In 2007, I attended a weekend retreat in Northeast England at Nether Springs, the mother house of the Northumbria Community. I’d been following the Community online for several years, and had started using their unintentional bestseller Celtic Daily Prayer in my personal devotions. I’ll skip the details for now, but my time at Nether Springs exceeded my expectations.
I still receive regular updates from the Community, and my family have (partly) adopted Daily Prayer as our own. We’ve worn out several Celtic Daily Prayer CDs — the sung versions are our favorites — and I have the Celtic Daily Prayer audio on my phone and computer as MP3s. Northumbria’s Daily Office is online, including Morning Prayer, Midday Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Complines.
More recently, I customized the daily meditation and Scripture reading sections from Celtic Daily Prayer, but basically, I just compiled a bunch of stuff and sifted through it and copied it all down in a black Moleskine. I used it for about a year and then I lost it, and only afterward did I realize that I never made a copy. So I started over. I resifted everything and re-copied it into a grey pocket-sized Moleskine notebook — the unlined kind, as I’m not a fan of lined paper. Then, after my friend Amy Jo taught me how to quick-draw vines on a page, I added vines and a few other artistic elements to the cover and inside pages. (I watched a YouTube video to learn how to draw a loaf of bread, and I’m particularly proud of it.) I’ve since created a newer version in a thicker black, soft-cover Moleskine, and I’m still adding stuff to it. Here are a few snapshots of what it looks like:
Rather than taking off-axis photos of the whole book (which oddly show the bleed-through more distinctly than in person) and force you to decipher my handwriting, I posted (almost) all of “BOOK ONE” from My Prayerbook here:
Prayers for Others | Daily Scripture Readings | Daily Meditations
Not published here (yet) are “BOOK TWO” and “BOOK THREE”:
BOOK TWO
Sacred Seasons & Feasts | Days to Remember | Prayer Practices & Spiritual Disciplines
BOOK THREE
Prayers & Blessings | Extras