Waymarkings

Are you a seeker, a searcher, a pilgrim? Here is a 'thought for today' for each day of the year, a 'cairn' on the faint track, showing that someone has been this way before. Cairns mark turning points on a route, warnings where there is danger, people and events that are worth remembering from the past, inspiring us for the future.

In deserts, in mountains, and in the maze of city streets we need help if we are not to lose our way. Jim Cotter writes from within the Christian tradition as a 'pilgrim soul', often on the edge of the Church, but in touch enough for the book to be commended by Stephen Lowe, Anglican Bishop of Hulme (Manchester).

Here is a sample, for 31st January: "Constant exhortations to be good have little or no effect: they merely add to the burdens of guilt and fear, allies of a cold moralism, rigid and solemn... Of course you fail... Relax... Admit the shames and pretences, the pride and the hiding away, the refusal to let your own truth be seen... Accept that much failure comes from the difficulty of translating your desire to love into an ability to love well... So let laughter well up from the deeps, and tears too. Gently shake away the fear, and begin, slowly, to flow again. "