Spiritual Exercise

Lance Carden

Aug 2019 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this ebook

This is not just a book about spirituality. It’s a celebration of spirituality as a natural and essential element of self-realization and human progress. Each and every one of these poems is a potential epiphany. The poet holds up spirituality as the ultimate goal of all human endeavor and an advance beyond organic life, which is “a carcass of thought used & abandoned, dust to dust, by all that’s ever truly us.” The highest work of the poet, he says, “is to translate what we blindly see as merely matter back into the Spirit sphere.” This book makes much of prayer, spiritual practice, and especially divine Love: “When we live in Love & it’s in us, the world explodes in loveliness.” Each poem stretches one’s thought towards the divine—and is thus a rewarding Spiritual Exercise.

About the author

Lance Carden holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon and was a longtime writer and editor at The Christian Science Monitor. He is the author of Witness: An Oral History of Black Politics in Boston (1989); two poetry books, Tuscan Retreat (2013) and City of Lions (2015), and the two-act play Democracy & its Demise (2018). He's also a trustee of the Endowment for Biblical Research, Boston.