About Letters to God
Procession, not parade.
Prayer keeps time. We wanted a book that did too.
Who makes it
Letters to God is a NO PARADE journal. NO PARADE is a faith-rooted brand from Bayonne, New Jersey, and its name is a working rule: procession, not parade. A parade is staged to be watched. A procession moves because it is going somewhere, and everyone in it is walking. We borrowed the distinction from Rebecca Solnit, and we use it as the test for everything we make: does it help someone keep walking, or does it only look good going by?
Our shorthand for the same idea is PBWY, Peace Be With You, the greeting Jesus gives his friends after the resurrection (John 20:19). It is also how this site signs off.
The family it belongs to
The same brand runs a few projects that share one thesis. No Parade F.C. is football culture and apparel with scripture on the things you wear. Bayonne Athletics is a community brand for Bayonne, made by us for us. Human Weather is a somatic wellness project and publication, and the body-first way of paying attention behind Volume III comes from there. Letters to God is the one you write in.
Why the moon
A month is the oldest calendar there is, and you can read it without a device. The moon is new, then half full, then full, then half again, about a week apart. Those four turns became the four stations of each moon in these books, and the crescent and gibbous moons halfway between them became four midpoints, each with a dated page that asks what has changed. You do not have to remember what day to write. You look up.
The moon happens at one moment everywhere, and the date it falls on depends on where you live, so every book is dated for your start day and your time zone. The phases come from the standard astronomical formulas in Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, and we checked them against an independent ephemeris library: across all 48 phases of a year, the largest difference was 28 seconds.
Why forty-eight commands
Most of us know what Jesus said. It is easier to miss that much of it was an instruction: repent, follow me, rejoice, forgive, watch, go. A list of 48 puts that plainly. Four stations a moon over twelve moons gives one command for every week of the year, each in the King James words, each with a prompt beside it and a page for your answer. Forty-four of the 48 come from Matthew, three from Luke and one from John.
The list follows a compilation by NewStart Discipleship. The prompts, the layout and the dates are ours.
Why three volumes
The trilogy rests on koinonia, the Greek word the New Testament uses for shared participation. The idea is prayer that takes the whole person along: spirit, mind and body, held together instead of taking turns. Volume I, Letters to God, is the direct one, a plain conversation. Volume II, Letters to Future Me, writes across time, so that you can read back a year of faithfulness in your own hand. Volume III, Letters to My Body, begins in the breath, the jaw and the hands, and the words come after. The same 48 commands run through all three, so you can take the one you need this year, or all three.
Why printed to order
Nothing here sits in a warehouse. When you order, your book is generated with your name and your dates, and only then printed and sent. It means a wait of a week or two. It also means there is no unsold stock, and the book in your hands was made for you.
How they are made
Each book is an A5 hardcover with a matte casewrap cover, in three colours: Deep Indigo for Volume I, Deep Teal for Volume II and Warm Rust for Volume III. Headings are set in Cormorant Garamond and the prompts in IBM Plex Mono. Scripture is the King James Version, which is in the public domain in the United States.