adopted were travelling. Only she and the priest survived What happened that night catapulted Sr Meg into twenty-five years of prayer and self-examination. She relentlessly explored her relationship with the transcendent and immanent God, the profundities of her religious tradition, her commitment to spiritual practice, and her very human failings. It was a journey that left her spiritually naked before the terrible love of God; a journey to keep one's heart open to the transforming wounds of suffering. In the great tradition of spiritual confessions from Augustine to Thomas Merton's The Seven-Story Mountain, Into the Depths is a fearlessly honest and simply told account of one woman's struggle to engage at the deeper levels with the most profound questions of faith.Original price was: £12.99.£8.99Current price is: £8.99. -
Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
Influences & Suggested Reading, Seasons of Life, The Inner JourneyIn the first half of life, we are naturally and rightly preoccupied with establishing our identities – climbing, achieving, and performing. But those concerns will not serve us as we grow older and begin to embark on a further journey, one that involves challenges, mistakes, loss of control, broader horizons, and necessary suffering that shocks us out of our comfort zones. Eventually, we need to see ourselves in a different and more life-living way. This message of 'falling down' – that is in fact moving upward – is the most resisted and counterintuitive of messages in the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. In Falling Upward, Father Richard Rohr offers a new paradigm for understanding one of the most profound of life's mysteries: how our failing can be the foundation for our ongoing spiritual growth. Drawing on the wisdom from time-honoured myths, heroic poems, great thinkers, and sacred religious texts, the author explores the two halves of life to show that those who have fallen, failed, or 'gone down' are the only ones who understand 'up'. We grow spiritually more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. With rare insight, Rohr takes us on a journey to give us an understanding of how the heartbreaks, disappointments and first loves of life are actually stepping stones to the spiritual joys that the second half of life has in store for us.£12.99 -
Eyes of the Heart; photography as Christian contemplative practice
Creativity, Spiritual ExercisesEyes of the Heart by Christine Valters Paintner explores photography as a spiritual practice from a Christian perspective. Christine builds on the process of contemplative creativity in her book The Artist’s Rule (also available from the community bookshop) by adapting the monastic practice of lectio divina (sacred reading) into a form of visio divina (sacred seeing). A spiritual director and Benedictine oblate, she guides readers through a new way of spiritual observation – through the lens of a camera – and in receiving images, not simply taking them. She writes that, ‘My hope is that, in exploring the language of photography, you [develop] new portals into the your own experience and awareness of God. Shadow and light, framing, colour, reflections, and mirrors all offer us metaphors for ways of understanding how we might move towards seeing ourselves and God with the eyes of the heart.’ She invites us to use our cameras to help us to release our expectations of what we think we ought to see and learn to discover what is actually there. And then helps us to bring this kind of interaction into our everyday lives.£12.99 -
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An Altar in the World
Church & Leadership, Everyday Life, Influences & Suggested Reading, The Inner JourneyIn this highly acclaimed and lyrical book, the best-selling author Barbara Brown Taylor reveals the countless ways we can discover divine depths in the small things we do and see every day. People go to extraordinary lenghts, she writes, to discover this treasure. 'They will spend hours launching prayers into the heavens. They will travel half way around the world to visit a monastery in India...The last place most people will look is right under their feet, in the everyday activities, accidents and encounters of their lives...the reason so many of us cannot see the red X marks the spot is because we're standing on it.' An Altar in the the World shows us how heaven and earth meet in such ordinary occurrences as hanging out the wahing, doing the supermarket shop, feeding an animal, losing our way. It will transfrom our understanding of ourselves and the word we live in and renew our sense of wonder at the extraordinary gift of life.£12.99 -
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Untamed Gospel: protest, poems and prose for the Christian year
