Book Recommendation - Winged with Longing for Better Things by Sylvia Sweeney, SWTS ’85
Still looking for a Lenten devotional for this Lent? You can support one of our alums who is a recent victim of the California wildfires by reading her book and heeding its warnings. Through scripture, meditations, poetry, and prayers Winged with Longing for Better Things invites readers to ponder their own relationship to the natural world and the ways in which both humans and non-human creatures thrive when we care for the world and suffer greatly when we exploit creation.
The Rev. Sylvia Sweeney, Seabury Western Class of 1985, lost her house, her neighborhood, and her town when extreme weather fostered by climate change led to mass destruction in the Eaton fire. Kim Hayes, author of the poems in the book lives in the Asheville, North Carolina area and is helping her town recover from devastating floods. Written before either of these events, Winged with Longing invites us to deep change, penitent change, the kind that has the power to alleviate suffering and transform our broken world.
Rather than classical penitence, Sweeney emphasizes intercession, solidarity, and preparation. Her work aims to help readers learn to view the world incarnationally and sacramentally. In rejecting one’s own embodiment and the natural world, the earth is being irreparably harmed by our destructive actions. The book invites readers to move beyond sympathy for those in strife into action and advocacy on the behalf of the earth and its less powerful inhabitants. Photographs and poetry enhance the daily devotional readings.
This is a book I return to every year. Through scripture, meditation, prayer, and poetry, the daily reflections renew my connection to the earth and all its creatures and challenge me to care for the planet. Journeying through Lent with these meditations, I grow closer to the mystery of God.
-- The Rev. Dr. Ruth Meyers, Seabury Western Class of 1985
Senior Research Scholar, Church Divinity School of the Pacific
Core Doctoral Faculty, Graduate Theological Union
Winged with Longing for Better Things is available through Church Publishing and is also available on Amazon.