Customer Reviews

Rhythms and Cycles

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Nancy Bruning's newest book "Rhythms and Cycles: Sacred Patterns in Everyday Life is filled with a warm, rich and comforting perspective.

She examines various religious practices for their common threads of traditions, songs and expression. She points out the great and often overlooked value of rhythmic repetition of even the smallest act, such as singing or humming at any time. Or lighting a candle to rememeber an event or a person.

What Ms. Bruning does so well is to bring back the sacred to our everyday life by reminding us to pay even the scantest attention to a ritual. One need not attend a typical place of worship, but rather one can worship anywhere and regain strength and uplift.

In these trying days of all the world's tragic actions, we need to focus energy toward keeping the spirit of life in our hearts. This book goes a long way to making connections in the heart through study, music, and extention of a helping hand.

Read this book, it's very good for you!

Somehow this book simultaneously gave me focus and set my mind to wandering. What more could one ask? Rhythms and Cycles' dialogue of opposites (sound and silence, solitude and community, for example) seems an invitation to draw on memory, to think about meaning. Nancy Bruning is conversational, engaging, generous, and even gently witty. Her exploration of patterns in everyday life in different cultures, different religions, offers lots of information; just as important, it encourages you to reflect on your past and present, on identities and contexts. It fills gaps and connects pieces of what you know. It's a fast and easy read, that you want to take slowly, to interrupt with your own reflections and insights. I'm giving it to several friends.

This book traces ancient rituals, as they have been adapted to modern religious practices. Primary focus is upon Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Hinduism, Buddhism and others are also examined.

Common day-to-day activities that seem non-secular are explored and shown to have religious roots. Conversely, this book explains that many religious practices are simply modified celebrations dealing with the cycles of nature. I liked how Nancy Bruning wrote about this in a very open, non-judgmental way.

I liked the image that common threads relating to natural cycles show up in the cloth of distinctly different faiths. I wish that the extreme fundamentalist believers in any faith could read "Rhythms and Cycles" and realize that perhaps there is only one God, a God that wouldn't be pleased with the notion of killing or dying.

This is very timely given the recent WTC tragedy. For me, a chilling sentence on page 211 summed up the mindset of the hijackers: "Martyrs of Islam have their evil deeds completely erased and they are sent to the Garden immediately."