These Reflective Prayers are the result of permitting a gentle reading of the lectionary texts for a given service to resonate in me and emerge as a searching engagement of the word with my spirit in a mood of settled joy. The ninety samples given are the most recent, in order, at the time of publication.

These Reflective Prayers are the result of permitting a gentle reading of the lectionary texts for a given service to resonate in me and emerge as a searching engagement of the word with my spirit in a mood of settled joy. The ninety samples are the most recent, in order, at the time of publication.

These Reflective Prayers are the result of permitting a gentle reading of the lectionary texts for a given service to resonate in me and emerge as a searching engagement of the word with my spirit in a mood of settled joy. The ninety samples given are the most recent, in order, at the time of publication.

Abbot Andre Louf said that, when a person decides to get serious about the spiritual life, s/he should acquire a spiritual director. Wayne Proudfoot argued that the form of religious experience depends upon the tradition in which it is perceived. Georges Bataille searched out the meaning of his own intense inner experience in non-traditional ways. This book seeks to follow the meaning of traditional measures of the spiritual life learned through the experience of the author once his spiritual life decided to choose him.

Poetry writing has proven proficient at helping me see what is there to be seen. I will see or hear or reflect on something which then provides an image, a nuance that emerges in a word, a line. The single line and image, written, provides a cadence, a focus of sound and echo that invites a second line, and more. Usually, they come quickly and run until they tell me they are done and the poem is complete. This book draws upon such poems over a pair of sweeps of my history plus a sampling of more current poems that strike me as desirable in this collection. These pieces of my past often recollect for me the occasion but also leave that occasion obscured and allow the poem to do its work of creating an image and a flow in my own mind. The poems, in my experience, write their meaning on my mind. And, I hope, on yours as well. For then the poems do their work.

These are bible studies of a limited scale, developed and led by the author with two of the congregations he served. The first congregation was in Mantua OH in the late 1970s, from which the first three bible studies arose: Ruth, Lamentations, and The Infancy Narratives. The second congregation was in New Martinsville WV from 1998 through 2003, these being done is a slightly different style: Psalms of Ascent, Selected Psalms, The Speech of Stephan, Encountering God, Matthew 5 and Matthew 6 & 7. I sought to bring a serious, somewhat scholarly approach to the study of the bible among those congregation members who chose to attend. This revisiting of those studies prove once again their value to me. I hope they prove to be so for you as well.

The Book of Psalms in the Bible attracts a great deal of devotional attention from many people, including this author. This attention turned in the Spring of 1993 toward a project of translating the Psalter from the original Hebrew. This was as a spiritual as well as scholarly task for me. The end product, with a few other Hebrew poems added to the collection, came complete in the Spring of 1994. In the late summer of 2022, I took to revisiting my work, revising and correcting it as I found it necessary, and brought to this format in the late Autumn of the same year. I had sought to provide a translation in the immediacy of the present tense, as free as I could manage of the generic masculine, and as lively as I could manage to formulate. I wanted to convey the energy of spirit and of devotion that I felt in the text as I had engaged it. As I brought my revisitation to a conclusion, I felt I had achieved what I had hoped and wished to share it all with what readers I may accumulate, hopefully you.