Sister Wendy's Book of Meditations

Public television celebrity Sister Wendy (The Mystery of Love: Saints in Art Through the Centuries) presents another sampling of the world's most famous artwork to illustrate the top four themes of meditation: silence, love, joy, and peace. As a contemplative nun, Wendy Beckett brings an aura of humility and respect to her plainspoken observations. The fact that she can also offer a truly enlightening spiritual context for any and every piece of art makes her one of the most beloved art commentators of our time.

For example, Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave (a foaming tsunami about to collapse upon two crews of men cowering in rowboats) is examined through Sister Wendy's lens of peace. "We cannot control our lives," she writes about the treacherous wave. "As Hokusai shows so memorably, the great wave is in waiting for any boat.... The worst is not that we may be overwhelmed by disaster, but to fail to live by principle." Later, Sister Wendy offers Claude Monet's blazing canvas of overflowing White Clematis as a study of joy: "Joy is too great to be experienced. It is never our own, never within our power. It is rather that we are taken up in its vastness.... Monet's white clematis say something of this, if only in its impression of a vision too vast for the encompassing." --Gail Hudson