Phaino

One minute a day, for a year. Each reading is a different way into the same idea: the light of God is already inside you. It has always been there.

Phaino is a daily devotional of 365 entries, each about a page long, written in plain words that a child can read and an adult will come back to. Some days it will remind you of what you already know. Some days it will be the first kind thing you hear. A minute to read. As long as you like to sit with it.

Read it in the morning with coffee, at night before sleep, out loud to a spouse or a child, at a bedside, or to open and close a few minutes of quiet. It works alone or with others: a small group, a care team, a family at the table. The entries are numbered, not dated, so you can begin on any day, and begin again when the year is done.

The readings draw on the Gospels, 1 John, 2 John, Jude, Revelation, and the early Christian writings preserved at Nag Hammadi and in the Berlin Codex: the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Apocryphon of John, and the Sophia of Jesus Christ. A source list at the back shows where each entry comes from.

The theology is simple and whole. God is light. The light lives in every person, everywhere, always. It cannot be broken, earned, or lost. The work of the spiritual life is not to reach the light or earn it. The work is to remember what has been here the whole time.

For the tired. For the doubting. For the ones who have been told the light is not for them.

Also available: Phaino Advent, twenty-five readings for December 1 to Christmas Day, drawn from this book.