Church & Leadership, Creativity, Resources for the Christian Year, Scripture & PrayerUntamed Gospel complements The Bright Field and Darkness Yielding, and offers meditations, reflections, stories, prayers and poems for use throughout the church year. Each one focuses on the often startling nature of Jesus' sayings and teachings, the raw honesty of the psalms and other biblical texts, and on contemporary issues, such as mental health and displacement, seen in the light of the demands of the kingdom of God. A rich resource for worship, preaching, teaching and personal reflection throughout the year, Untamed Gospel contains hundreds of reproducible items, including seasonal reflections, stories, homilies, poems and some of Jim Cotter's last writings as he was being treated for cancer: a moving sequence of prayer poems inspired by the psalms.Original price was: £17.99.£13.99Current price is: £13.99. -
Glimpses of Eden: field notes from the edge of eternity
Everyday Life, Seasons of Life, The Inner Journey'The land has a long memory...it forgets nothing, waiting only for the opportunity to ease the heart.' Glimpses of Eden is a seasonally-arranged collection of the very best of novelist Jonathan Tulloch's acclaimed nature column, which ran in The Tablet for more than 10 years. In 96 evocative daily records of his exploration of the land, mostly within an hour's bike ride of his North Yorkshire home, Jonathan captures snapshots of the wonders of the natural world. Here are eternal stories of resilience and beauty, hope and death, survival and renewal, a tapestry of miraculous creation to enrich our souls and deepen our understanding of life. Each reading is followed by a new reflection written for this book.£19.95 -
Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit
Influences & Suggested Reading, Spiritual Growth£12.99Spiritual formation, I have come to believe, is not about steps or stages on the way to perfection. It’s about the movements from the mind to the heart through prayer in its many forms that reunite us with God, each other, and our truest selves.
Henri Nouwen, from the Introduction
Henri Nouwen, beloved author, priest and spiritual guide, counseled many people during his lifetime, but his principles of spiritual formation were never written down. Now, Michael Christensen, one of Nouwen’s longtime students, and Rebecca Laird have taken the famous course in spiritual formation and supplemented it with his unpublished writings to reveal Nouwen’s sage advice on how to live out the five classic stages of spiritual development.
I always knew I was in the presence of a spiritual master when I was with Henri Nouwen. Here are some simple, wise words that will allow the master to continue to teach.
Richard Rohr, O.F.M., author of The Naked Now
One of the book’s many strengths is its integration of an area especially important to Nouwen, the contemplation of icons and other works of art – visio divina – in order ‘to behold the beauty of the Lord’.
Jim Forest, author of Praying with Icons and The Road to Emmaus
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Life Journey: A6 Greetings card
Creativity, Spiritual GrowthWords: Life journey winding, Patterns undulating, overlapping Weaving community Touch as you pass, smile, hold the moment As God holds you in His heart Background: Artist Mary Fleeson comments...'The weaving of lives in community are expressed in 'Life Journey', whether that is a religious community or not. It is about living each moment, making a positive difference in the lives of others and getting to know God better as we see Him in those we meet.' Printing and Sizing: This item is 105mm x 148mm and is printed on 300gsm gloss card stock. Each card is blank inside, has its title and copyright details on the back and is individually wrapped in cellophane with an envelope.£2.25 -
Ancient Paths CD
Celtic Prayer, Creativity, Music & Creativity, Spiritual GrowthAnna's first solo album includes some of her 'signature' pieces as well as some songs of her own. Some of you will recognise familiar words from the Complines in Celtic Daily Prayer drawn from Carmina Gadelica and other traditional sources. Here they are set to Anna's own music which has emerged over the years of saying and singing these night-time prayers with her children, Joel and Martha. Anna says, 'I hope you will want to play this album often and that it will capture something of the rhythm of the tides, the sounds of the island and also its stillness.'£12.00 -
Celtic Parables: Stories, Poems and Prayers
