Morehouse Publishing, 198 pp., $18.95
As both writer and preacher, the Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton’s voice extends the personal to the spiritual and vice versa. Nearly every day, she produces a meditation and sends it out to a virtual congregation in the form of e-mail. In the worthy book called Let Us Bless the Lord, she extends her singular voice into brief meditations on the Daily Office.
Let Us Bless the Lord goes from Advent through Holy Week (Year One). Each day’s entry begins with a citation of the lessons appointed and a short quote from one reading; the meditation exploits the quote. Verse and meditation and liturgical season always are linked, whether by spider web or steel.
Always tie the verse and the meditation to the season so you follow along with her thinking before going off on your own. Following Christian and Native American traditions, Crafton often includes stories -- about her garden and pets and family -- but the tenor of them differs somewhat from her more familiar "eMos."
Read the meditation to the end, because her closures zap with gentle electricity. For example, in responding to “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse …,” Crafton writes about her trumpet vine (called Trumpet), which blew down in a storm. “Out of [Trumpet’s] devastation will come a better plant,” she knows, and knows, too, to look for “green shoots of life." "They are signs of God.”
Among her comfortable words are epigrams and affirmations:
“Integrity is being brave enough to see my actions clearly.”
“…there is a gospel to be proclaimed by living it.”
“We spend a lifetime learning and relearning how to believe.”
Like the work of many essayists, especially women who write about spirituality, Crafton’s motherwise meditations on the Daily Office are witty and intimate, grounded in learning from life and books and prayer.
Reviewed by Martha K. Baker.
