Loosening the Roots of Compassion

Book excerpt: Here is Holy Week and Eastertide reading to which you will return time and again. Here is real nourishment for body, mind, and soul, and for the remaking of the world. Ellen Bradshaw Aitken’s meditations will “help you to send forth deep roots from your life into scripture and into the contemplation of Jesus’ risen life. . . . Take what you need to help you pray your life and to discern new pathways of the resurrection in yourself and in the world around you—to loosen the roots of compassion within your heart.” These meditations sing that “the resurrection is somehow at work everywhere,” building in us a new creation. Beautifully written, deeply considered, they invite us to tilt and turn the scriptural text as though it were a hologram—and then to do the same with our lives in light of those texts.