Description Through poems about prayer, conversion and faith, Tim Bete shares his search for God--a search that is common to each of us. Somewhere in the intersection of holy silence and the struggles of daily life, God appears: in a winter evening walk, in the smell of incense at church, in a blue patio chair, in the Sacrament of Confession. More than a collection of poems, this book is a prayer journal--a glimpse into the faith journey of the poet. Sample poems Repayment What will God find when He looks within, searching a soul emptied to make a dwelling place for Him? He will see Himself, for that is all my soul can hold. And when He sees Himself, rejoicing at the Love He’s found—a Love that is also Him—how is it He will repay me, who am neither the seeker nor the Love, but only the container in which He dwells? Without His blood, a chalice is only a cup; without His body, a tabernacle just a box. He creates and sustains all I am and yet it is He who repays me—a strange repayment of that which was never first given. Unknown Martyr Each night, she scrubs tile floors after waiting tables all day: her hands and knees raw, exhaustion bringing her one day closer to death. Her only thought, a son and daughter—how to keep them fed with a roof over head, how to survive another month, how to pray in the midst of pain. Kneeling on dirty, wet vestibule block is not as glamorous as Joan (burnt by soldiers) or Clement (tossed with an anchor into the sea) or Stephen (stoned by a mob). Each Saint quickly sacrificed while her martyrdom is decades long, her life laid down bit by bit each evening through the instrument of a soapy brush. Praise “Beautiful and very accomplished. There's a spareness about the language and a quietness which makes these poems excellent vehicles for reflection and prayer. We need God’s stillness in the world. These poems really contain His silence.”— Sally Read, poet and author of Night’s Bright Darkness “These poems are a powerful and quite enjoyable read in and of themselves, but perhaps the most compelling aspect of this collection is its ability to help us, in a prayerful way, identify and wrestle with our own fragile faith in the midst of a quite unpredictable existence.”— Mark Danis, OCDS, co-host of the Carmelite Conversations radio program More of Tim's poetry can be found at www.GrayRising.com. "Beautiful and very accomplished. There's a spareness about the language and a quietness which makes these poems excellent vehicles for reflection and prayer. We need God's stillness in the world. These poems really contain His silence." -- Sally Read, poet and author of Night's Bright Darkness "In this collection of beautiful and soul stirring poems by the new poet, Tim Bete, the reader--or perhaps more appropriately, the contemplative listener--will discover a means of transport into the center of the human encounter with God. Drawing on everything from the earliest and sometimes painful childhood memories, as in 'Hangar Shirts', to the inevitable lifetime journey of the prodigal's return in 'The Longest Road,' Bete's poems have the impact of encouraging the reader to both enter in, and later be drawn back out from our often all too raw human experience. Along the way, and as part of this spiritual exercise of entering in and going forth, Bete uses the powerful imagery of night, nature, snow and silence to paint this picture of encounter, as when in the 'Silent Winter Prayer' he writes, "At that moment, You pierced my heart, fracturing the tabernacle of the woods." These poems are a powerful and quite enjoyable read in and of themselves, but perhaps the most compelling aspect of this collection is its ability to help us, in a prayerful way, identify and wrestle with our own fragile faith in the midst of a quite unpredictable existence. This is well demonstrated in the poem, "Invocation for a Dying Man." Here Bete invites us to experience the apparent futility of the act of prayer in the midst of pain, "God took the man and we sobbed because God hadn't listened." But then he offers his readers, in the later poem, 'Love's Call,' the hopeful note of victory, transition, encounter and even the vision of an eternal embrace, "Yet death He nimbly smashed, like a fragile earthen vase and called out to His souls, come through this death to Me." For those who appreciate good poetry, this will be a very enjoyable read. But even more so, for those who seek in poetry an encounter between the interior and the eternal, this collection will serve as fair passage to that rendezvous." -- Mark Danis, OCDS, co-host of the Carmelite Conversations radio program While Tim Bete has been a writer for much of his life, he only started writing poetry after he entered his fifties and began spending a significant amount of time in silent prayer. The more time he spent in silence, the greater the ease he had writing poetry. In a way, Tim's poems are his prayer journal. Tim is a member of the Secular Order o