Zen rituals—such as chanting, bowing, lighting incense before the Buddha statue—are ways of recognizing the sacredness in all of life. A ritual is simply a deliberate and focused moment that symbolizes the care with which we should be approaching all of life, and practicing the Zen liturgy is a way of cultivating this quality of attention in order to bring it to everything we do. Here, John Daido Loori demystifies the details of the Zen rituals and highlights their deeper meaning and purpose. We humans are all creatures of ritual, he teaches, whether we recognize it or not. Even if we don’t make ritual part of some religious observance, we still fall into ritual behavior, whether it be our daily grooming sequence or the way we have our morning coffee and paper. We run through our personal rituals unconsciously most of the time, but there is great value to introducing meaningful symbolic rituals into our lives and to performing them deliberately and mindfully—because the way we do ritual affects the way we live the rest of our lives. The book includes instructions for a simple Zen home liturgy, as it is practiced by students of the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen.

Sacred Passages takes an entirely new approach to the way we understand and experience the sacraments. Foregoing dry, technical explanations, Bert Ghezzi explores the meaning and benefits of the sacraments in a practical and highly personal manner. Interweaving scripture, the writings of the saints, and personal stories, Ghezzi reveals the dynamic realities that the sacraments provide believers. In chapters devoted to each of the seven sacraments--Baptism, Communion, Confirmation, Reconciliation, Marriage, Holy Orders, and the Anointing of the Sick--Ghezzi restores a sense of wonder and excitement in the sacraments and instills an understanding of what is really happening. For example, in the section devoted to Communion, the effectiveness of the sacrament is explained: The eating of the bread and wine cleanse, strengthen, and nourish the spirit. Reconciliation is seen as an opportunity for direct access to God through prayer and the continued participation in Christ's ministry. Each chapter includes practical teachings on applying the grace of the sacraments in daily life, inspiring believers to participate fully in all the stages and important moments of the Christian life, from birth, growth, and coming-of-age, through vocation and service, and finally to death. One of America's most popular writers on topics of interest to Catholics, Ghezzi's engaging prose, easy-to-understand explanations, and thoughtful insights offer readers a life-changing vision of the role of the sacraments, and helps them experience the practical and spiritual rewards of each sacred passage.

Nurture the soul and learn how to create joy in everyday life with this inspirational collection of 100 meditations. Each quotation, taken from both Eastern and western religions, as well as inspiring speakers, focuses on an aspect of spiritual life. It is followed by practical tips and specific activities that guide readers in applying these spiritual words of wisdom into their daily lives.

In the complex world of the late 1990s, many people feel isolated and alone. Much of society has lost the sense of belonging, a feeling of connectedness to community, to the earth and to the sacred. Many long for simpler times when people lived in villages, depended on one another and engaged in sacred rituals.

Healing lies at the heart of Zen in the home, as Paula Arai discovered in her pioneering research on the ritual lives of Zen Buddhist laywomen. She reveals a vital stream of religious practice that flourishes outside the bounds of formal institutions through sacred rites that women develop and transmit to one another. Everyday objects and common materials are used in inventive ways. For example, polishing cloths, vivified by prayer and mantra recitation, become potent tools. The creation of beauty through the arts of tea ceremony, calligraphy, poetry, and flower arrangement become rites of healing. Bringing Zen Home brings a fresh perspective to Zen scholarship by uncovering a previously unrecognized but nonetheless vibrant strand of lay practice. The creativity of domestic Zen is evident in the ritual activities that women fashion, weaving tradition and innovation, to gain a sense of wholeness and balance in the midst of illness, loss, and anguish. Their rituals include chanting, ingesting elixirs and consecrated substances, and contemplative approaches that elevate cleaning, cooking, child-rearing, and caring for the sick and dying into spiritual disciplines. Creating beauty is central to domestic Zen and figures prominently in Arai’s analyses. She also discovers a novel application of the concept of Buddha nature as the women honor deceased loved ones as “personal Buddhas.” One of the hallmarks of the study is its longitudinal nature, spanning fourteen years of fieldwork. Arai developed a “second-person,” or relational, approach to ethnographic research prompted by recent trends in psychobiology. This allowed her to cultivate relationships of trust and mutual vulnerability over many years to inquire into not only the practices but also their ongoing and changing roles. The women in her study entrusted her with their life stories, personal reflections, and religious insights, yielding an ethnography rich in descriptive and narrative detail as well as nuanced explorations of the experiential dimensions and effects of rituals. In Bringing Zen Home, the first study of the ritual lives of Zen laywomen, Arai applies a cutting-edge ethnographic method to reveal a thriving domain of religious practice. Her work represents an important contribution on a number of fronts—to Zen studies, ritual studies, scholarship on women and religion, and the cross-cultural study of healing.

