Maggie Oman Shannon is a spiritual director, workshop leader, and retreat facilitator. She is the founder of The New Story (www.thenewstory.com), a coaching and consulting business focused on helping people create deeper meaning in their lives. This paperback contains inspirational quotations, prayers and reflections in the following categories:

• Ourselves
• Our Relationships
• Our Communities
• Our World
• Our Planet

This is the handy kind of spiritual resource that you can turn to in moments of doubt, pain, loneliness, sadness, or inertia. It provides good medicine for the soul and the elixir of hope for the spirit. Here is a sampler of the riches in the book:

A Quotation by Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Freedom
"Not only action but also suffering is a way to freedom. In suffering, the deliverance consists in our being allowed to put the matter out of our own hands into God's hands."

A Buddhist Prayer on Forgiveness
"If I have harmed anyone in any way
either knowingly or unknowingly
through my own confusions
I ask their forgiveness.
If anyone has harmed me in any way
either knowingly or unknowingly
through their own confusions
I forgive them.
And if there is a situation
I am not yet ready to forgive
I forgive myself for that.
For all the ways that I harm myself,
negate, doubt, belittle myself,
judge or be unkind to myself
through my own confusions
I forgive myself."

A quotation by Richard Jeffries on Hope
"Every blade of grass, each leaf, each separate floret and petal, is an inscription speaking of hope."

Try a Spiritual Practice on Peace