The Wind, the Fountain and the Fire

The 2020 Lent Book from Bloomsbury explores the vivid imagery of the Psalms and the Gospels as a path into scriptural prayer.

Scripture, and especially the Book of Psalms, has always formed the substance of the daily prayer of Christian monks and nuns. Monastic men and women spend more time among the scriptures each day than in most other activities.

How do such regular interactions with the texts of the Old and New Testaments help us renew our Christian imaginations; how might these reflective encounters enable all of us to discover the wind of the Spirit, the fountain of living water and the fire from which God speaks, within the printed pages of our Bibles?

In The Wind, the Fountain and the Fire, Mark Barrett, a Benedictine monk of Worth Abbey, offers a Lenten pathway through scripture, opening the gateway of sacred imagery as a mode of prayerful reflection. For each week of Lent he has selected a different image: the Dust; the Mountain; the Well; the Light and the Tomb.

In these richly imagined biblical symbols we are invited to find keys which can unlock both our experience of scripture and our understanding of our own hearts.