Books with Which to Pray

A Fall Reading List for Spiritual Types

A colleague once referred to reading as bibliotherapy as she recommended a book to me for something hard at that moment. I was at the thrift store on the military post where we check our mail once a month scanning the shelves when I remembered this. Most of the spirituality titles were not of interest to me but this I saw Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing About Grace? and it felt divine.

Grace has been at the heart of one of my directee’s questions these past few months and I’ve been trying to sort through my own ideas on what it means. What is so amazing about it? What captivates me about this concept? Why does it always make me weep? I don’t know if this book will answer my wonderings but it might open my heart to bibliooratio.

Books can be like that. They can give us language for our prayers and open us to more awareness of God in our lives. In that spirit, I’m sharing a few books from the teetering stack of volumes on my bedside table. Some of these have been there for a very long time. Some of the spines are cracked and others are waiting to be cherished.

Dimming the Day: Evening Meditations for Quiet Wonder is a book to be read when you’re already under the covers and ready for sleep. Ready, in theory, because it can be so hard to let go of the day. Harder still, at least for me, not to begin to make lists and reminders for everything I need to remember when I awake. It is gentle and tender and offered with such heart. I savor these chapters and want to read each page slowly. I imagine it’s a book that I’ll return to again and again asI can’t imagine a time when I won’t crave an invitation to quiet wonder.

Brain science is not something I gravitate toward in my reading but I do love me some Jesus. Not only does Practice the Pause: Jesus’ Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science and What It Means to be Fully Human have an amazing title that was truly the reason I ordered it but it invites us into a new awareness of what it means to have the “mind of Christ.” She invites us to consider how Jesus practiced contemplation and then encourages us to use these practices to allow our brains to be changed with all that new brain science. I feel like this book is going to really challenge me and invite me into new ways of contemplation. It also feels like it will be a lot of new information that might be best digested with friends or a book group and so it might be worth downloading the study guide the author has prepared.

Hosts of the Food And Faith Podcast brought their passion and energy into this wonderful book that is not a cookbook, as I thought it would be. There are a few recipes like Bruce Reyes-Chow’s Chicken Adobo that I’m excited to try but most of The Just Kitchen: Invitations to Sustainability, Cooking, Connection and Celebration invites us to consider our relationship with food not merely in the preparation in our kitchens but in the foods we choose to purchase and how we obtain them. As someone who has wondered and prayed over how best to care for the world with the food I put on my table, I especially love that each chapter includes some glimpse of hope. It’s named and celebrated when it is so easy to feel like all is lost. I’m excited to bring this into my own practice of cooking and love that these short essays will be easy to read amid the chaos of trying to feed my children.

“Peace is a state of mind, heart, body, and soul. It is the freedom to breathe, even in the face of great challenges and chaos,” writes Morgan Harper Nichols in Peace is a Practice: An Invitation to Breathe Deep and Find a New Rhythm for Life. This book is said to challenge the idea that peace is out there somewhere but something that we can find by joining the rhythms already us. Peace is not perfection or calm. Or any of the other things we might equate with it and this is witnessed to in the author’s own fight for her peace in a recent diagnosis with autism spectrum disorder. I’m not sure I entirely understand what this rhythm might look like from the reviews I’ve read but I’m curious enough that it’s teetering on the stack of books on my bedside.

What are you reading? What books have you found recently that have brought you into bibliooratio? I’d love to add to my reading list and hope you’ll share what has expanded your vision.

If you are interested in spiritual direction and are interested in a first conversation with me, please reach out or go ahead and book an appointment here. I am currently welcoming new directees and would be delighted to explore the holy threads of this life with you. First sessions for Prayer Threads subscribers are always free!