Sermon Series
In Sermon Series, her first full-length collection of poetry, writer Stephanie Harper focuses on moments that are explorations of the self and relationships with the exterior world, both known and unknown, through concrete and tangible expressions of language. Drawing direct inspiration from sermons and the worship experience, the writer has crafted a universally spiritual collection of poems that transcends religious tradition and instead focuses on the greater mysteries of living and experiencing the world around us, offering a new avenue for contemplative poetry.
Praise for Sermon Series:
“Stephanie Harper‘s Sermon Series offers a respite from the fast-paced cacophony of our world: brief, meditative poems of searching, fully open to delight. This is a pilgrimage of details mined from the natural world, and the private landscape of the speaker’s soul. Harper offers that oft-forgotten but vital ingredient of prayer and the sacred experience: listening born of silence. A sermon, like the best sacred poetry, is a vehicle of preaching. In the words of priest and poet, Thomas Merton, “Preaching God implies silence. If preaching is not born of silence, it is a waste of time.” In Sermon Series, one can feel the poet listening between her words, as in the collection’s final poem: “with quiet purpose, the way a steady stream (glides) over smoothly faceted stone.” This is perhaps the best gift of the collection: it makes the reader listen, too.”
–Annabelle Moseley, an award-winning poet, author, professor and speaker.
Pamela Garber of The Mindful Word: “Anyone who’s ever sat in a church pew should read this collection. Or, for that matter, anyone who’s ever sat on a Yoga mat or lain prone, gazing into the wispy clouds from the cradle of a pristine meadow on a balmy day. Like the poems in this collection, these are meditative pauses to ponder space, time, divinity, love, devotion and nature.
Complete Review: https://www.themindfulword.org/2018/sermons-series-poems-jubilation/
