A Love Quilt - eBooks.

Re-published:  19 April 2024
Language: English
Words: 58,586
B/W text, 154 pages, 7″ x 10″

ISBNs:
PDF 9781988572598
Kindle / Mobi 9781988572574
ePub 9781988572581

Book Description

A Love Quilt records a spirituality of aging, where many paths and truths are understood to converge. This engaging spiritual memoir quilts together 68 pieces of Trish McBride’s writing from the last decade. The overall theme is that the meaning and purpose of human life is learning to love – ourselves, others, earth, cosmos, and Holy Mystery, the one of so many names. Trish believes we are all on a spiritual journey, whether or not we call it that.

Her efforts to live out her post-denominational Christianity are documented in her pieces on social justice, mental health, interfaith and racial relationships, prayer, non-orthodox theologies on forgiveness and same sex marriage, critiques of church practices, metaphor as the viable alternative to biblical literalism, and community – including her Covid-19 lock-down diary. The book also includes reflections on her travels near and far.

Do you wrestle with institutional religion but have a desire to encounter God as Divine Love?

This collection of later-life writings integrates deep Christian spiritual experiences of God with sometimes unorthodox thinking on many aspects of love, life, interfaith, race & social issues, and sciences.

Distilled wisdom, from Trish’s 75-year spiritual journey, will encourage and support you on your own journey. Her stories, poems and liturgies will engage you and challenge you to look at your life story and direction.

Trish writes as a post-denominational Christian.

• • •

Trish’s three books – Faith Evolving, Exploring the Presence and A Love Quilt – are being republished in 2024. Read together, they document Trish’s 75-year life and faith journey from childhood to her 80s – a unique longitudinal record of women’s spirituality and thinking. They are both spiritual biography and contextual theology. 
Along the way, Trish moves from a traditional Catholic faith to embracing feminist theology and on into a post-denominational, inclusive, integrated Gospel-centred spirituality. She has used a patchwork metaphor across all three books, connecting writings of many colours, shapes and textures. Her purpose in all three has been to encourage others to ponder and record their own faith journeys.

• • •

Praise for A Love Quilt

“As an avid reader I find there is a wide diversity of literature that forms, informs and nourishes me as a spiritual director. Works of fiction, spiritual classics, memoirs, emerging biblical scholarship, poetry, theological treatises, process theology, Indigenous studies, current psychology, and eco theology are just a random sample. However, once in a while I come across a book that seems to reflect much of my own spiritual journey, a book I could imagine having written. A Love Quilt: Later Faith Patches by Trish McBride is one such book. It is a pastoral theology work, but not in the academic sense, for it has evolved out of Trish’s rich life experience as a chaplain, counsellor and spiritual director, a life that has been reflected upon with insight and ease.

A Love Quilt: Later Faith Patches is an apt title for McBride’s latest book, the third in what she describes as ‘an accidental trilogy’ recording her spiritual journey for most of the last 70 years. Through this collection of more than sixty ‘patches’, drawing predominantly on the most recent decade of her rich, vibrant and faith-filled life, McBride stiches together a quilt that manifests her passion for social justice, love for accompanying others and her own spiritual journey. The pieces of this quilt incorporate her writings in various contexts. They include sermons preached, liturgies curated, poems composed and previously published articles, collated under themes such as ‘Being Loved’, ‘Love and Creation’, ‘Love and Parish’. There is a moving story of a family reconnection following adoption, a profound story of a devout Muslim woman from Kabul and wonderful examples of radical hospitality. In the story of ‘Sue’s Tooth’ I hear Trish’s cry for justice and her anger at shortsighted bureaucratic decision making.

