Waymarks

by Peter Millar

Many people find the modern world a threatening place. Technologies than can control life, social and moral changes, ethnic tensions and other events that dominate our daily news often make the world seem an alien place. Yet for all its failings, it is God's world and Waymarks teaches us to recognize and celebrate his presence and activity, even where we least expect it. Waymarks explores the ways in which life's difficult challenges can be transformed into 'moments of possibility', where we can co-operate in bringing good even out of seemingly hopeless situations. These include attentiveness to Scripture, sensing our interconnections with the earth and with each other, giving expression to our creative imagination, letting go in laughter and in tears, rediscovering prophecy, healing, confession, finding friendship with God and regaining the sense that life is provisional and death is part of the journey we are making. These themes have been developed in reponse to the many questions brought by countless visitors and pilgrims to Iona and they offer an authentic and practical spirituality for life in today's complex world.

Paperback

First published August 24, 2000

About the author

Peter Millar is an award-winning British journalist, author and translator, and has been a correspondent for Reuters, Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph. He was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year for his reporting on the dying stages of the Cold War, his account of which – 1989: The Berlin Wall, My Part in its Downfall – was named ‘best read’ by The Economist. An inveterate wanderer since his youth, Peter Millar grew up in Northern Ireland and studied at Magdalen College, Oxford. Before and during his university years, he hitchhiked and travelled by train throughout most of Europe, including behind the Iron Curtain to Moscow and Leningrad, as well as hitchhiking barefoot from Dubrovnik to Belfast after being robbed in the former Yugoslavia. He has had his eyelashes frozen in the coldest inhabited place on Earth - Oymyakon, eastern Siberia, where temperatures reach minus 71ºC, was fried at 48ºC in Turkmenistan, dipped his toes in the Mississippi, the Mekong and the Nile, the Dniepr and the Danube, the Rhine and the Rhone, the Seine and the Spree. He crisscrossed the USA by rail for his book All Gone To Look for America and rattled down the spine of Cuba for Slow Train to Guantanamo. He has lived and worked in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow, attended the funerals of two Soviet leaders, been blessed six times by Pope John Paul II (which would have his staunch Protestant ancestors spinning in their graves), and he has survived multiple visits to the Munich Oktoberfest and the enduring agony of supporting Charlton Athletic. Peter speaks French, German, Russian and Spanish, and is married with two grown-up sons. He splits his time between Oxfordshire and London, and anywhere else that will have him.