A lovely gift of a book, The Flowering of the Soul gathers an incandescent, unprecedented selection of nearly a thousand prayers and thoughts about prayer, set down through the ages by women of many faiths.

St. Teresa of Avila, Meera, Simone Weil, Emily Dickinson, Annie Dillard, Julian of Norwich, Sun Bu-er, Marianne Williamson, Marion Woodman, and hundreds of others are among the saints, spiritual teachers, poets, healers and anonymous women whose passionate words generate  a dazzling arc of love between women and their most profound beliefs.

In prayers of praise and thanksgiving; calls for mercy and courage in the face of death; lives of surrender and holy love; in celebration of the soul’s unfolding, readers will find their burdens lightened, their paths illuminated, and their hearts touched. A lifetime’s sustenance is here.

It is not how much we do, but how much love we put into the doing.

                             —Mother Teresa

Lucinda Vardey, who also compiled God in All Worlds: An Anthology of Contemporary Spiritual Writing, provides segues and introductions that weave it all together. There’s Father God and there’s Mother God too:

As we awaken Her in ourselves, She lives and works Her grace through our lives and thus out into our world. As we speak Her, write Her, touch Her, we are contributing to the feminine’s quest for unity in partnership and equality. By doing so we come closer to the image of Her in harmony with Him. By embodying her in the deepest part of us, in the creative centers of our wombs, and in our masculine logical part, our heads and minds finally are able to meet in the middle place—like the middle way that the Buddha teaches: right in the center of us, the place of our hearts.