The Graces We Remember: Sacred Days of Ordinary Time

by Phyllis Tickle

In her three-book series that spans the liturgical year, renowned author Phyllis Tickle recalls simple stories from life on her familyís farm in Lucy, Tennessee. In spiritually uplifting and nostalgic memoirs, Tickle records the richness of faith in everyday life. The Graces We Remember, the third book in the series, provide tales from the end of Pentecost to the beginning of Advent. Tickle recalls special saints? feast days, splendid autumn mornings, and grace-filled moments found in ordinary time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Faith

150 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2004

About the author

Phyllis Natalie Tickle was an American author and lecturer whose work focuses on spirituality and religion issues. After serving as a teacher, professor, and academic dean, Tickle entered the publishing industry, serving as the founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly, before then becoming a popular writer. She is well known as a leading voice in the emergence church movement. She is perhaps best known for The Divine Hours series of books, published by Doubleday Press, and her book The Great Emergence- How Christianity Is Changing and Why. Tickle was a member of the Episcopal Church, where she was licensed as both a lector and a lay eucharistic minister. She has been widely quoted by many media outlets, including Newsweek, Time, Life, The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, C-SPAN, PBS, The History Channel, the BBC and VOA. It has been said that "Over the past generation, no one has written more deeply and spoken more widely about the contours of American faith and spirituality than Phyllis Tickle." A biography of Tickle, written by Jon M. Sweeney, was published in February 2018. Phyllis Tickle: A Life (Church Publishing, Inc), has been widely reviewed.

Reviews

[Tamara Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know the late Phyllis Tickle only from the work she did compiling prayer manuals known as The Divine Hours. I found at a library book sale this sweet series of short stories written throughout the span of the liturgical year at the author's family farm in Lucy, Tennessee. Naturally, I want to read each title in the appropriate season, thus The Graces We Remember in the closing months of Ordinary Time.

[Steffanie Kamper Culp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poignant reflections on family and farm life.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here in the once lovely metro Atlanta landscape, which since the Olympics back in the 1990s has been overcome with concrete and cars, I'll sometimes stop at the Pickadilly Cafeteria, simply because I'm usually able to find good fried okra there and to speak to one of the food servers about the experience of actually picking okra. Though its food is not my favorite, Pickadilly is an oasis of Southerness. Visiting there makes the vegetable sensations of the family garden come back to me somehow. Okra on the stem is subltly furry and its smells are delicious. It leaves its pickers with distinct itchy sensations that must be washed away afterwards. My grandmother had a sort of ritual bath for it. When my sister and I were little, we would be desposited in the Victorian lion's foot tub, virgorously soaped and then rinsed several times. Phyllis Tickle is so right to describe okra as a sensual plant. In bloom it is lovely, like an hybiscus, and when mature its prickly green spears with their delicate white fur are magestic. Her descriptions here of okra and other life at "The Farm at Lucy," her family home in East Tennessee, were incredibly dear to me. I know that country and I'm a native Memphian so I also adored her descriptions of the fake beauty salon she used to frequent in town because she and her mother loved the "hooker," Bonnie, who worked there. Bonnie liked having Southern ladies in her establishment and dressing their hair as a cover. And Phyllis and her mother took up Bonnie's cause in their way. I can imagine this, so Memphis. Bonnie is among a cast of lovable characters including the Roman Catholic ghost Lawrence who lives in the Tickle's intown Memphis home and Jerimiah the frog who presides in the farm kitchen. I loved them all, human, animal and vegetable. They were quitely linked to liturgical Ordinary Time in imaginative ways. All this is reviewed in the Epilogue which explains the concept of Ordinary Time, I guess to the direly Protestant and others. The Epilogue was the least convincing part of the book as far as I was concerned. But I've lived Ordinary Time so explanations of it naturally bore me. Tickle's linking of the charming stories to Ordinary Time was often weak, though not offensively so. Some of the tales and the times seemed contrived or too casually connected. I've known of Phyllis Tickle's other work, though it hasn't much interested me. But, after this, I'll be reading more of her stories of life in West Tennessee. This is one of a three book series of memoirs of the family farm. I casually discovered this in the library and had no idea that I would enjoy it so much. Tickle is a fine writer and this was the perfect read for me right now as I've been negotiating a return to my home base here in metro Atlanta following six months of crisis. Dealing with electrical and air-conditioning problems while trying to conduct my life has seemed like a small thing in contrast. Last night I believe I saw a mouse in my garage. Tickle with her stories of family and farm love prepared me for him. After this book, I was grounded in where I came from and ready to meet an ordinary varmit.