The quiet eye Book

The combination of art and spirituality seems to be a very natural one, and yet many spiritual traditions throughout the ages have looked with suspicion at art. Quakers, Sylvia Judson's own religious community, always prided themselves on exquisite simplicity of life and shunned all visually ostentations displays, which included almost all art. Judson wanted to change this attitude to some extent, and her book "The Quiet Eye" is an important and valuable example of this.

This book is a collection of many beautiful images of art throughout the centuries. Each image is accompanied with a quote, most of which have some important spiritual message to convey and are in some way related to the image they are associated with. Both the quotes and the images are beautiful and they stimulate the imagination. The stimulus is a subtle one, and the experience is mean to be inward and introspective. In this regard the book is very much in tune with the Quaker tradition.

This is a very beautiful small book that eschews trappings of cheap and trite spirituality. It could be used as a small traveling companion for all of our spiritual journeys.