Lenten book suggestions
Our pre-Vatican 11 flirtation with Latin heralded Lent's arrival with the sobering, if scarcely deniable dictum: "In medio vitae jam mortui sumus—in the midst of life we already taste...
...Etty's reflections rarely focus on the ominous political landscape...
...The Reverend Robert P Imbelli, a frequent Commonweal contributor, is director of the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College...
...The Mass is ended and we go in peace...
...Rather he sees the world through Catholic eyes...
...A Lenten exposure to Heaney's extraordinary sight and insight should help one better to see and to see things...
...Perhaps even more important, neither can our Monday mornings...
...The Passion of Jesus in the Gospel of John (Liturgical Press...
...Alleluia...
...Etty Hillesum was a twenty-seven-year-old Jewish, somewhat Bohemian intellectual living in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam when she began her diary...
...The only title, however, that evoked angry phone calls and letters to the office was the invocation "Unwed Mother, pray for us...
...Undeniable, but, of course, daily denied (as Andre Dubus avers: "we are distracted, we run errands...
...Reading for Lent, then, must permit an appropriately brief preoccupation with church, faith community, body of Christ...
...Unfortunately, the disposition of texts in the new Lectionary has eliminated the reading of all four accounts during Holy Week...
...The liturgies are linked: the one in church symbolically expresses the one in the world...
...only sacramental substance...
...Throughout the book, death is not dissected at a distance, but wondrously wrestled with...
...Rosanne Haggerty Redmond is director of the Common Ground Community, which operates and is renovating the Times Square Hotel for single room occupancy...
...Indeed, Seamus Heaney may well be the most Catholic writer since the aforementioned James Joyce...
...But nothing I've read has made it as clear and believable as Michael Skelley's The Liturgy of the World: Karl Rahner's Theology of Worship (Pueblo Books from Liturgical Press...
...The introduction alone offers enough fresh and disturbing ideas to he worth the price of the book...
...This closes the centuries-old split between the secular and the sacred that has plagued us...
...his translations of the Tao and the Book of Job will wrestle you for a lifetime...
...Having lived for years with the lectio divina discipline of the Benedictine monastic tradition, I search for (but rarely find) books which invite me to "taste and see" the working of the spirit in the author...
...The authors' goal is to enrich the quality of American life by reinvigorating the American people about what matters most: "learning how to live our lives, and with whom...
...Who knows what disguise our angels take...
...The Enlightened Heart, a collection of mystical poetry...
...Reading the essays, one can almost catch the strains of the Easter Sequence: "Death and life were joined in stupendous combat...
...First of all it means seeing things, that is seeing not only the hard physical reality of things, but seeing what lurks behind them, their meaning, their mystery, their hints of something else...
...Carol Rittner, R.S.M., lives in Scranton, Pa., and is the coeditor (with John Roth) of Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy and the forthcoming Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust...
...Like Gutierrez's book, initiation is about helping each other to engage seriously in the lifelong task of becoming free of idolatry to worship God alone...
...The Good Society reminds us that when people come together, when they pay attention to what is significant, power is generated that can transform even the most decayed institutions...
...Heaney, however, is self-consciously a maker and a revealer of the sacramental, of the gracious in the ordinary...
...She finds that she is spiritually prepared, even liberated to respond to desperate circumstances...
...It's a liturgy that takes place in the world...
...Here lies Lent's Easter reversal: "In the midst of death, still we live...
...Actually, I recommend anything by Mitchell for Lenten reading...
...All poets are sacrament-makers, even if they do not want to be...
...She was a deeply intuitive, passionate person, and a marvelous writer...
...As an artist, I too, with Patricia Reis, have internalized the wealth of divine female images created by our prehistoric sisters that have, most recently, been presented to us in the archaeological work and books of Marija Gimbutas...
...Mary Lou Kownacki, O.S.B., is executive director of the Alliance for International Monasticism...
...As a result the "good news" is once again news...
...When the forced deportation of Amsterdam's Jews begins, Etty must test her newfound beliefs in God and the mystical unity of creation...
...The church still exhorts us to fast and pray, but these days, faced as we are with the decaying cities, ecological devastation, increasing economic inequality, shattered families, neighborhoods, and schools, we must couple fasting and prayer with our human responsibility for building a more humane society...
...Now one of the accounts is proclaimed on Sunday of that week, and John's account is sung on every Good Friday...
...It is not a party line, but a call to dormant imaginations to create and bring together many party lines and interpretations in love toward consensus...
...Denying our very selves and taking up our cross is not separate from working to transform our society but is integral to the transformative process...
...God speaks there...
...Many have lauded the sacramental sensibility so evident in Dubus's work...
...Church is the focus of Lent and Easter while all the rest of the year is focused on the world as a whole, God's reign therein, mission this last the proper overall focus of heirs of Judaism and disciples of Christ...
...Art Winter is the editor of Praying magazine...