I see hope and healing being offered as women prisoners are ‘heard into speech’. There are little gems, sewn like sequins into the quilt, such as ‘Encountering Rumi’. I found myself identifying with her painful struggle in her call to priestly ministry and was affirmed as I engaged with her final question ‘Am I a Christian?’ I feel as if I have met and conversed with McBride—sometimes as her directee, sometimes as a director and at other times just as good friends sharing a cuppa’ across the kitchen table. There were times I would have liked a two-way conversation with McBride, inviting her to ‘Tell me more about…’ ‘How was …?’ ‘What did … feel like?’ Her poem ‘Spiritual Direction’ will resonate with many readers of Coolamon journal. Numerous other patches in McBride’s quilt will connect with faith seekers and their companions—interfaith stories, intellectual integrity, Sunday worship congruent with theology, forgiveness, reconciliation, journeys of awareness alongside LGBTI communities and much more.

McBride’s spiritual memoir is set in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, a nation which, from my perspective, has a far greater appreciation of Māori culture than we in Australia have of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and spirituality. One way this manifests itself is the frequent inclusion of the Māori language in her writings. We could learn much from our close neighbours! What became evident as I immersed myself in A Love Quilt was McBride’s own developing understanding and relationship with Indigenous peoples and the land.

Spiritual directors may find A Love Quilt a helpful resource to offer their directees so they may recognise how God, named or unnamed, is present in each and every experience of life. As McBride notes in her introduction, while ‘[a] secondary purpose of it is to document some of Christian thinking in the 2000s… [the] primary purpose… is to encourage you, the reader, to reflect on the happenings and ponderings of your own life, …your own stories of inner and outer journeys.’ McBride’s book has done that for me and could do so for you and your directees. May those who pick up A Love Quilt: Later Faith Patches be invited to engage with their own story, see it filled with divine grace and maybe create their own ‘love quilt’.”

A Love Quilt: Later Faith Patches by Trish McBride
Reviewed by Elizabeth Lee, In Coolamon issue 6: Sept 2022, 
(Australian Network for Spiritual Direction Inc.)

• • •

 

Trish McBride shares her spiritual journey and understanding of Divine Love in A Love Quilt: Later Faith Patches. Peter Lineham and Bernadette Miles discuss her deep commitment to Love, its rawness, and how it challenges us to look at our own faith matrix. The book is arranged in ‘patches’, exploring Love in creation, community and social justice. Heather Sangster-Smith urges us to be dismayed and reassured by this wisdom, shaped by Trish and others.

  

Review by Sande Ramage in Tui Motu InterIslands June 2021

“Trish McBride presents her personal myth as a quilt, symbolic of women hand-stitching their narratives in times when men held the pen to write history in their own image.

Trish’s “love quilt” is a patchwork of explorations across the landscape of her rich and full life. She assembles the patches of her experience – relayed in prose and poetry – stitching them together with the thread of her evolving spiritual life.

I noticed a significant thread of Catholicism, Trish’s original spiritual home, but one which she has relinquished to carry out her spiritual calling. Jesus has remained a constant, now mixing and mingling with the Divine Feminine, dreams and archetypal characters that reveal her individual holy mystery.

Central is “the blessing of Divine Love”, something I find hard to comprehend. But this is Trish’s truth and Divine Love is something which she has experienced in “privileged and astonishing ways.”

Women readers may connect with how Trish developed loving detachment through involvement with Al-Anon, so that she could live well despite problems at home. This surfaces again as she helps women in Arohata Prison find their voice beyond trauma. Male readers might wonder at the courage and creativity women need to excavate their long-buried voices to speak out feminine truth.”

More praise for A Love Quilt

“This is the story of the faith patches that make up the later stages of one woman’s spiritual life. You too may indeed identify with and discover anew, but you will not find this book mundane or prescriptive or even the end of the journey. Trish ends with a brief and beautiful blessing: may her writing bring rich blessing to you and those with whom you share it. Thank you, Trish, for trusting us with the mystery and multi-layered fabric pieces of your later life.” Rev Dr Jenny Dawson from the Foreword

“A quilt is the perfect metaphor for this beautiful patchwork of what the author describes as ‘pieces of my learning and thinking from the last decade.’ As in her earlier volumes, Trish engages the reader in an intimate personal conversation about the spiritual journey.” John Broomfield, Former President, California Institute of Integral Studies

