Poet Eamon Grennan has said, “I admire Julia Kasdorf’s poems for their alert eye, attentive mind, vigilant heart, all fused into a single, sometimes painfully aware, vision of the world. Bristling with narrative surfaces, angular emotional interiors, humorous sympathies, her poems move in careful zigzags, like a bat. Her politically astute voice knows, understands, and without sentimentality embraces a universe of ordinary lives and unsung places—celebrating women’s work, or her daughter’s rapt in-taking of all that is new to her, or the nature of ‘Poetry in America,’ or the existential texture of Mennonite life, or simply sun flashing on a spider’s thread, a blade of grass, / my own tanned skin. Plainspoken, both intimate and discreet, these poems take hold.”

The Renovaré Spiritual Formation Guides, created by Richard J. Foster and the team that developed The Life With God Bible and the longstanding A Spiritual Formation Workbook, provide tangible lessons that help us become spiritually formed, conformed, and transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. Geared for either individual study or use in small groups, each Renovaré Spiritual Formation Guide explores one facet of our life with God, providing readings from Scripture as well as classic and contemporary works of spirituality. The combination of readings, reflection questions, exercises, and activities makes these books invaluable interactive guides that prompt true spiritual growth.

Following the same themes as The Life With God Bible, the Guides explain, expand, and put into practice The People of God in Individual Communion in Connecting with God, The People of God in Prayer and Worship in Prayer and Worship, The People of God with Immanuel in Learning from Jesus, and The People of God in Mission in Living the Mission. All of the Guides emphasize that as God’s people we have a with-God life, a life with God every day, year in and year out in which we participate in the kingdom and co-labor with God to create “an all-inclusive community of loving persons with God himself at its very center as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.”

Connecting with God

God has communicated with his people throughout the ages in many ways. Adam and Eve encountered him directly in the Garden of Eden, Teresa of Avila experienced him through visions, and Francis of Assisi heard his voice in nature. This book gives practice advice for connecting on a deeply personal level with God. It uncovers new places to look for God, while providing reflection questions and activities to reinvigorate communication with God in such traditional areas as prayer and Bible study. Divided into twelve chapters conveniently organized for individual or group study, each section explores a different area in which we can deepen our individual communion with God.

Prayer and Worship

Prayer and worship compose the heart of the devotional life and are essential practices for a close relationship with God. But too often our prayer is nothing more than a checklist of requests, and our worship happens only in church. What does it mean to communicate with God? How do we enter his presence in the midst of our daily lives? Utilizing the beloved book of the Psalms, this guide reveals many different ways to come before God in prayer and worship, including wrestling with God, pleading with God, lamenting to God, and longing for God. Conveniently organized for individual or group study, Prayer and Worship offers insights and avenues to help us bring every part of our lives before God and truly enter his presence.

Learning from Jesus

To Christians, Jesus is many things: the Son of God, the pivotal figure in whom we put our trust and who speaks on our behalf, a companion in the life of faith. But Jesus is also an incredible example of how to lead a faithful life. Jesus, as a human, walked on earth and confronted the same struggles that we face. Our primary mission as his followers is to learn from him–to become his apprentices. In this book we seek to further our apprenticeship by studying everything from Jesus’s interactions with those around him to the revolutionary wisdom recorded in the Gospels. Learning from Jesus is conveniently organized for individual or group study, and each section of this guide leads you further down the path to true discipleship.

Living the Mission

Living the Mission explores what it means to be a Christian today. By examining the early church’s struggle in the wake of Jesus’s devastating death and aw-inspiring resurrection in the book of Acts, we learn how we can follow Jesus, how Jesus is still with us in the Holy Spirit, and how we are called to form communities into which we are forever inviting others. Conveniently organized for individual or group study, Living the Mission explores the heart of what it means to follow Jesus and be a part of his church.

Since its publication in 1978, Celebration of Discipline has helped millions of seekers discover a richer spiritual life infused with joy, peace, and a deeper understanding of God.

Hailed by many as the best modern book ever written on Christian spirituality and described by Christianity Today as one of the ten best books of the twentieth century, Celebration of Discipline explores the classic “Disciplines,” or central spiritual practices, of the Christian faith. Along the way, Richard J. Foster shows that it is only by and through these practices that we can find the true path to spiritual growth.

Dividing the Disciplines into three movements of the Spirit, Foster shows how each movement contributes to a balanced spiritual life. The inward Disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study offer avenues for personal examination and change. The outward Disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service prepare us to help make the world a better place. The corporate Disciplines of confession, worship, guidance, and celebration bring us nearer to one another and to God.

Foster provides a wealth of examples demonstrating how the Disciplines can become part of our daily activities–and how they can help us shed our superficial habits and “bring the abundance of God into our lives.” He offers crucial new insights, demonstrating how the biblical view of the Disciplines, properly understood and applied, brings joy and balance to our inward and outward lives and “sets us free.” Celebration, often the most neglected of the Disciplines, is revealed as critically important, for it stands at the heart of the way to Christ. Featuring an introduction in which Foster shares the story of how this beloved and enduring guidebook for the soul came to be, Celebration of Discipline will help motivate Christians everywhere to embark on a journey of prayer and spiritual growth.

Four Distinctives

The classic Spiritual Disciplines Richard Foster names in Celebration of Discipline—meditation, prayer, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship, guidance, and celebration—are timeless. They have been practiced by people of the Book—Jewish and Christian—for centuries, and they continue to be essential for a full life in the kingdom. Their practice prepares us “to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done,” and, as we integrate them, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” overcome us (Gal. 5:22).

