A Journey into Love: Meditating with Piers Plowman

A Journey into Love: Meditating with Piers Plowman is a small gathering of passages from the fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman, with brief commentary and thought questions for private meditation or group discussion, and with beautiful photographic illustrations from art and architecture which are from the poet's own time. The poem, a masterpiece of English literature, is now little known to the people for whom it was presumably written--those who want new insight into how to "do well" and come to know God who is Love. Written well before the Reformation, it belongs to both Catholics and Protestants because they had not yet divided; it praises Jews and hopes for the salvation of all people. Its spirituality is peculiarly apt for our time because of its biblical, liturgical, and non-sexist character, its affirmation of nature, the body, and marriage, its emphasis upon the need for social justice, its ethics centered in love, and its extraordinarily beautiful language. Its tones range from the earthy to the sublime, the comic to the poignant. It reflects in vivid metaphors upon the deepest religious mysteries, such as the nature of God, the Trinity, the natures of Jesus, and the indwelling of Divinity in the human heart, without over-simplification or sentimentality. Its sense of God is of an infinitely merciful Being searching the world for those who are lost. Filled with word-play, plays on sound and logic, the original Middle English is here translated into modern English by the author. Readers who find help in Julian of Norwich or Hildegarde of Bingen, in Eckhart or Tauler, will be introduced here to another medieval master of the spiritual life whose teaching is a journey into love.