Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

Let's see ... John Dominic Crossan has a book called The Essential Jesus, in which he took the sayings of Jesus and put them into a verse structure so they resemble meditations. And they seem very Zen. You can get it for a penny on Amazon.

I have a book called Love Poems from God, which is a collection of poetry from mystics from various faith traditions -- Sufi Muslim poets, Hindu, Christian. It's very good.

Anything by Rumi is good, and he's popular these days so books are easy to find.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. That's a really good idea, ER, I was trying to think of something to do for Lent that didn't involve the traditional "give up something for Lent" thing from my Catholic childhood.
 

I'm currently reading Joan Chittister's Becoming Fully Human. It's very thought-provoking and would lend itself to meditation and dailyness as it's written in short snippets.

Another possibility might be one of the many books that parallels the sayings of Jesus and other sages. There's one by Marcus Borg and two by Thich Nhat Hanh that are Jesus and Buddha. But there's also one with those two plus Krishna and Lao Tzu (by Hopper).

And Rumi is good. So is Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours. Or pretty much anything my Mary Oliver.
 

Although not designed to be a book of meditations this one will make you stop at least three times a page and look up the footnotes in the back and then check you trusty study bible. So in practice it is a good one to fill an esoteric need.

Jesus Christ, Sun of God: Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism by David Fideler

Amazon reviewer:
It has become plainly obvious from the Christian commentary above that they do not like "secular scholars" revealing that Christian philosophy and theology is mostly built on Pagan ideas. The fact is that the above reviewers obviously missed the point of this book.
Fideler spends the first half of the book demonstrating that there is a deeply evolved amount of symbolism in the texts of the N.T. that started 500 years (give or take) before Christ's time (and likely farther back than that). Symbolism that is communicated in numerical metaphors, imagery, harmonics and in poetry and myth that express higher (ineffable?) concepts. With a fuller understanding of Logos, we understand why the "Word" is an inadequate translation and reinforces Plato's own observations on the problem with language. With Clement's symbols of the Dove and the New Song we see how old concepts such as Gematria became "modernized" under the Hellenistic church fathers - expressing new ideas in an ancient way."

It is not a book you read all at once. It is not a "debunker", it is not "evangelical", it is just telling you what was there when.
 

Various books by Frederick Beuechner (pronounced BEEK-ner). Also, The Will of God by Leslie Weatherhead. Finally, a good meditation for Lent is The Gospel According to Judas by Ray Anderson. This last work, published in 1991, is a meditation on the question posed in the subtitle, Is There A Limit To God's Forgiveness? Inspired by a scrawled message on a cracked public restroom mirror, the book includes a fanciful dialogue between the risen Jesus and the now-dead Jesus, in which the questions of grace, forgiveness, free will, and acceptance are posed without necessarily any answer being forced upon them. I wasn't a universalist until I read this book.
 

They all sound excellent, but I just loves the sound of "Love Poems from God."
 

OK. I just ordered

"Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner,"

and

"Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West,"

and I put "Jesus Christ: Sun of God" in to-buy-later.


Because I didn't have this brainstorm until yesterday, and I'm too cheap to get one-day shipping, I'll get a late-Lent start. But that's OK. Maybe I'll read "Progress" or "Regress" again in the meantime.

Thanks, y'all. Others, feel free to make recommendations.
 

I am sure you hav probably already read this but you might check out "The Prophet" by Khalil Ghabran.