Religion Booknotes

...to bring a contemplative dimension to her church life...

...perhaps what is called (but remains undefined) "love of learning...

...it belongs to that kind of spiritual writing, with deep roots in people like Thoreau, which turns the ordinary into the extraordinary...

...Using the old insight of "learned ignorance" (the docta igno-rantia of Nicholas of Cusa) he sets this chapter against a professor he once had who, immediately after entering a lecture hall one day, looked at the students, closed his notes, and walked out saying, "I'm sorry...

...In a single volume she has managed to cover the leading iconographical symbols, personages, events, and artifacts of the Christian (mostly Western Christian) artistic tradition...

...He later spent time as a solitary back in New Guinea, headed a small monastery in North Carolina, and now, near-ing eighty, is back in Gethsemani where he works at various tasks in the monastery, serves as chaplain to the guest house, and nightly gives those talks...

...Benedict began his rule with the word "Listen...

...a welcoming community of good monks...

...On the other hand, there is a generous representation of saints and their iconography, flower symbolism, biblical events and figures, parts of the body, other symbols, etc...

...or, inadequately explained (there are only five lines on "icons...

...Nugent correlates the profound mystery of death with the Christian mystical tradition...

...Asi' Es, a slim book of personal narratives, makes that point in an indirect way by a series of stories told by a range of Asi' Es: Stories of Hispanic Spirituality, edited by Arturo Perez et al...

...To link mystical prayer with a kind of death is to avoid thinking that mysticism is always euphoria (a common claim of New Agers), since, as Nugent rightly points out, God is not always euphoric...

...I suspect that this is one of the less desirable effects of software programming...

...This is the consciousness of Christ...

...I am awake," said the Buddha...

...Other things, for lack of space, get overly compressed (for example, is the "paten" really reducible to a symbol of the Last Supper, or even the "chalice" for that matter...

...God's skepticism, Chesterton once wrote, was more satisfying to Job than all of the solutions of Job's "friends...

...have so many fine insights that I cannot rehearse them here...

...His particular gift, it seems to me, is to see the whole and the seamless where most of us see the scattered and the atomized...

...Not a goddam thing...

...It is not a theoretical treatise nor is it a "how to" manual...

...Nugent brings forward the testimony of a litany of people to illustrate his point from classical authors like John of the Cross (to whom he is deeply in debt and about whom he has learned much) and Therese of Lisieux to more modern people like the Jewish and Dutch Etty Hillesum (one of the more extraordinary personalities of our time) and the writer Caryll Houselander...

...The entries are cross-referenced by the use of an asterisk to an almost alarming degree...

...Such a reply spoke deeply of the human struggle to live, of the untold chances we all miss to live in our everyday lives, and of the toughness of this unnamed woman...

...One author cites approvingly the Portuguese proverb that a "pinch of mothers is worth a pound of priests...

...I am a frequent visitor to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and here are My Song Is of Mercy: Writings of Matthew Kelty, Monk of Gethsemani, edited by Michael Downey Sheed & Ward, $15.95,258 woods to walk about in...

...Authentic mystical wisdom is a kind of death (of false ideas...

...The homilies are brief but full of monastic wisdom...

...Perhaps these two volumes would make good companions.Perhaps these two volumes would make good companions...

...I think Juan Sosa, one of the contributors to this volume, gets it right when he admits that his spirituality is a "patchwork" which is "composed of many elements," precisely because he is a Cuban priest, raised in the United States, and shaped by a "church in transition...

...Every evening after compline, in a small chapel next to the church, the retreatants, a few monks, some of the locals, and a few passersby gather to hear Father Matthew speak...

...The talks always end up being brilliant (note always-I've never heard a mediocre talk...

...Furthermore, there is no clear distinction made between "high" and "low" culture, which is to say that devotion to the Virgin (under her various national titles) or family altars or religious fiestas are not quaint ethnographical examples of folklore but sacramental expressions of a deep and coherent faith...

...What are you, the person insisted...

...It was rather like the skepticism of God in the Book of Job when God answers the questions of Job with tougher questions of his own...

...Since these are stories that are almost exclusively autobiographical they do not contain any appreciable measure of theological or sociological reflection, nor should they be expected to do so...

...The hidden motif that runs through this work, in short, is the nexus between a spiritual discipline and recognition of the Logos who is Christ...

...Nugent makes the wonderful observation that Christianity does not have koans because all of Christianity is koanistic, which is to say, that it proposes for us riddles and gnomic aspirations, and odd challenges which are to be lived and not to be solved...

...The Liturgical Press, $8.95, 111 pp...

...She also notes that her meditation exercises "overflowed" into her liturgical awareness as well as into her personal life...

