Abstract
Stephen Cherry, Barefoot Prayers: A Meditation a Day for Lent and Easter, SPCK: London, 2013; 144 pp.: 9780281071258, £8.99 (pbk)
I was half way through this book’s excellent introduction – which contains a good many arresting and helpful insights about the nature of prayer – when I came across a confession from the author that made my heart sink. Cherry admits that the prayers in the book were not written for Lent, or indeed for publication at all. They are personal meditations from his own spiritual journal, written, as Cherry puts it, ‘when the silence stops’, and only much later rethought and ordered for this Lent book.
I have had to try not to be over influenced by this admission. But material conceived for a quite different purpose than accompanying the reader on their pilgrimage towards Easter can be experienced as a bit of a disappointment when it is asked to bear the timed devotional reading pattern that a Lent book has to.
This is not the usual reworked sermon series, however, and these are convincingly real prayers. They have a freshness and simplicity, and a grounding in daily life, that reminds me of that highly influential book of the sixties, Michel Quoist’s Prayers of Life – but thankfully much less wordy. There is a voice of prayer here which is authentic, moving and somehow liberating. But whether or not I can exactly appropriate the prayers for myself, or for a group with whom I might be leading devotions, is less certain.
Cherry is very good at putting his finger on what it is like to pray when facing some specific occasions, for example preparing to undertake a speaking engagement, moving house, enduring sustained bodily pain, or returning from holiday –it is of course very hit-and-miss, however, whether that particular circumstance will strike a chord with the reader’s situation on one particular day in Lent.
More likely to be powerful for many readers are his texts that reflect on everyday situations: taking a coffee break, hearing the news, watching the rain, or just contemplating a working day with nothing special on the to-do list. Some of his intercessory prayers (e.g. ‘People with Nowhere to Sit’) and prayers definitely addressing the season (e.g. ‘Hosanna’, for Palm Sunday) are telling and highly usable. But many of the texts are personal and idiosyncratic.
In the end, Barefoot Prayers teaches me a good deal about attentive and honest prayer. It endears me to the author. It opens up the ordinary in an unpretentious and engaging way. It makes me want to find my own true voice of prayer. It is an anthology that nourishes the reader and I am glad that Stephen Cherry has published some of his intimate journal. But it is not quite a Lenten journey for all.