...q Commonweal 13 March 1992: 29...
...Nor, for that matter, can our Sunday mornings...
...We can begin to act when we interact...
...Before Vatican II, stress was put on fasting and praying during Lent...
...His latest book, The Gospel According to Jesus: A New Translation and Guide to His Essential Teachings for Believers and Unbelievers (HarperCollins) is excellent Lenten reading for those who prefer being pulled from preoccupation with self to the poetic and profound...
...Lent's ancient character as a climactic season in the process of communal initiation is being rediscovered...
...After the Bible (basic book of believers, font of liturgical tradition), the book whose message is most needed in initiatory processes— and has meant most to me in forty-three years of presbyterial ministry—is A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez (translated and edited by Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson, Orbis...
...True...
...It is an antidote to the apathy, cynicism, and despair so many Americans feel over the decline and decay of our nation's institutions...
...I've heard rumors of this liturgy of the world...
...It is surprising that the Passion narrative is read in one sitting and never broken up...
...This author-prophet persuades us that we cannot contribute if we are not free in relation to money and its omnipresent satellites, that the continuing pilgrim process is "breaking down our selfishness and the structures that support our selfishness...
...most useful: The Passion of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew...
...But it's only part of the story...
...Published in this country in 1983, An Interrupted Life is an unforgettable account of a search for self-knowledge and an authentic spiritual identity, of doubt, clear-eyed courage, faith, altruistic love, and ultimately, of transcendence...
...As a help in such a meditation I find the four books by Donald Senior, C.P...
...And it is a journey forward to the recovery of her healing wisdom, the knowledge of female wholeness, of self-conceiving and regeneration...
...Our pre-Vatican 11 flirtation with Latin heralded Lent's arrival with the sobering, if scarcely deniable dictum: "In medio vitae jam mortui sumus—in the midst of life we already taste death...
...Through the Goddess is the journey back to the wisdom of the cosmic mother who, for over 20,000 years enlightened our religious imaginations, the sole divinity whom we worshiped, the subject of art and ritual...
...In other words, the Spirit is present there...
...And though many of the essays were written long before that terrible night in 1986, the climactic encounter with death and diminishment casts a searing darkness and light over all...
...Thank God for Stephen Mitchell...
...and I know they have all endured their own agony, and prevailed in their own way, though not alone but drawing their hope and strength from those they love, those who love them...
...Both discipline and affliction have driven Dubus to contend with death...
...The Spirit gathers...
...and, though he doesn't say so, one has very little doubt that he knows that his vision is Catholic...
...Christ intercedes and communes with us there: God acts and we respond there...
...The Reverend Andrew M. Greeley is a professor of social science at the University of Chicago and author of the new Bishop Blackie Ryan mystery, Happy Are the Merciful (Warner Books...
...The center of the book is a new translation from the Greek of the sayings of Jesus and a commentary on the same...
...Her most recent book is The Litany of the Great River (Paulist...
...I cherish it not merely as a read, but as a vade mecum...
...It does so by spelling out Karl Rahner's theology of grace—that God is present and active in every nook and cranny of creation...
...There's another liturgy in which God interacts with us...
...The Passion of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke...
...and from You, in the sometimes tactile, sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes seemingly lethal way that You give...
...Moreover, all the other sections of Scripture are broken up and read in smaller portions over a long period of time, so that preacher and listener can reflect on each detail and every aspect of the mystery...
...Even his essay on the book of Lamentations in Congregation (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) is ideal Holy Week reading...
...Lent is a good time for us to reflect on "how to live our lives, and with whom...
...Heaney's work is a classic example of what David Tracy calls the analogical imagination, the particularly and peculiarly Catholic propensity to see grace everywhere, to sense all of reality and all realities as signs of the transcendent...
...life's standard-bearer dies, yet reigns victorious...
...And Irish Catholic at that...
...As befits a book by a poet, particularly an Irish poet, the title of Seamus Heaney's new collection Seeing Things (Random House) has two meanings...
...The author tells the stories of women whom she has guided to wholeness, to healing diseased, wounded, or abused bodies and 28: 13 March 1992 Commonweal psyches...
...Christ intercedes with the Father and communes with us...
...Indeed, this liturgy is the primary liturgy...
...The Passion of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark...
...An Interrupted Life is profound reading for any season, but is particularly suited for those Lenten moments when Etty's life and final remarks echo with glorious sustaining power...
...The Reverend Robert W. Hovda, recently deceased, was a long-time columnist for Worship magazine and a contributor to Commonweal...
...Are the catacombs really about wallowing in dysfunctional families, healing every bruise and boo-boo since the crib, burnout and balanced lifestyles, enneagrams and INFJ, ESTP, WXYZ...
...One day at Mass, after accident and multiple operations and daily struggles merely to endure, Dubus directs this prayer to the Lord: I receive You in the Eucharist at daily Mass, and look at You on the cross, but mostly I watch the priest, the old deacon, a widower, who brings me the Eucharist...