...It was Bernard of Clairvaux who once said that the person who undertakes his own spiritual direction has a fool for a teacher...

...and an index...

...Sitting Still is a brief spiritual diary and should be read as such...

...She began to see, in short, what the Christian mystical tradition had always taught: that God is more basic, foundational, mysterious, and Other than our paltry imaginings imagine...

...Some may quibble with the speedy iconographical glosses in some of the entries but I noticed few factual errata...

...religious and lay...

...divine transcendence in the person of a baby...

...The author describes, in her introduction, the criteria for inclusion/exclusion which does help to explain why some of the areas are not covered...

...At Mysticism, Death, and Dying, by Christopher Nugent State University of New York, $12.95,127 pp...

...Hispanic Catholics (married and divorced...

...In order to do this she signed up for a week's retreat in California under the direction of a Jesuit priest with long experience in Japan who had himself sat zazen under a spiritual master there...

...The "im-ageless" meditation of Zen also had the added benefit of purifying her notion of God so that whatever "domestic" notions she previously held disappeared until "the presence of the holy in my meditation had actually enlarged my faith rather than diminished it...

...the trinity of persons in one God (can you meditate on that, Nugent asks, for twenty years without a grin or a grimace...

...The question that occurred to me (I raise the same questions when reviewing similar books) is to what extent such a spirituality can remain vibrant in coming generations as the Hispanic community, like its counterparts from Ireland, Poland, and Italy, becomes more "Americanized," which is to say, suburban and middle-class...

...He then talks for about fifteen minutes, but it is very difficult to explain the tenor of those talks...

...of a rootedness in an overly loved routine life), as Saint Bonaventure, at the end of the ltinemrium, once beautifully noted: "Let us, then, die and enter into the darkness/ let us impose silence upon our cares, our desires, and our imaginings...

...I'm empty...

...However different the stories may be, there are some common themes...

...on "maniple...

...Oh yes, and there is something else...

...How to define this book...

...Carse is, in that sense, awake and being awake allows him to describe the seemingly mundane moments of his life as larger and more powerful than they first appear to be...

...The advertising material (I read it in page proofs) calls it a memoir...

...the very beginning of the work he notes that the sense of the experiential awareness of God's presence is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit but, unlike some of the more exuberant gifts, this one brings to us Wisdom...

...James Carse is a long-time (since 1966) and, evidently, wildly popular teacher Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience, by James P. Carse HarperSan Francisco, $21,224 pp...

...Here is my highest praise: it is a book of sermons that does not read like a book of sermons...

...and the silence, especially the silence of the night...

...Carse tells wonderful stories (of a reluctant duck hunt...

...When asked by an inquirer if he were a God or a magician, the Buddha responded that he was neither...

...Judging by this powerfully written book, he is a person of profound insight and deep compassion...

...was her reply...

...One could do worse than read this good monk who has been listening for a long time with the ear of a poet and the heart of a mystic...

...To my mind there is only one other similar volume with as much information at such a reasonable price: the paperback Flammarion Guide titled The Bible and the Saints (New York, 1994...

...They are funny and seemingly disconnected (I can never figure what the topic is when he begins) but they always cohere into a solid meditation from what began as an observation about the price of coffee at McDonalds or why men drive out from Louisville to fish in one of the abbey ponds...

...It is also, in a rather parenthetical fashion, a portrait of a skilled and sympathetic retreat master that should remind us that, were we to enter into these disciplines, a good teacher is a must...

...Zen retreats are rigorous exercises and Clifford makes that quite plain: she is, by turns, bored, doubtful, physically in pain from the sitting exercises, but finally confirmed in her faith and more committed to the service to which she had earlier pledged herself...

...RELIGION BOOKKOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham There is not, as Joann Wolski Conn has reminded us, a generic spirituality but only particular spiritualities nourished by past traditions, particular charisms, and cultural influences...

...In short, everything ordinary and clear-cut becomes deepened and thickened and darkened when it confronts the oxymoronic deep claims of the gospel (which is why, I think, everybody in John's Gospel seems to miss the point so often...

...He finishes in about fifteen or twenty minutes, tells the audience he has said enough, and scoots off to the cloister...

...In sum: a handy reference book which should find its place on the library shelf of the curious art lover with a penchant for matters Christian...

...etc...

...of a shriveled ego...

...Despite the somewhat forbidding title, Nugent's terse little book (three extended essays and an afterword) derives from his own experiences with the Hospice movement and, more specifically, with the death of a teen-ager who had been struck down by cancer...

...the conferences are enlightening and deeply felt...

...The result is sentences such as: "A fiery chariot was an *attribute of the *Old Testament *prophet *Elijah...

...It was the silence-the apophatic moment- that was the moment of decision...

