Searched Me Out and Known Me

Journeying Lent with The Psalms

Charlie Bell

978 1 915412 78 2
Paperback |208 pp |198 x 126 mm

Price: £12.99

"In this Lenten companion, Charlie takes us through our human frailties, questions, challenges, and joys through the lens of Psalter. With searing hope he offers us a reflective tool kit to enter the journey to the cross with renewed purpose. Of all the seasons in the church year, Lent perhaps is the one that offers the most to a world hungry for God with little sense of how to connect. The poetry of the Psalms, with praise and lament provides such a vehicle. Charlie shows us how these most ancient of words and songs resonate with the rawness of our humanity in the present. The reflections in this book offer a firm nudge to those who might need it, and a purposeful comfort where that is most felt. You cannot read this book and not pause to reflect. You cannot reach it’s end without exploring afresh what it is to truly be a disciple of Jesus. I suspect this book will become more than a Lenten pilgrimage. May it be a prophetic cry to our church and world today."

Rt Revd Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, Bishop of Newcastle

'It works as well for individuals as for groups. An excellent companion for Lent.'

Sr Gemma Simmonds SJ

‘It is to the Psalms that I encourage you to turn this Lent, as a book of music that can still make our hearts soar, and yet which can accompany us through our darkest moments, too.’

In Searched Me Out and Known Me, Charlie Bell offers a soul-enriching devotional study of the Psalms for reading through the season of Lent: once a week on each of the Sundays of Lent, and once a day during Holy Week. In these pages he helps us to appreciate the Psalms as texts to be prayed over and to be prayed with, to be breathed in and breathed out, as music and poetry that calls to our hearts and then to our heads – pointing within ourselves and outward in worship towards God.

Each chapter offers a reading from the Psalms and the Gospel reading for the day, a thought-provoking reflection by Charlie, questions for group discussion, and closes with the Church of England’s Collect.

Charlie Bell is an Academic Clinical Fellow in Psychiatry at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London. He is also a Fellow, College Lecturer and Director of Studies in Medicine at Girton College Cambridge, holds a PhD (2015) in immunogenetic medicine, and is a Module Leader for the University of London’s Global MBA. He will be ordained in the Church of England in June 2021 and will serve his curacy in the Diocese of Southwark; he is currently completing an MA focusing on a theological response to ‘total pain’. He is involved in a number of church-based organisations, including Modern Church and Affirming Catholicism. He has published papers in both theology and medicine and was previously the National Medical Director’s Clinical Fellow advising the Health and Social Care Committee of the House of Commons and the National Audit Office, where he contributed to a number of reports.

Browse by Subject

Searched Me Out and Known Me

Journeying Lent with The Psalms