 |
|
A Chair Pulled To A Place Of Prayer. Prayer Handbook 2008 edited by Geoffrey Duncan, Granary - a URC Publication, pp144. ISBN 9780853462637 £4.50
For many years the URC has published a prayer handbook with lectionary readings and prayers for each Sunday and Holy Day throughout the church year. Expect a complete transformation in the handbook for 2008. The presentation breaks with 30 years’ tradtional format and it runs from Advent 2007 to the end of 2008.
Gone are the daunting number of lectionary readings for the day, now grouped together at the back of the book. A single Bible reference or brief quotation prefaces most of the prayers and meditations. Gone too are the suggestions for a week’s prayers and the centre pages with information about CWM churches that interrupted the sequence.
Instead you have an uncluttered handbook of prayer that invites you to pull up a chair and pray. The photographic presentation carries the title theme subtly throughout in an imaginative way. For Holy Saturday, that limbo day, there is a full spread close-up of the cruciform joint of an old wooden chair, inviting wordless meditation. To some these may be cryptic images of an obscure purpose, to others they will be like icons, windows into prayer.
Geoffrey Duncan has edited many books of contemporary poetry and has drawn on writers from around the world whose prayers emphasise the multicultural nature of the church. They are rooted in today’s world – Iraq in Lent, the volcanic eruption on the island of Réunion, and a reminder that when we celebrate harvest time it’s typhoon time in the Philippines. There is also humour – a Christmas shopping list that includes locusts and wild honey.
I like the larger format of the book, that stays open more easily. It was hard to find fault though I didn’t care for the parody of ‘As with gladness men of old’; perhaps it speaks to someone else. This prayer handbook is attractive enough to grace a coffee table. If you have regularly used the Prayer Handbook, you will be delighted with this one and want to make sure all your friends have a copy for public or private use and to keep and refer to it again and again. Helene McLeod |
|