...And Lent reminds us Christians that we are sealed with the sign of the cross, our power to transform the world...
...All of us know what we believe happens at Mass...
...And Irish Catholic at that...
...unless monastic or domestic discipline (the two closer than we often surmise) or personal affliction compel our attention to its truth...
...It means, for example, the liturgy of Lent and Easter is going on all the time in the world, not just in church during forty special days...
...A word means two thinks as Joyce wrote...
...The title essay itself conveys with almost unbearable intensity and honesty the tragic, selfless accident that cost Dubus a leg and rendered him a cripple...
...And may be just possibly the beginning of a new tradition of Catholic humanism...
...These ancient images confirm what any woman artist knows: that we are not empty vessels waiting to be filled by an outer, other, phallic energy, but, like the primordial self-conceiving goddess, the entire power and process of seeding, gestation, and birthing, the paradigm of all creative work, is wholly within our bodies...
...and the people who walk past me to receive...
...He is not an apologist, heaven save us, nor a convert-maker...
...From the train carrying her to her death at Auschwitz, Etty Hillesum threw a postcard...
...It also means seeing things, physical, material objects, the solid presences which lurk around our everyday life...
...By using the best of modem scholarship, Mitchell strips the gospel to its essence, omitting all passages that were added by the early church...
...Meinrad Craighead lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico...
...Thus, during Lent I find it helpful to read all the accounts of the Passion and death in smaller doses and in a more prayerful and reflective way, what Benedictines call lectio divina, extended over the whole of Lent...
...These accounts—their vivid details, their pathos, their portrayal of the long-suffering Christ—have been central to us Christians throughout the centuries...
...Her way is through therapeia, the act of "attending to," and its original association with worship...
...The Good Society is not an easy book to read, but it is an important book to read...
...It is an immersion in God rather than a dipping of our toes in an isolated and protected puddle we have the chutzpah to call "faith...
...and I hope this re-echoing will attract yet others to the dreadful wisdom the work embodies...
...This century's remarkable opening up of a museum liturgy to be the universally accessible "primary and indispensable source" for a church that had become too dependent on its official interpreters is the basis for its rescue of theology from academic and abstract confines, freeing that reflection to be as it once was: pastoral, benefiting from the insights and experience of all...
...She is, rather, attempting to locate a source of meaning, a sense of purpose, and to integrate her intellectual, sensual, and spiritual selves...
...It thus bears blessings to the company of believers, wayfarers in Lent, sustained by Easter hope...
...But grief, after all, like joy, comes to us as a passing guest," Mitchell writes...
...Patricia Reis, the author of Through the Goddess: A Woman's Way of Healing (Continuum), is an artist and psychotherapist whose words do speak directly to my soul...
...When I was national coordinator of Pax Christi USA, we issued a contemporary litany on Mary, giving her some real but radical titles...
...To live out her conviction that "we should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds," Etty voluntarily goes to Westerbork, a holding camp for those on their way to Auschwitz...
...In and through the ritual, God acts and we respond with praise and thanks...
...The forty days of Lent are earthquake time...
...Knowing this, our Lents can never be the same...
...But these days it's hard to find a "spiritual" book that sells dynamite, not No-Doz...
...The Most Reverend Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B., is the archbishop of Milwaukee...
...In fact, we work out our salvation through it...
...In the hands of this sculptor of words, the reflections on the text are masterpieces...
...Well, that's a hint of what's in Mitchell's introduction...
...We left the camp singing," declared this remarkable and complicated woman, whose spiritual journey against the background of the Holocaust is revealed in An Interrupted Life—The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943 (Pantheon...
...We ought to treat it with courtesy, as Abraham treated the angels...
...If you have time to read only one book this Lent, I recommend Commonweal 13 March 1992: 27 The Good Society by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Anne Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton (Alfred A. Knopf...
...There are no spectral abstractions in it...
...But here that sensibility is founded upon rock, its substance transubstantiated in Eucharist: the memorial of the Lord's death until he comes...
...We spend all our lives participating in it, not just an hour a week...
...God speaks...
...She declines opportunities to escape Amsterdam, and embraces the fate of the Jewish people...
...All four Evangelists make the events of the passion and death of Jesus Christ the centerpiece of their Gospels...
...The miraculous result is that life is not grudgingly measured out, but extravagantly celebrated, whether in the refusal of self-deception, the rage for justice, or the surrender to grace...
...Heaney's vision is overwhelmingly Catholic and almost always implicitly so...
...Light the dynamite and duck...
...and his recent book of essays, Broken Vessels (David B. Godine), serves as striking testimony to the encounter...
...While it is short on strategy, it is filled with insights, analysis, and encouragement to engage others in the conversation of democracy...
...David Toolan's splendid review in Commonweal (November 22, 1991) first alerted me to the book...
Vol. 119 • March 1992 • No. 5