“It’s always a pleasure to learn from Trish’s words and history. And it’s a privilege to have access here to her meditations, experiences and wisdom. If you have the chance, try also to reach her previous books. In each piece, you will hear the voice of the Universe asking you to stop for a bit, reflect and feel its magnificence.” Antonio Lima, Liberation Theologian, Sociologist, Activist, Brazil

“A rich reading experience! This is a wonderfully multifaceted quilt – inspiring, challenging, and thought provoking. All the pieces are sewn together with the continuous thread of love.” Sheila Pritchard, Spiritual director and supervisor

“Trish is an enchanting storyteller who secretly embeds insights and wisdom within, for those who have eyes to see.” Heather Sangster-Smith, Educator, Advocate, Facilitator

 

• • •

About the Author

Trish McBride was born in Lancaster, England and came to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1952. For most of her life she was deeply involved in the Catholic Church. She has subsequently spent times with ExAlt, a women’s spirituality group, a Progressive Presbyterian parish, and the Religious Society of Friends, and now identifies as post-denominational. 

Now retired, Trish has been a spiritual director, chaplain in various contexts, counsellor and supervisor. She is mother to 7 and delighted grandmother to 23, some acquired, and is now (2024) happily settled in a retirement village.

A high point in her writing career was as a prize-winner in a 1994 international competition for religious journalism awarded by The Tablet, London. Others have been contributing chapters to five Aotearoa Catholic-based theology books, (The God Book, A Thinkers Guide to Sin, Journeying into Prayer, But is it Fair? and Living in the Planet Earth), publication of two academic papers in USA, and completing her own unintended trilogy: Faith Evolving, Exploring the Presence and A Love Quilt.

Many of the articles and poems in her books have previously appeared in a variety of publications. Formal studies included MA (Hons) in Classics, Diploma in Pastoral Ministry and Recognition as an Associate in Christian Ministry (interdenominational).

Involvements include family, social justice, nurturing friendships, quilting, reading, swimming, walking and occasional painting.

Contents

Foreword
Introduction

• To the Unknown Woman

Being Loved

• Culture Shock
• Strange happenings
• Seeings
• Prayer of relationship: a personal journey
• Reluctance
• Easter Crossing 2000

Love and Creation

• Yatton Park
• Breath
• Wilton Bush
• Kākariki
• Osmosis
• Labyrinth
• The Bush
• In Spring
• Bee
• Learning
• Breakfast meditation
• Higher tide
• Down South
• The Stardust Revolution: The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars

Love and Community

• Spiritual Direction
• A True Story
• Rātana
• Mahboba’s Promise
• Tibetan Journeys
• Encountering Rumi
• Words and Worship
• The Interfaith Journey
• The Pandemic

Love and Social Justice

• Pentecost Prayer
• Being A Neighbour
• Just Peace
• A Closure
• Sue’s Tooth
• Stretching
• Listen, love, respect! Justice for Same-sex Couples
• The Living Wage Movement
• Abortion – A Middle Way?
• Hope and Healing in Prison
• Doing Racial Justice
• A Closer Look at Forgiveness

Love and Parish

• Ordination
• The Anointing
• New Wineskins: Progressive Christianity
• Mysticism and Progressive Christianity
• A New Liturgical Season: Celebrating the Season of Creation
• Storm Reflection
• Humanity Reflection
• Good Friday
• New Year Reflection, 2017
• Light

Ponderings

• Jesus and Evolution
• Musings on Metaphors
• Letting Go
• Bad Back
• Mortality
• Am I a Christian?
• Blessing

Endnotes
Glossary
Bibliography
Periodicals
Websites
Acknowledgements

Click the links for:
3 Print Book set | Faith Evolving Print Book | Exploring the Presence  Print Book | A Love Quilt Print Book |

3 eBook set | Faith Evolving eBooks | Exploring the Presence eBooks | A Love Quilt eBooks