Bookshop

NZCCM Library

The NZCCM library has some 50 titles plus DVDs, cassette tapes, videos and CDs. It costs $5 per item and all browers must be current financial members of NZCCM. Download here the booklist and read how you can order books and other items from the library.

Medio Media 2009 Catalogue

Media Media is the publishing arm of the World Community for Christian Meditation.Download here the September 2009 catalogue of books, CDs and DVDs.

Community of Love by John Main OSB

With new introduction and new prefaces to each section

This book brings together John Main's insights into a range of issues: prayer, community, monasticism, the spiritual relevance of Mary and death and dying. Download brochure here.

Book Review

Under The Huang Jiao Tree - Two Journeys In China, by Jane Carswell (Transit Lounge Publishing, 2009)

The practice of contemplative life and prayer has some good effects, and among them, if we allow it, is a heightened perception and deeper insight as life goes on and we have our adventures. Readers of Father Laurence Freeman’s column in The Tablet regularly discover how wisely and sensitively he is able to see the things that happen and the people he meets.

To have become a friend of silence and stillness, and to have learned the disciplines of letting people and things be what they are, is to be able to recognise and appreciate at another level. For the most part we have not the same need to possess or change others, or to feel threatened by difference.

Jane Carswell, who is a NZ meditator and a Benedictine Oblate, has written in just this way of some 10 months she spent teaching English in Chongqing, in China. For the best part of a year, in a culture and surroundings quite different from Christchurch, Jane found the grace to be herself and to meet and appreciate those who came her way. Students and staff invite her into their homes. She meets their families – and their food. She occupies a humble apartment with humble plumbing, without complaint. A pianist, she finds herself a school piano with some bass notes and a particular B flat kaput.

The story of that year gets told in the light of Jane’s contemplative spirituality, and one of the important features is the way in which she shows this integration without preaching. It is simply there. It is the point of the subtitle, Two Journeys In China, since the second journey of course is the inner one. Well done, Jane.

Ross Miller

For more information visit janecarswell.net or send a message via the contact page on this website