Blessed: Meditations on a life of small wonders, Ann Rennie. Laneway Press. ISBN 9780645007015
As with all good spiritual writing Blessed attends to the depth of connections we ordinarily miss.
It is about a life’s journey that will be familiar to Ann Rennie’s contemporaries – a happy girlhood, relaxed study and exploration of life afterwards and long years of teaching English and Religious Education. The power of her writing lies in her ability to tease out her connections with her family, with her times, with places where she has stayed and visited, and with the tradition that she inherited and passes on.
The close attention she devotes to the detail of her world will encourage her readers to reflect more closely on their own experience, and so be grateful for the blessings that small encounters have brought them on their life’s journey.
Her familiarity with literature and constant rediscovery of its power to move and energise young people also enriches Blessed.
She is certainly not naïve about the challenge to commend it to young people, as her definition of students’ attitudes shows, ‘Poem – a polite four-letter word that is often greeted by a collective groan’.
The quotations that introduce each chapter from mainly English, American and French writers show the breadth of her reading, as do her many references to novels she has enjoyed. Works of art and of music, too, run through the book.
As a book of spiritual wisdom, it encourages the reader to find God’s presence in the delicate connections of an attentive life.