Hiding in Plain Sight: Sabbath Blessings [Paperback]

Molly Wolf (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1998

First prize winner in the first-time authors division, Catholic Press Association Annual Awards, 1999.

Product Details

• Paperback: 135 pages
• Publisher: Liturgical Press (July 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814625061
• ISBN-13: 978-0814625064
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,533,425 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Glistening sensitivity to God's presence in everyday life., October 16, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Norfolk, Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hiding in Plain Sight: Sabbath Blessings (Paperback)

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.]

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superbly written essays on finding God in ordinary life., June 20, 1999

By 

Jane M. Wolf MD (Augusta, Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hiding in Plain Sight: Sabbath Blessings (Paperback)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars God in the Garbage, April 1, 2000

By 

"charlie_fw" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hiding in Plain Sight: Sabbath Blessings (Paperback)

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 [e-mail] for information on how to subscribe to the weekly essay/sermons.