Hiding in Plain Sight: Sabbath Blessings

by Molly Wolf

Book Overview

Failing to notice God in daily life may be what keeps us from experiencing the full joy of God's presence. In Hiding in Plain Sight, Molly Wolf shows that, by relating God-talk to the practical and the everyday, we can find love, joy, and God right where we are: "hiding in plain sight."

These short, lively pieces pull together the sacred and the human, looking for God in such ordinary things as lilacs, mud season, turtles, dancing...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814625061
• ISBN13: 9780814625064
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: Liturgical Press
• Length: 148 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

God in the Garbage

Molly Wolf finds the supernatural in the very natural events of daily living, finds it very well and expresses it very beautifully. Her weekly essays are delivered by e-mail, and a year's worth has been collected here. Rejoice that she has a multi-book contract with a major publisher, and her writing only gets better. You can access sabbath-blessings@justus.anglican.org for information on how to subscribe to the weekly essay/sermons.

Superbly written essays on finding God in ordinary life.

I have never been a reader of religious works. But Hiding in Plain Sight opened my heart to reflection on how God's wisdom and teaching come into play in life. It is decidedly non-technical, non-preachy, and at the same time lyrical and down to earth. Its audience will span those, like me, tentative and searching, to those well-versed in traditional theology. Reading it is a joy.

Glistening sensitivity to God's presence in everyday life.

Every Saturday, several hundred members of an internet list called Anglican eagerly anticipate the arrival in their computer mailboxes of a "Sabbath Blessing" by Molly Wolf. Since 1995 she has posted one such essay each week -- a gift of generosity born of an exquisite sensitivity to the presence of the divine in the midst of the ordinary."Hiding in Plain Sight" presents several dozen of these short pieces. They are unpretentious and grounded in the ordinary, but they fairly glisten with an awareness of how an immanent God breaks into everyday life in rural Canada, where work, children, mud in the spring, and talks around the kitchen table are the regular fare.Her pieces may begin with a walk near a saltwater marsh at low tide or a sense that the spring thaw is imminent and a torrent on its way, a piece of raw wool or a visit from the plumber. Wolf's great gift is to see God's presence in regular life, to interpret ordinary things and events as transparent windows to the holy.Although never saccharine and always unblinkingly honest about human failing and the perpetual attempt to run away from grace, Wolf nevertheless opens her readers' eyes again and again to the startling sense that no matter what, it's all right here, right now -- the Kingdom of God is here, hiding in plain sight.In the two millennia of our Christian faith, giants of the church have kept the institution alive and defined its orthodoxies, celebrated its sacraments and built its great cathedrals as shapers of tradition and guardians of right belief. Yet through this great tapestry of time and faith, there always weaves a bright thread of saints and mystics whose devotion is never primarily institutional or mediated by authority or even bounden duty, but by responding in gratitude and joy to a God who insists on revealing himself in a milkweed plant or an afternoon's work picking suet for plum puddings, who persists in redeeming by love the bleakest situations we can contrive for ourselves, and who invites us to know transcendence in the here and now.Molly Wolf lives in that tradition and writes out of an almost Franciscan vision and as if with her friends in mind. The publication of *Hiding in Plain Sight* should gain her many, many more who will lean over and look through her window and see her glimpse of the Kingdom, visible just over there where some deep ruts left by heavy machinery are dry-caked, where from "this life... this rutted path (both of body and of mind)" we are transported to "a shoreline in the sky. Another country, beautiful and almost within reach."[This review by Connie Jones appears in the upcoming issue of COVENANT, Nashville, Tenn.]

The Divine revealed through the mundane

*Hiding in Plain Sight: Sabbath Blessings* is one of the most enjoyable collections of essays that I have ever read! I first read Molly's essays as they were published on the WWW and came to look forward to them as highlights of the week. These essays do what sermons often fail to do: relate the apparently trivial things and events of everyday life to the eternal truths of the Divine -- and they do so *without* being sappy-sweet. If you enjoyed John Cowan's essays *Small Decencies: Reflections and Meditations on Being Human at Work,* you will surely enjoy Molly Wolf's. A real winner! Those on my Christmas gift list will have the pleasure of receiving copies.