Celtic Prayer, Celtic Studies, Celtic Studies & Spirituality, Scripture & Prayer, Spiritual GrowthNever mock what others say. Perhaps their words are full of nonsense. Perhaps they are trying to puff themselves up. Perhaps they like hearing the sound of their voices. Perhaps they are trying to deceive their hearers. Perhaps they are foolish and dim. Perhaps they are more clever than wise. Yet amidst the useless clay You may find jewels beyond price. The word of God is in every heart, And can speak through every voice. Never mock (p.104) This collection of stories, meditations, poems and prayers evokes the authentic spirit of Celtic Christianity. Capturing the atmosphere of parables passed down through generations, it shows the human warmth, respect for the natural world and robust, down-to-earth qualities for which Celtic spirituality is so greatly valued. With its rich treasury of material – most of it previously unavailable in modern editions – Celtic Parables offers a fresh lively introduction to the Celtic world. It will appeal to all those fascinated by our Celtic heritage and the way it speaks directly to us today.£10.99 -
Colonies of Heaven: Celtic Models for Today’s Church
Celtic Studies, Celtic Studies & Spirituality, Re-imagining Church'Celtic' Christianity continues to fascinate us, but is it relevant to the life and witness of the church today? Ian Bradley is convinced that it is; that the building of 'colonies of heaven' drawing on Celtic models provides the way forward for the churches in the twenty-first century. Colonies of Heaven explores how the distinctive themes in the early Christianity of the British Isles – monasticism, blessing and cursing, penance and pastoral care, worship, the communion of saints and pilgrimage – might be applied in practical terms to Christian life today. Building 'colonies of heaven' (communities of prayer, artistic and creative activity, hospitality and team ministry), Bradley argues, would revitalise our churches with a new spiritual and social role in an increasingly secular and fragmented society.£14.99 -
A Labyrinth Prayer Handbook: creative resources for worship and reflection
Creativity, Music & Creativity, Scripture & Prayer, Spiritual Exercises, The Inner JourneyAn imaginitive and practical resource for using the labyrinth in worship, spiritual practice and pastoral care. It offers many ideas for using labyrinths with individuals and groups in different settings, including schools, hospitals and hospices, residential care, mental health care, adults with learning disabilities, retreats and quiet days, and in seasonal worship throughout the church year. It offers complete outlines for themed worship and workshops, focussing on such subjects as life stages, pilgrimage and vocations, and includes prayers, simple liturgies, suggestions for music and creative ideas for responding to walking the labyrinths. This inviting book also shows how to create your own labyrinth, whether a small hand-held one, or a temporary or permanent installation, indoors or outdoors.£14.99 -
Caim: A4 signed print
Creativity, Spiritual GrowthBackground: Artist Mary Fleeson tells us that...'"Caim" was originally designed as a CD cover for an album of prayers set to music by the same name, therefore the imagery reflects themes of the music included, however as is often the case the illustration evolved into something which speaks beyond the obvious inspiration. The hand seems to reach out in a loving, gentle gesture to caress the face of the Creator, symbolised by the star (Revelation 22:16 ‘I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.’). The complex knotwork intersperses three overlapping circles which represent the Trinity and the patterns and colours are life patterns, weaving and merging, coloured by experiences, actions and reactions.' Printing and Sizing: This item is 210mm x 297mm and is printed on 300gsm card stock using our in-house printer. Each print is individually signed by Mary Fleeson and is packaged in a cellophane wrapper with a descriptive backing sheet explaining more about the piece and the Scriptorium.£12.50 -
Beauty’s Field: seeing the world
Culture & MissionAs the leader of the World Community for Christian Meditation, Laurence Freeman's calling takes him all over the world to teach and lead groups who want to practice contemplative prayer. In this spiritual travel memoir, he recounts timeless, memorable and moving stories of people, places and events in which he has encountered God 's transformative presence. The title of the book comes from a Shakespeare sonnet and the book explores how the life of God can be found in the most unlikely places, not only in the world's beauty but even in its tragedy. Slum priests quietly bringing hope to the favelas of Brazil, the gloriously fat stone ladies of Malta which are the world's oldest depictions of God, the different effects of a mountain-top retreat on an investment banker, a tired social worker and a cancer patient, the impact of a child's death on a whole community - these and many more stories movingly reveal how the sacred strains to find expression in every life, every place, every day.£12.99