Spiritual Ecology: 10 Practices to Reawaken the Sacred in Everyday Life offers inspiring and practical guidance for reconnecting to the sacred in every day life and transforming our relationship with the Earth. Describing the power of simple, daily practices such as Walking, Gardening, Cooking with Love, and Prayer, this small book supports profound changes in how we think about and respond to the ecological crisis of our times. Our groundbreaking book, Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, (now in its second edition)—which included spiritual perspectives on climate change, species loss, deforestation, and other aspects of our present environmental crises from renowned spiritual teachers, scientists, and indigenous leaders—drew an overwhelmingly positive reaction from readers, many of whom are asking: "What can I do?" Spiritual Ecology: 10 Practices to Reawaken the Sacred in Everyday Life answers that question with inspiring, personal anecdotes from the author—Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee—and simple practices we all can do. Rooted in the mystical foundation of the world's great spiritual traditions, with a particular connection to Sufism, these timeless practices remind readers of our deep connections to life, each other, and the Earth, and invite a return of meaning to our desecrated world. As Rumi says, "there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground," and it is this sacred ground that is calling to us, that needs our living presence, our attentiveness. This small book offers simple ways to reconnect so that we can once again feel the music, the song of our living connection with the Earth. "This small book, exquisite in its luminous simplicity, brings me home to my life. Even in a dark time, its practices center me in a sense of the sacred, our birthright." —JOANNA MACY, teacher, activist, and author of Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects “Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee's book on practices for Spiritual Ecology in everyday life awakens us to the potential to take small steps towards big transformation. It overcomes the artificial divide between nature and humans, and spirituality and action. No matter who we are, where we live, these are steps each of us can take.” —VANDANA SHIVA, activist and author “A beautiful book. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and Hilary Hart do a brilliant job sharing simple and powerful practices that help readers connect to the sacredness within nature, the earth, and our own daily lives.” —SANDRA INGERMAN, author, Walking in Light: The Everyday Empowerment of Shamanic Life

Picking up on the monastic tradition of creating a "rule of life" that allows for regular space for the practice of spiritual disciplines, Ruth Haley Barton takes you more deeply into understanding seven key spiritual disciplines along with practical ideas for weaving them into everyday life.

Home altars have been used since ancient times throughout the world yet, today, many people think altars are only of significance inside a church. In this beautiful, lavishly illustrated gift book, Denise Linn reclaims the altar for today's spiritual seeker. She explains why people need altars and shows the many different uses to which altars may be dedicated, such as celebrating or mourning significant life events or working through troubled times. Altars allow us to create a sacred space away from ordinary life where we can remind ourselves of the profound mysteries of creation.The approach of this book is also practical, with clear advice on how to prepare and purify an altar of your own. Denise explains the significance of the various objects you can choose to place on your altar and gives advice on the different rituals and ceremonies you can perform in front of it. Whether inside the home, at the office, or outside in the natural world, altars allow us to create a personal space and bring meaning to our lives.

We live in a world where there never seems to be enough time for all we want and need to do. In Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life, Christine Valters Paintner guides us as we move beyond our own lives and embrace a world that urges us toward rest, reflection, and growth. In Sacred Time, Paintner, abbess of the online Abbey of the Arts, shows us how by becoming in tune with the rhythms of the natural world, we can live more intentionally and experience a conversion toward a more expansive way of being. Paintner introduces us to the eight cycles of sacred time that exist in our everyday lives. These cycles that can ground us through our busy lives are breath, rhythms of the day, weekly rhythms and Sabbath rest, waxing and waning lunar cycles, seasons of the year, seasons of a lifetime, ancestral time, and cosmic time. Each cycle encourages us to mindfully consider the time that passes as quickly as each breath and as slowly as the passing of generations. Within each cycle, we find wisdom from sacred tradition and the saints, including St. Benedict, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and St. Hildegard of Bingen; room for growth; and the presence of the Divine. Along the way, we are also given scriptural guidance, and we are invited to spiritual practices and creative explorations that will help deepen our understanding of each cycle, allow that understanding to take root in our lives, and expand our lives beyond the pressures of each da

"The tranquility of order is a dynamic tranquility, the stillness of a flame burning in perfect calm, of a wheel spinning so fast that it seems to stand still. Silence in this sense is not only a quality of the environment, but primarily an attitude, an attitude of listening. " Let us give to one another that gift of silence, so that we can listen together and listen to one another. Only in this silence will we be able to hear that gentle breath of peace, that music to which the spheres dance, that universal harmony to which we, too, hope to dance." Austrian-born Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast is one of the most influential and beloved spiritual teachers of our time. For decades, Brother David has divided his time between periods of monastic life at the Mount Saviour Monastery in New York and extensive lecture tours on five continents. He has brought spiritual depth into the lives of countless people, whom he touches through his lectures, his workshops and his writings. Brother David was one of the first Roman Catholics to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue, studying under Zen teachers and building bridges between religious traditions. His newest book, The Way of Silence, draws heavily on Buddhist teachings to cultivate the practice of “deep” listening: turning away from noise and distraction, paying attention, and embracing quiet. The Way of Silence embraces paradox: absence versus presence in silence. Dynamic tranquility. The all-oneness of aloneness. Humbly, trusting in God, you’ll practice emptying your mind in order to receive wisdom, insight, and understanding. You’ll learn to listen deeply, with a trusting heart—and you’ll joyously discover a new, interior freedom that will make you feel more vibrant, and more fully alive.