Fairacres Publications 198 I wrote these stories when I was living in Hackney, East London. Life was quite hard. My health was poor, I was re-evaluating my career and I was beginning to recognize that I needed to leave London which had been my home for twenty years. It was a place I had grown to love: its estates, its religions, its shabby backstreets, its people from all over the world. Then I discovered the ‘old men’, the Egyptian Desert Fathers and Mothers of the fourth and fifth centuries. They entranced me. So every day before starting work I would translate one of their sayings into the context I knew: the urban wilderness that is Babylondon (a Rastafarian term for London). Reading these reworkings again after ten years I found they made me cry and realized they were a love letter to the London I knew, and a hymn of gratitude to the ‘old men’ who saved my life.

Thomas Campion (1567–1620) was a composer of lute song and the author a significant body of Latin and English poetry and masques written for the Stuart court. This volume collects all of Campion’s sacred poetry in one place for the first time. Campion’s lyric style was influenced by Sir Philip Sidney, but also by the music to which it was most often set: the lines flow gracefully, with an elegant and direct communication of depth and sincerity. Campion’s faith is evident and his texts speak as vividly to us today as they did to those who copied and shared them during his lifetime and beyond.

Fairacres Publications 218 This is a book about the nature and practice of prayer for the serious Christian, lay and clerical, in which the problems of the spiritual life in the modern world are presented as a challenge. Mother Mary Clare, who was one of the Anglican Church’s leading spiritual directors, takes the major contemplative themes and brings to them her unique blend of spiritual realism, vision and authority. Prayer begins and ends in the inescapable necessity of a relationship with God; the dimension of silence reveals that praying is not only an action but a still contemplation; the path of spiritual progress is to discern in the union of action and contemplation a deeper listening which leads to an apostolate of prayer renewing the action of contemplation. It is all God’s Work. In his foreword, Bishop Michael Ramsey writes: ‘I hope this little book will have many readers, as I am sure it will help them as it has helped me … Christian lives which know contemplation will be lives nearer the love of God…’

"In this revised edition of Becoming Fire: Through the Year with the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Tim Vivian arranges the sayings of the desert monks of the fifth and sixth centuries in short daily readings. This volume provides sayings and stories for each day of the year to use for lectio divina; saints and revered persons from the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Episcopalian traditions; sayings from the Philokalia and the fourth-fifth century monastic writers Neilos of Ancyra and Hyperechios, among others"--

SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 12 This collection speaks about the experience of nature, religion, thought, ideas and people; sometimes with the anxiety that those relationships can bring, but also with plenty of celebration. There are thoughtful ponderings, gazing into the beauty and rawness of nature, from wide sweeping beaches or forests, to tiny stones and fleeting birds. Fractured meaning is celebrated, even in its incompleteness, alongside the pleasure of wholeness, inner certainty and realization.

Fairacres Publications 216 The scholarly investigations and translations of Prof. Sebastian Brock have been largely responsible for bringing Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also known as Isaac the Syrian, to public attention. Isaac was a seventh-century Syriac Christian bishop and monastic author from Beth Qatraye in the region of Qatar. He is best known for his writings on Christian asceticism. This selection of Isaac’s prayers, taken from the three collections of his Discourses, is elegantly translated by Dr Brock into accessible English, bringing the thought and prayer of one of the great Fathers of the Church to modern readers. Their simplicity and sincerity have a surprising beauty and relevance to our Christian journey.

Fairacres Publications 55 For centuries theology and spirituality have been divorced, as if mysticism were for the saintly and theological study for the practical but unsaintly (to paraphrase Thomas Merton). So Archpriest Louth writes: ‘The theologian is one who prays, and one who thinks about the object of his loving prayer. So, part of the formation of a theologian is the study of spirituality, not just as another branch of the history of doctrine, or whatever, but as a deepening of their own life of prayer.’ This book seeks to show that theology—even the rigorous ‘academic’ theology—and spirituality belong together and, isolated, suffer disintegration and atrophy. It does this by suggesting that contemplation lies at the heart of both theology and spirituality, and includes an examination of the place of the contemplative in the thought of Diadochus of Photicé.

Fairacres Publications 211 Wendy Robinson’s work was primarily interpersonal and in retreat talks or lectures where she could engage with her audience directly; many of the essays here are transcriptions of those talks. Even ten years after her death, her theology and her compassion are remembered with great fondness and gratitude, and continue to resonate both with those who knew her and those who encounter her writing for the first time.

SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 8 In 1945 Gabriela Mistral became the first Latin American author to be awarded a Nobel Prize. She was a passionate advocate for many disadvantaged groups in her native Chile, but particularly women and children living in poverty and unable to access education that might help them to improve their lives. She spent much of her life as a teacher, but her poetry reflects the people she met and the situations she encountered through her life. It speaks of a deep empathy with those around her, and of great strength of faith. Her legacy is continued by the many foundations and schools set up in her name. Gallas’s translations bring Mistral’s words to English-speaking audiences, creating new and beautiful works in the canon of literature by Christian poets.

Fairacres Publications 133 Amidst the trials and uncertainties of individual human lives, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus can sometimes seem like a great play written by God, where the actors are assigned fixed parts. Yet this is to make a travesty out of these great events. In entering our world and sharing its suffering in Jesus, God accepts the uncertainty and unpredictability which are part of the human lot. The resurrection of Jesus is a sign of unexpected hope beyond final despair.