A Season of Healing

A Season of Healing: 365 Daily Readings, A Year Long Journey Toward Wholeness is now finished. Thanks to Maris, who came up with the idea and edited the project, the book is now cleaned up and ready for order.

The book contains hundreds of quotations together with original material. The text does not dwell each day on grief. Many days that topic does directly concern mourning. But there are also themes that run through the year dealing with love, forgiveness and healing. The idea is that the book creates a year-long journey weaving these themes through each day. Certainly some days will speak more strongly or directly to a given person than others, but I trust that the Holy Spirit who guided the selection of the material will also add to the words with inspiration beyond the text itself.

The downside is that at 412 pages, the book costs $24.98 from LuLu.com. The good news is that through the end of the month, they will give you 10% off is when you order, you put the code "GREATBOOK" in the box for special offers on checkout. Order from Lulu here: order A Season of Healing at Lulu.com.

The better news is that through a volume buy, those who attend King of Peace will be able to purchase the books at the church for $17, and $5 of that (all the profit) will go to the discretionary fund, which is used to assist those in need. The even better news is that the book is online in PDF form for free here: A Season of Healing.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Author/Compiler of Quotations

Cheesy Book Alert

The Arts & Crafts Bazaar has come and gone again. I provided my usual craft, which is to use my writing and design work in creating a book collecting sermons and essays. This year, with our tough economic times, I created the least expensive possible book, in order to make a worthwhile gift for only $5.

The result is Eyewitness Gospel a pocket-sized 144-page book of storytelling style sermons. A word of warning: The goal was to put together an inexpensive book with a certain style of writing. Most of the stories have appeared in one of my two earlier sermon collections Peace, Peace or Unfailing Love and the new one below. They are repeats for those who own the other books, which is why I refer to it as a cheesy book above. But to even things up, I offer the full interior of the book here online for free as an Adobe PDF. You may share it freely as long as you do so with attribution and without compensation: Free Eyewitness Gospel PDF. It is available at King of Peace for $5 through volume buying. By the book online it costs $8 plus shipping, which is more in line with bookstore prices for a comparable book.

I have also created a new sermon and religion column compilation called A Reason to Hope. The 338-page book is a loose collection of 65 sermons and essays put into sections on Identity, Baptism, Pilgrimage, and Hope. The book is available online and at the church for $15. If you buy online through Lulu, select Media Mail shipping which is the cheapest. This book is on order and should be available at the church in about a week.

As some who has published eight real books through publishers who place them in bookstores and promote them in ads and catalogs, I also find self-published books a bit cheesy. But I do my best to make the King of Peace published books to be as high a quality as possible. In this, thanks go to Maris Cato for once putting her green pen to work for the glory of God in editing my manuscripts from their "Frankish" text into something more closely approximating English.

All proceeds from any of the books go to the discretionary fund at King of Peace to assist the needy in our community.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

Books that made a difference

Over at The Washington Post/Newsweek the web forum On Faith has asked its panelists to tell us about a book or books that have made a difference in your life. There are answers which include Philip Yancy's What's So Amazing About Grace, Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest, and yes that collection of 66 books I have read more than any other made the list with someone naming The King James Bible. You can read all the panelists responses.

So, naturally I wondered about my own answer. It's not just my job, the Bible is the best answer as I read it all the time, have read it more than anything else and have even given as many as a hundred sermons in a year based on its contents. But moving beyond the obvious...I had to pause. The question isn't what book did you most enjoy reading, which could get an odd answer like Stuart Little, Thr3e, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, When Nietzsche Wept, The Poisonwood Bible, The Oldest Living Conferederate Widow Tells All or the novels of Susan Howatch.

If they asked what did you find the profoundly interesting, I could answer And the Band Played On, Bowling Alone, Leadership and the New Science, Generation to Generation, or Guns, Germs and Steel. Or which books have haunted me, as I haven't been able to forget them would include A Sand County Almanac, The Monkey Wrench Gang, In Our Strange Gardens, Diary, and Salvation on Sand Mountain.

Those that have influenced how I think about my faith would have to include several by C.S. Lewis and Michael Ramsey, Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship, Chesterton's Orthodoxy, Quarks, Chaos and Christianity, Love's Endeavor, Love's Expense, Amazing Grace: a vocabulary of faith, The Black Christ, and certainly Christianity Rediscovered.

But the question is made a difference. The answer would have to be the writings of Heinrich Böll, the German Nobel Prize winning author I first was introduced to thanks to that great influence on my life Dr. Jerry Weatherford at Georgia Southern, who is one of two Mormon men (the other being Dr. Lane VanTassel) who helped me be a better Christian (in very unMormon ways, of course). Böll's post World War II works broadened my world and showed me how words could convey great depth of meaning. I could choose The Clown, or Billiards at Half Past Nine but should go with the short story collection Children's Are Civilians Too which I checked out of the Georgia Southern Library to read and reread. I only owned a copy after coming to Camden County and in reading it discovered how much the pathos of those stories mattered to my life.

What books have made a difference in your life?

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

Spiritual Reading

In The Joyful Christian C.S. Lewis writes,

Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity, you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke, or St. Paul, or St. Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas...But I would advise him to read the old....

The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity ("mere Christianity" as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be aquired only from old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

I don't know that I follow C.S. Lewis' advice to the letter, but I do know that the passage above has been helpful in redirecting me back into the deep traditions of Christianity to read spiritual classics, which have earned their place by speaking to generations of readers. Books such as the slim little Practicing the Presence of God of Brother Lawrence, or the anonymous Russian work The Way of a Pilgrim leap to mind. But there are other spiritual classics such as St. Augustine's Confessions and the anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing and many others. Additionally, there are more recent works that can said to have already have stood the test of time including the writings of Thomas Merton as well as those of C.S. Lewis himself.

One way to start broadening your selection is to visit the bookshelf near the coffee pot and coke machine at King of Peace where you can check out some books for free, that have already stood the test of time. You may also want to visit online bookstores listed in an earlier post.

Know that Lewis is right. You will enrich your spiritual journey in seeking out the older books that have already nourished generations of the faithful. The best one close to hand is, of course, the Bible with its 66 books of the Old and New Testaments.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

Test Drive Our Savior

The Rev. Linda McCloud has a book of sermons Sunrise on the Marsh: Classic Christianity for 21st Century Seekers now available online through lulu.com. Nearly a third of the $15 purchase price (all of the profit) goes to support the Episcopal Church of Our Savior at Honey Creek. The book offers a way for those interested in that daughter congregation of King of Peace to test drive the new church before it opens by reading sermons from its founding pastor.

A few of the 60 sermons in the book will be familiar to those who regularly attend King of Peace as they were preached at our church since Linda moved to Camden County. Others are from her time as the pastor of St. Margaret of Scotland Episcopal Church in Moultrie, Georgia. All of the sermons offer an insightful look at how the scriptures speak to our lives today.

We will also be offering the book for sale at King of Peace as a way of raising funds for and awareness of our daughter congregation, which is set to start regular public worship on Sundays this coming November 4. The church will meet in the chapel at our Episcopal Camp and Conference Center, Honey Creek, which is in Waverly, Georgia (5.5 miles east of I-95 at exit 26). For more information visit the church's website www.oursaviorhoneycreek.org

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor