THE DAY IS YOURS
Slow spirituality in a fast moving world
By Ian Stackhouse
Paternoster, 158pp, £9.99
ISBN 978 1 842 276 606
This book is aimed, I think, at the general Christian reader, on the vital subject of our attitude to time.
Its basic message is the importance of living a day at a time, with a determination to live each day well, trusting the Lord to take care of the future. Its author, an experienced pastor, makes a determined effort to help his readers not to be drawn unthinkingly into the ways of our consumer society, with its obsession with the clock and its absurd call to live life in the fast lane.
Monastic insights?
In developing his theme Ian Stackhouse leans quite heavily, though not uncritically, on insights offered by the monastic movement on patterns of life and prayer. Whether we are as comfortable with that as he is, it is nonetheless true that throughout the book there are plenty of helpful and thought-provoking insights to challenge and redirect our lives so that we value each day, with its mundane but God-given occupations and opportunities, more than at present.
Yet for all the good things here this book has one great problem which makes it sadly impossible to recommend generally. Not only are some of its ideas unnecessarily difficult to grasp, its language is generally much too difficult (highbrow) for the average reader. I fear that many in my generally quite well-educated congregation would give up in frustration before they got to the end of the book, and some before they got to the end of the preface. And that is very sad, because the author has an important message and writes with an obvious longing to help his readers.
Instead of just reprinting a book first published in 2008, the publishers could have served us much better by setting a kindly editor over the author, who was determined to challenge him to use both simpler concepts and everyday language. That would have produced a much more helpful book than the one we have, which is simply too full of verbal fog to be accessible to the average (or even above average) Christian reader.
