For roughly ten years now, the only way to really see the rector’s annual two-week show — hundreds of clusters of blossoms that will take your breath away — is to go and stand in the alley. I have been waiting all of this time for it to do what I have been telling folks, including myself, that it would do some day, and that is to come over the roof and begin to grow down the front side.
After years of pruning it back, tying it to the roof line, standing in the alley to see the blooms, and generally wondering if our Rector was ever going to become what we hoped, I came out to the studio one morning in May and there he was, his blooms peeking over the peak of the studio in the morning light.
It was a big week at my house.
Around the same time that we first were introduced to the Rector, I was beginning to learn about the daily office — the ancient tradition of fixed hour liturgical prayer. I was astonished by the practice when I first stumbled into it and have been drawn to it and by it ever since.
And about the same week this year that the Rector made its grand entrance here, so did a new book. It is called In Constant Prayer and it is about the things that I have learned and am still learning about the daily office.
(Very cleverly, we have included an excerpt on the bookshelf page. And yes, you can buy it wherever you buy books, by the dozen if you like, and feel free to mention it to your friends. )
In some ways, it is a book I was looking for years ago, a book that I could never find. In that sense it is a book about my own astonishment. It took much of the last two years for me to write it, but it feels in some ways as though I have been working on it for more than a dozen.
The result is nowhere near as spectacular as the Rambling Rector, nothing I am ever going to make is going to be as good as a rose, but I hope you find it to be worth your while and worth my wait.
Namaste' — and be in touch.
R. Benson
