A Mystical Heart: 52 Weeks in the Presence of God

by Edwina Gateley

Best selling author Edwina Gateley—through meditations, poems, and drawings—encourages us to recognize God's ever-present healing embrace, even in the midst of darkness. This book features ideas and motivations for every week of the year that invite us to be awake in the presence of God.

Genres: Spirituality, Nonfiction

118 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This fall, I heard Edwina speak. I didn't know of her or her work before, but it was a moving time. She is passionate and shared how she, as a layperson, was convicted to live her life serving God. Her life story, full of social justice, is powerful. I selected this book for purchase that night (and others in the coming days).

This one is a selection of 52 reflections/poems with a challenge for each week and sometimes an accompanying sketch, but I devoured them much more quickly than that. I set it aside at one point after realizing how quickly it was going (I think unconsciously I didn't want the book to end).

Here is one from Week 10:

Often we anxiously seek the will of God,
as if God had gleefully hidden dreams for us
deep in unfathomable places.
As if it were God's intention
that our whole lives be spent
in endless searching for signs and directions
buried in obscurity.
The will of God is that which brings us
peace and fullness of life.
The will of God is the seed of our dreams
ever gestating with possibility
and longing to leap forward
scattering new and surprising blessings
in our gray reality.

Here is one of the free-form passages, from Week 41, made especially poignant as I read it when the Syrian refugees (and the warring opinions on them) were center stage in the media:

We build walls around our hearts, around our land, around our borders to keep out the strangers, the different, the other; to protect ourselves from getting hurt or from having to share our space with others. We guard our hearts, our land, and our country with great vigilance until the very guarding obsesses us and we become so outwardly focused and defensive that we lose touch with ourselves and our humanity. In our efforts to protect and defend we become disconnected and fragmented.

God, who will have nothing of walls and barriers, is like the Great Illegal Immigrant -- ever looking for cracks in our walls and defenses, seeking vulnerability so that She might slip through our barriers to convert and to transform us. God, in great longing for wholeness, constantly invites us to dismantle all that is exclusive. We cannot be whole until we come to embrace all that God has made and to share all that God has given. In matters and issues of exclusion we may be sure that God is always on the outside with those very people whom we do not accept. We diminish ourselves and we diminish God until we break down our walls. All of them.

[Cat Rayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meant as a 52 weekly selection of meditation through Edwina Gately’s poems I instead inhaled them over a few weeks time.

Since being introduced to “Soul Sisters”, every offering of Ms. Gately has been sought out. To find “Mystical Heart” in a library book sale, new, with nary a crease was like finding a hidden jewel.

There will be a more measured read of these poems over time as her work subtly demands. Her insight is deeply profound in the smallest collection of words. The suggestions in this book for closer walks with God are timeless.