Richard not only names the classic Disciplines of the spirit, but makes them accessible to us through his simple yet profound writing. We don’t need a college education to understand why we should do them and how to get started. He emphasizes that they are for everyone—not just the religious or clergy—and that we can do the Disciplines right now, right where we are, smack in the middle of our jobs and our families, our churches, and our communities.

In Celebration Richard also prompts us to be intentional about our Christian life, giving us something to do by working with God on our spiritual growth rather than by simply sitting on our hands and waiting for God to rescue us from a world gone bad. To be intentional about practicing the Disciplines is to do them—knowing that we change incrementally, not in giant leaps—and to be persistent—recognizing that spiritual growth takes time.

Lastly, Celebration of Discipline is full of grace. We are not condemned for trying and failing. We are not even made to feel guilty if we don’t try. Richard introduces us to the Disciplines in a way that makes us want to incorporate them into our lives so that we can become like Christ. He leads us to be proactive rather than reactive; we learn to train rather than merely to try. Won’t you join me as I continue to study Celebration and to do the Disciplines?

–Lynda L. Graybeal, co-author of the Renovaré Spiritual Formation Guides

Other Comments

“Like a child exploring the attic of an old house on a rainy day, discovering a trunk full of treasure and then calling all his brothers and sisters to share the find, Richard J. Foster has ‘found’ the Spiritual Disciplines that the modern world stored away and forgot, and has excitedly called us to celebrate them. For they are, as he shows us, the instruments of joy, the way into mature Christian spirituality and abundant life.”

–Eugene H. Peterson, author of The Message

“Richard Foster has given us a rare gift . . .the celebration of each Discipline in this book hands us a tool that can be useful in helping us to integrate our inner and outer lives.”

–Marcrina Wiederkehr, author of A Tree Full of Angels

“The best modern book on Christian spirituality . . . No other book apart from the Bible has been so helpful to me in the nurturing of my inward journey of prayer and spiritual growth.”

–Ronald J. Sider, president, Evangelicals for Social Action

At the same time in 2011, on my own, I published another collection of essays, Now it is Snowing Inside A Psalm, a 75-page meditation on the book of Psalms.  “In the past when I’ve been hollowed out by the rigors of living, I have returned to Psalms.  It was into the lowlands that the rivers of scripture ran, flooding the hollow places with the water of the word.”  The meditations are drawn from my own travels, the thoughts I pick up from the land, and a few excerpts from Covered Wagon Women, also published by Nebraska.

Here’s how she describes the process: “Aha, I thought. That’s a lot like writing poems. Something’s in the air, a word, an impression, a rhythmic phrase, a small connection. You grab it and then you catch more drops and pool them together, wringing some fresh meaning out of them and as if by miracle this mystery, this moisture becomes a new entity that satisfies a thirsty imagination. The art is in the awareness of “moisture”; the craft is in the “wringing.” In her Fore Word the author claims that “such harvesting is something that happens when the mind is open to possibility.”

Often that possibility has to do with the large questions of faith, or the affirmation of a vision. It requires concerted attention to detail in the larger landscape of human experience. There is nothing that is not worthy of that attention, producing poems that deal with the ordinary and extraordinary. Her subjects range from bees, prismatic light, an Andy Goldsworthy construction, gravestones, a fallen leaf, an airport walkway, weight loss, a woodpile, fallen snow, a mission trip to Nicaragua, and even the darkness of human failure in “The Two of Them,” a poem in couplets that begins: “He’s the black plug that fits no socket,/She’s the small change that weights the pocket” and ends with “He’s a chimera, a heat mirage./They’re the gas fumes in their own garage.” The poem “Massage” reflects on the comfort of human touch, and the blessing of divine healing.

The Fore Word concludes: “The idea of fog gives me hope—all those little particles of reality waiting to be collected into water for cleansing, for thirst,” and invites the reader to “give the poems time to gather, to soak them in.”

Howard Butt Jr., vice chair of the H.E. Butt Grocery Co., leads the H.E. Butt Foundation to help Christians connect their faith, their work, their everyday lives, and the culture around them. The Foundations for Laity Renewal established not only The High Calling online community but the 1,900-acre Laity Lodge retreat center and camp in Central Texas and the Laity Leadership Institute.

Editorial Director Dan Roloff said. “From faith at home, in the workplace, or out in our large culture, from more than 10 years and many top writers in faith and business, The High Calling content helps people think and grow. Best of all, it’s free.” In May 2011 the site reached 38,000 subscribers, through its Daily Reflections, Weekly Calling, and FaithInTheWorkplace.com newsletters.

At TheHighCalling.org, subscribers and readers will find

• Original articles by contributing writers
• Links to selected bloggers writing in concert with The High Calling mission
• Sermon outlines and small group content on life, faith, and work.
• Audio broadcasts—The High Calling, from Howard Butt.
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• Daily Reflection, a daily devotional from Mark Roberts, popular blogger, pastor, author, and scholar-in-residence at Laity Lodge.

She is a Soapstone Resident and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She has lead workshops at Seattle Pacific University’s Writers Conference, The Northwest Christian Writers Renewal Conference, and the Mercer Island Methodist Women’s Retreat. After having spent her formative years in Roswell, New Mexico, she now resides just north of Seattle with her husband Jeffrey Overstreet and earns her keep as a freelance editor and private gardener.