...Michael Downey has gathered together a whole range of Father Matthew's conferences, liturgical homilies, and chapter talks, as well as reprinting Flute Solo which was an earlier book on Matthew's monastic life in New Guinea and North Carolina...

...a selected bibliography of English-language titles...

...He comes to the lectern with a sheaf of dog-eared notes and xeroxes, a beaten-up book or two, and reads some poetry: Blake or Hopkins or Eliot or Dickenson or Merton...

...The effortless dance at the grill, the ebb and flow of daily conversations, the parade of customers, the endless bagels and coffee, the sheer flow of mundane energy is Carse's closely observed metaphor of the changeableness of human existence, just as his wife's dying (in his arms) is a pathway into the mystery of human love and the tenuous hold we have on time...

...at New York University...

...To cultivate mystical theology (which means, historically, nothing more than encounter with the hidden reality of God's presence among us and in us) is to penetrate deeply into what it means to be a Christian...

...The three meditative essays in this book (do they mirror the classical three stages of the interior life...

...I can invite anyone interested in the life of deep prayer as it relates to our life's journey to "take up and read...

...Patricia Hart Clifford is an Episcopalian lay person who had first encountered meditation practices to counter stress in her life at a time when she had left conventional religion behind her...

...It is good to have in print the wisdom of a monk who has seen the world, loves Simon & Garfunkel, knows tailoring and cobbling, has a mind saturated in the psalter, reads the poets with passion, and understands the monastic life not as quaint "lifestyle" but as a way of life which, when observed, teaches a person a thing or two...

...In a single volume it is inevitable that certain things could not get mentioned (for example, we have an entry on "chasuble" but not Dictionary of Christian Art, by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona Continuum, $39.50,376 pp...

...The line shocked me when I first came up to it, but only a second of reflection made me think about how unsentimentally true and right it was to say that...

...of sailing on Lake Michigan) but what struck me most forcefully was a brief chapter on teaching as a vocation...

...It was at that moment, Carse said, that he knew that with those memorable words he wanted, above all, to be a teacher...

...The volume is enhanced with 162 black-and-white illustrations...

...he inquired...

...She rightly notes that what she did not seek was "self-improvement" or conventional therapy but a way of discipline, stillness, focus, and attention in order to deepen her prayer life...

...After becoming active in her Episcopalian church, she decided to continue with her meditative practices in order Sitting Still: An Encounter with Christian Zen, by Patricia Hart Clifford Paulist, $9.95,85 pp...

...Even the word "Hispanic" is too generic because the attentive reader will quickly see that the nourishing roots of Cuban religious life are not quite the same as those that come from Mexico or Central America or further south in Latin America...

...The Dictionary of Christian Art is not a work of high scholarship but it is a testimony to the hard work of its compiler...

...Shortly before she died, his wife asked Carse if he knew what she had learned from her months of suffering...

...The Flammarion is excellent both in terms of its illustrations (with many in color) and capacious entries on the saints but has less on the particulars of liturgical usage, the iconography of flora, etc...

...This slim book is an extended diary- set out in seven chapters-describing her week of Zen practices done with a slant toward deepening Christian faith...

...As her retreat master put it: "Our aim in meditation is to identify ourselves with the Word, that is to come to know ourselves as a singular, unique manifestation of the formless source...

...After all, the gospel speaks of life coming from death...

...Like Carse, Nugent is an academic but one who makes us hopeful about the professorate: here is a writer who is learned, compassionate, and deeply touched by the Wisdom which is the Word...

...As the Catholic church in this country becomes more Hispanic, will this rich panoply of traditions fall prey to the flattening out of an increasingly homogenized culture...

...On my bookshelf it will have a place next to writers like Kathleen Norris, Annie Dillard, and Patricia Hampl-all quite different writers, to be sure, but who all share the attractive quality of being wide awake...

...Anyone who has passed through the guesthouse of Gethsemani will get this book in a trice, but others, who have not actually heard his voice, will profit from it...

...What...

...In story after story, for example, there is an appeal to the family and, more specifically, to those parents and grandparents whose faith and practice served as the matrix from which the narrators instinctively turn in order to speak of their current faith pilgrimage...

...Patricia Clifford is a graceful writer who took her retreat with the seriousness it deserves...

...It is more than that...

...The book, then, might well be an aid to anyone who wishes to explore the possibility of learning more about contemplative disciplines...

...It also shaped his conviction (one to which I always aspire) that the teacher brings a conviction that is more than what he or she teaches...

...Matthew Kelty was a missionary in Papua, New Guinea, before he entered the monastery in 1960 at the age of forty-five...

...The "victory" of the book's title was a diner run by a one-legged veteran of World War II where Carse would breakfast...