As many of us set new goals or aspirations for 2024, perhaps you have decided to enrich your faith journey through reading. If so, the parlor of Pilgrim House contains half of our late Ann Barry’s spiritual library. Most of these books are short, but powerful, offering the reader the opportunity to reflect on nature or a story from the Bible or some other focus that will cause you to think.  Rev. Allen recently suggested that we all take time to reflect on our lives as we look backward and forward  about how God has been part of our journey.  Now is the chance to follow his good advice (his  sermon:https://www.firstparish.net/sermon/looking-back-looking-ahead/).  Perhaps you might want to make a commitment to read a book each month or just one book this year from our church’s lending library.  The check-out notebook is on the left side of the bookshelf and you can simply write your name, book title and the date and return the book a couple weeks later.  No late fees here…..!

In thinking about new starts, this book from John Phillip Newell seems like a good way to begin 2024.  Although our book recommendation is from 2011, Newell has plenty to teach us as here is a recent quote from Newell about his book Sacred Earth Sacred Soul that was the 2022 Gold Winner of the Nautilus Book Award for Spirituality and Religious Thought of the West: “We know things in the core of our being that we have not necessarily been taught, and some of this deep knowing may actually be at odds with what our society or religion has tried to teach us. This book is about reawakening to what we know in the depths of our being, that the earth is sacred and that this sacredness is at the heart of every human being and life-form. To awaken again to this deep knowing is to be transformed in the ways we choose to live and relate and act.”

— John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth Sacred Soul (HarperOne, July 2021)

(Click on the images to see an enlarged version)

Blessings to you and your family for a meaningful 2024.  May it be so for all of us.