Book Description

Including the Earth in Our Prayers tells a story of love and prayer, how spiritual practice is not just for ourselves, our own journey, but for life itself. It steps back to reclaim the wisdom of our ancestors, including the "Original Instructions" of Indigenous peoples—instructions that describe how we need to "get along" with all of creation—and relates these teachings to the need of our present time. With our ecosystem in crisis and our culture increasingly divisive, it suggests ways in which the energy and transformative potential of our spiritual nature can be applied to these critical issues, and reconnects us with a spiritual understanding of the living Earth. The simple premise of this book is that there is a vital need to shift our collective culture from a story of separation and exploitation into a new story of living oneness, and that spiritual practice, and the love and light it generates, have an essential part to play in this shift. (Including the Earth in Our Prayers is a revised and updated edition of Awakening the World: A Global Dimension to Spiritual Practice, which was originally published in 2006.) “The call of the soul in our time is to become loving partners with our world in manifesting the potentials of blessing and wholeness innately within us and within the Earth. In this wonderful book, Llewellyn eloquently shows us that we each have within us the power to answer this call and embody this partnership. In a time when we are beset with fear and divisiveness, he offers a vision of wholeness and healing, hope and empowerment. It is definitely a book whose time has come.” —David Spangler, author of Journey into Fire “Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a rare mystic who honors the eternal truths of the wisdom traditions while recognizing the ever-evolving ways that these truths must be accessed and lived... this book opens our eyes and hearts to the true potential of spiritual practice to go beyond self-transformation to play a vital role in the well-being and awakening of the Earth as a whole. He suggests that ours is a time when new pathways are being revealed that use spiritual practice as a way of nourishing the whole of life, pointing the way to a form of spiritual service that belongs to the future.” —David T. Nicol, author of Subtle Activism: The Inner Dimension of Social and Planetary Transformation “... this luminous book shows us the way to navigate these tumultuous times with a clear mind, a hopeful heart, and a renewed relationship with holy awe. In Including the Earth in Our Prayers, Vaughan-Lee, one of the great wisdom teachers of our age, invites us to participate in nothing less than the radical rebirth of all that is.” —Mirabai Starr, author of God of Love and Wild Mercy “The Earth is luminous. From being a dark and degraded "thing," the earth is in reality an angelic being. Our relationship with the Earth, not one of domination but one grounded in harmony, adoration, and contemplation is a powerful indicative of our relationship with the Divine, with the feminine, and ultimately with the entire realm of the Spirit. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee opens up this connection in a lucid and luminous way. Highly recommended for devotees of spiritual pursuit and ecological sustainability.” —Omid Safi, author of Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition; Professor, Duke University; Leader, Illuminated Tours “As we enter the Anthropocene era when no part of the world remains untouched by the human imprint, the need for action is urgent. Any talk now of contemplation or spirituality might appear to be self-centered, and much of what passes for spirituality has fallen into this quagmire. But as Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee shows us, ‘Real spiritual practice is never for ourself alone, but always for the whole, always for the sake of the Beloved.’ Drawing on the deep tradition of Sufi wisdom, Including the Earth in our Prayers is a call to place the wellbeing of the Earth at the center of our spiritual practice. With lucidity, grace, and wisdom, Vaughan-Lee has given us a cleverly disguised resistance manual for our time.” —Fred Bahnson, author Soil & Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith, and director of the Food, Health, and Ecological Well-Being Program at Wake Forest University School of Divinity