The new school year begins

August 27, 2007

Dear friends,

A new school year is about to be launched, and so I return to my blog. The summer was a good one, a great balance of work and play and much time for reading for pleasure. The main item that will be arching over this year will be my senior project. I plan to create a devotional that uses as each day's reading an excerpt from secular fiction and nonfiction prose. I am deliberately avoiding material that was originally written to be devotional or reflective, hoping to invite readers who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious" -- a growing number of the population -- to discover the holiness of the everyday and the inherent holiness of the intentional arrangement of words.

I don't know how to add attachments to blogs, so I will send an e-mail to each of you with an attachment showing the two dozen or so quotes I have gathered of the 100 or so I will need. I encourage you to keep a casual eye out when you read and send items along. Please, do this only as your own wanderings and inclinations may lead you -- this project is my responsibility, and I'm not asking for anyone to do my work for me. If you happen to come across something that gives you pause, however, I'd be grateful to see it.

Reading what I already have will give you a good sense of what I'm looking for -- I hope. In a nutshell:

1. It can't be too long. The selection from "A Prayer for Owen Meany" is probably as long as it's safe to get.
2. I don't plan to include prefatory plot information -- I'm looking for stuff that can stand alone whether the person's read the book or not. This technique might prompt mild curiosity, but I figure if the reader wants to, s/he can search out the book. Hence, nothing that requires too much setup or footnoting will really work.
3. There doesn't have to be anything overtly sacred about it. Witness the selection from "Errors and Omissions." It might take a couple of readings to discover that there's something there to explore.
4. Please, to save what's left of my sanity, include the following with the quote: Full title of the book, author's name, publisher and publisher's address, year of copyright, and ISBN. All that gobbledygook is on the back of the title page. The ISBN is a string of numbers usually starting with a 0 and sometimes with a 13.

Again, no pressure or obligation, just alerting other readers in my circle what I'm going about this year, and gratitude.


I leave you with this quote from poetry (breaking my own rules) that I'm still trying to figure out:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
To waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Grace and peace,
Beth