Product Description

Gerard Hughes is the author of "God of Surprises" and his books aim to speak directly to the individual stuggling with issues of faith and life and get right to the heart of spiritual needs and concerns. This book is the follow up to "God of Surprises" and is written for a different world and a different spiritual climate. This is a guidebook for the inner journey. It is about recognizing God in the ordinary, in the joy and sadness of things, about knowing that God cannot be separated from whatever we experience. It is written for people on the fringes of Christianity, or those who are disillusioned with church structures and dogmatic theology. Hughes has written this book because he is concerned at the split between religion and life, as if religion was something apart and detached from the rest of God's creation. It is a call to a faith in terminal decline to enlarge its concept of God and break out of the straitjacket of pious religion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #486246 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Gerard W. Hughes SJ is author of GOD OF SURPRISES, GOD, WHERE ARE YOU?, IN SEARCH OF A WAY and WALK TO JERUSALEM. He now works on the development of a spirituality for people who are active in peace and justice work and is based in Birmingham

Customer Reviews

Soul-food for the journey.
Picked this up in Waterstones before a quiet weekend to get my act together. Leafing through, it identified links between daily life, chunks of the Bible, struggles with meditation, national politics and global economics. So I bought it to try to see God in more things.

48 hours later, it's read and heavily annotated. Some highlights are:

Jesus gets locked up in a cupboard after His 'little talk' at your local church.

Churches as static, high-walled garrisons with troops drilled in ineffective, defensive and out-of-date parades.

Simple and surprisingly effective exercises. Hughes says they're the most important part of the book. In one, be still and just imagine Jesus arriving at your door. A revelation for me.

While writing as a spiritual director and author, Hughes' views on church unity, religiosity and militarism are more characteristic of a modern prophet. And yet, there's a compassion here for people as finite pilgrims stretched by the vagaries of life - external and internal.

In one chapter, Hughes uses simple metaphors - a sheepdog, a well - as a vehicle to apply this thinking in our own lives. Again, the exercises are constructive.

As a corporate employee, I have questions about earthing some of his ideas 9-5 - but his points are valid.

As a mature psychology student, the book touches on attention, motivation, mindfulness, consciousness and existential existence - useful material with which to query the assumptions of the more acidly secular social psychologists.

A good read - one of those rare books that can change the way we perceive existence and our journeying through life.

A beautiful and inspiring book
This is the sequel to Gerard W. Hughes's classic God of Surprises. Personally, I found this book even more helpful.

Hughes argues passionately that, if God is real, then he is present in all aspects of life. Also, God is a God of compassion, so we cannot seek God without seeking a source of love and compassion towards all people. This is very much a book about breaking down spiritual barriers. Hughes talks a lot about the "split spirituality" that enables us to give only part of our lives to God. Because what Christ demands of us is difficult and revolutionary, we may often choose to keep Him at the edge of our lives. He also writes movingly about the need for understanding between different Christian groups and between different faiths, including also those of no faith.

This is a very moving book. I found it too precious to read through from cover to cover in a few days. Rather, I read it a few pages at a time as an aid to prayer and contemplation. I warmly recommend it as an aid to anyone's spiritual journey.

God in all things a book to challenge you
Our local Ecumenical group chose this to study in Lent/April.
God made His creation He is in his creation. we are part of His creation. We belong to His creation. "In whom we live and move and have our being" Read, follow the study helps and you cannot but be changed.