'Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention' by Sarah Clarkson

Event details

Date: Tuesday 5 November 2024

Time: 5:15 pm

Venue: Wycliffe Hall, 52-54 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PW

The event includes:

• A Welcome from Revd Dr Michael Lloyd, Principal of Wycliffe Hall
• An Introduction and readings by Sarah Clarkson from her book
• Opportunity for questions to Sarah from the audience
• Refreshments
• Book signing and sales

Getting here: Wycliffe Hall is on major bus routes. Limited parking may be available on site (please contact us by email if you have any special access requirements) and pay-and-display on-street parking is available close by in Norham Gardens. 

All are welcome: the event is free to attend and booking is not required. 

About Sarah Clarkson

Sarah - who is is an alumna of Wycliffe Hall - says:

I’m a writer whose work centres on beauty and grief, story and quiet. I think that the stories we tell about suffering will shape the whole of our lives. I’m trying to write well about my own sorrow, and my own encounters with the beauty that defied my darkness and drew me into a life of creativity, yearning, and wonder.

I studied theology at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford (B.Th, MSt) with a focus on theodicy, and my most recent work is This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks Into Our Darkness (Baker Books, June 2021). It’s the story of my own wrestle with mental illness and the beauty that pervaded and transformed my darkness and taught me to hunger after hope. (I've also authored a number of other books, you can find them here.)

While creating a book about quiet, I’ve been wrestling through these questions: What it means to have quiet as a homeland of the self. What is the shape of a quiet life? How may we retain a quiet mind, a listening heart, a wondering eye in the midst of a frenzied, disordered, distracted world?

Someday, I’ll write a novel… but it’s still growing in my mind.

Text source: https://sarahclarkson.com/

About the book

Recapture wonder and learn to live by the healing shapes and rhythms of stillness.

In a restless and distracted world, the cultivation of quiet often feels abstract and impossible. But quiet is, and always has been, essential to spiritual life, the only way we can turn from the frenzy toward the peace for which we were created.

Reclaiming Quiet is an invitation to discover the profound, daily joy of resisting patterns of anxiety and hurry and cultivating a life of holy attention instead. With practical strategies to address our use of screens or fear of silence and compassionate ideas to nourish stillness, listening, and rest, this book explores:

• what it means to become a person who listens each day for God's voice before all others
• how to reclaim wonder in prayer
• how to cultivate an interior life

Quiet is not for specialists or the ultra-disciplined. It's not limited to those who have great swathes of time. Quiet is our inner native land, the place to which we turn to find God already waiting, calling us beloved, and drawing us homeward into a life of holy and joyous attention.

Text source: Baker Publishing Group