Thy Sheltering Arms My Spirit Take: Praying the Hours with the Patients of Utica Asylum by Amy Panton
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This book is an invitation to prayer. Not the kind that neatly resolves or easily comforts, but prayer that emerges from complex places, prayer that holds contradiction, that speaks in whispers and fragments. In Thy Sheltering Arms My Spirit Take: Praying the Hours with the Patients of Utica Asylum, Amy Panton invites you to enter a contemplative space where the voices of Utica asylum patients, preserved in the pages of The Opal magazine (1851โ1860), might be heard not as historical curiosities, but as meaningful spiritual expressions that still resonate across time.
Panton employs a "palimpsestic" theological method as a way of engaging historical theological reflections that emerged under institutional constraint. A palimpsest is a manuscript often made of parchment or vellum that has been scraped or washed clean and written over, yet traces of the original text still remain. These ghostly remnants, partially visible beneath newer layers, offer glimpses into what came before, and the tensions between erasure and endurance.
๐ฐ๏ธ The book follows the monastic Hours of Prayer:
Matins โ Beginnings, Awakening
Lauds โ Praise and Wonder
Prime โ Work and Daily Life
Terce โ Community
Sext โ Struggle and Persistence
None โ Lament and Protest
Vespers โ Reflection and Wisdom
Compline โ Rest, Surrender, and Ending
Each hour includes a short spiritual reflection and a curated selection of writings by patients from The Opal, inviting the reader into breath, prayer, memory, and meaning-making.
Thy Sheltering Arms My Spirit Take gathers the words of mad people, and is curated and held by a mad theologian. It is a mad prayerbook for mad people. It is also for spiritual care workers, chaplains, companions, and quiet witnesses, for anyone who has sat in silence, unsure whether they were praying or surviving โ or both.