A Word Shared Between Us: Praying in a Time of Exile

In the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic shut-down, the churches were ordered to close. An Anglican priest of a busy parish community who is also the father of four children in a busy family began at that time a practice of composing morning prayers, daily sharing them with his congregation. Soon, those parishioners in turn began to share his searching and often intimate prayers with an expanding circle of family and friends. Where is God, in a time of exile and disruption? What may God be saying to us, even through our experience of God's absence? How are we to remain attentive to the love that dwells in us and calls us out of ourselves?
A Word Shared Between Us is a unique, poetically composed journey of faith, full of wonder and amazement, of theological insight—and above all, of listening for God's Spirit—in a time of vulnerability, when so many personal and social certainties have been shaken. For Travis O’Brian, the questions sharpened by the pandemic are the questions of a world seeking direction and hope. His prayers are the voice of one person’s faith confronting this world without blinking: faith seeking truth and understanding.

Travis O'Brian is Rector of St Barnabas Anglican Church, a lively, loving community near downtown Victoria, BC. He is married to Jasmin, and together they have four children. Travis has a PhD in philosophy from KU Leuven, Belgium, specializing in the writings of Soren Kierkegaard.