In Brief: My Life Is a Quilt: A Book of Quaker Messages

By Wendy Clarissa Geiger. Southeastern Yearly Meeting Publishing, 2020. 133 pages. $15/paperback.

This little book is square in shape, which makes it feel like a quilt piece in the reader’s hands. Each of its pages is lightly “stitched” with a message that came to—and through—Friend Wendy Geiger. The messages are laid out in short paragraphs that are centered top-to-bottom on the page and have large drop caps. This layout makes the page pleasing to the eye, even as the offered messages ease and please the heart and mind.

Friends are familiar with receiving vocal ministry of others during meeting for worship, and many are also familiar with receiving a message and being required to give it as vocal ministry. Geiger does readers a kindness by collecting so many messages that she says, “usually appeared fully developed, clear, and startling.” She finishes the book with a section called “The Quaker Experiment of Meeting for Worship.” It is a welcome combination of guidance, encouragement, description, and invitation to “take the hour of meeting for worship on Sunday morning to clean the windowpanes of our hearts in order for Godde to flow in and out of our hearts more easily.”