Wrestling with the Angel: Poems of Spiritual Exploration

by Jennifer Phillips

Publisher:

Resource Publications

, 2024

In Wrestling with the Angel, Jennifer M. Phillips invites readers on their own spiritual journeys of exploration, whether inside or outside the bounds of formal religion. She urges each to investigate bravely the delights, pains, and mysteries of life in this passing-away world full of hints and signals of larger meaning. These poems refuse to look away from doubt, death, and disappointment or to accept easy answers; instead, they peer under and through these universal experiences, scanning for traces of mercy, hope, tenderness, and joy. They ponder: What if God is like Scheherazade, spinning a Self-revealing story day after day to keep the door of relationship ajar? What if the essential human task is listening with reverent attention?

Praise for Wrestling with the Angel

“This gentle poet directs us to the ‘lively oracles of God’ in her garden, the green glades, night skies, snow squalls, Ely Cathedral and the sea. She teaches us how to honestly face doubt, disappointment and despair but also to be ‘transparent with joy’ and most of all awake to ‘the signs of love everywhere.’ Open these pages to receive thoughtful, empathetic, even saintly pastoral care from a true friend of God because ‘what you never could believe in . . . isn’t finished with you yet.’”

—Malcolm Clemens Young, priest, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco



“Sail with the poet, singing in pellucid waters veined with delight. Breathe together in the dark violent seas that threaten to smother our painstakingly composed arias. Ours too the darkness, and ‘just beyond the darkness is the light.’ These poems gift readers with real presence, the beauty and the pain of human experience.”

—Margaret R. Miles, emerita professor of history of Christianity, The Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California

Product Details

• Title: Wrestling with the Angel: Poems of Spiritual Exploration
• Author: Jennifer Phillips
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Print Publication Date: 2024
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9798385230204, 9798385230181, 9798385230198
• Resource ID: LLS:9798385230204
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-10-03T20:42:35Z

About Jennifer Phillips

Jennifer Phillips, author of the widely praised book Bringing Lucy Home, is an adoptive parent to a loving little girl she and her husband affectionately named Lucy. Actively involved in discipling women, she is also a volunteer at her children’s school. A psychology graduate of Samford University (Birmingham, Alabama), she served as executive director for the local Sav-A-Life, a national network of crisis pregnancy centers. She and her family currently live in Brisbane, Australia, where her husband Brian serves with University Impact, a franchise of Campus Outreach. For more information, visit her blog at jenniferphillipsblog.com.