Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S
RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham I am not expert enough to say if Father McNamee's poetry is "good" in any formal sense. My own clumsy attempts at sonnet writing have always left me...
...It is good to be reminded that statues are hewn from tough, earthly material...
...a humble person doing hidden work but "when Easter comes...I shall imagine him as graceful as the cleaning woman...
...Anyone who would like a primer on Christian prayer would do well to consider this volume...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...What the Martys, father and son, have given us is a holistic meditation aid that engages the visual, the literary, and the musical...
...into one of the canonically acceptable "forms" of committed living), she decided to spend her life as a contemplative presence and social activist in a largely hostile political atmosphere...
...Cape Sunion...
...All of the citations are in French, which means that Mann's work is the first available to us in English...
...That criticism aside, I can recommend this volume for anyone interested in the practice of Christian prayer...
...The author does a nice job of relating prayer to the sacramental life and the sociopolitical life of the one praying...
...Prayer for Leech is Christian prayer and it is not an exercise in privatism...
...McGovern gives us good, thick assertive lines (just as woodcuts ought to do) tracing out Hopkins in his oversized collar and Simone Weil with those no-nonsense rimless glasses...
...Willis Elliott is a Protestant pastor with a Ph...
...Someone would appreciate it as gift...
...a conservative...
...The book contains a brief bibliography of Delbrel's published works and works about her (Mann evidently wrote a dissertation on Delbrel for the Institut Catholique in the 1970s...
...Its reasonable price makes it all the more attractive...
...This book is a sampler...
...For that reason alone I was glad to come across Charles Mann's biography of Madeleine Delbrel (whom I had never heard of before reading this book), who had a part in the Catholic renewal in France...
...As a young person I also went to Saint Severin to see its well-executed liturgy, read of the priest-workers, received inspiration from the Little Sisters and Brothers of Jesus, and immersed myself in the writings of Congar, Chenu, Danielou, and de Lubac...
...There have been some very fine books on prayer published since this work first appeared...
...it would also make a fine retreat companion...
...McNamee has an incarnational eye...
...I found myself, while studying the pictures or scanning the text, humming some of the hymns with which I was familiar...
...Most important, however, Elliott has been a keen student of the Bible...
...Marty does suggest, however, that if each one were used for each day of Lent, the book would take one exactly from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday...
...By his count, he has composed well over two thousand of these reflections...
...He reads it daily in the original languages...
...There is a lot in these "thinksheets" with which to argue...
...Some of the pictures provide a long view (a cathedral interior) while others are close-up details of, among other things, exterior sculptures such as lintel carvings, buttresses, and so on...
...How, then, to describe Elliott and his enterprise...
...The bite of the chisel is a profound signature for me which explains why, for example, I have always preferred Michelangelo's Pieta in the Florence Cathedral to the polished youthful one we see in Saint Peter's Basilica...
...The forty-six chapters which make up this reader are a mixed bag (not enhanced by Elliott's penchant for diagrams which, for the most part, are puzzling), but what most attracted me to the book is the basic vehicle which he calls the "thinksheet...
...Flow of Flesh, Reach of Spirit: Thinksheets of a Contrarian Christian, by Willis Elliott, Eerdmans, $15,252 pp...
...For over twenty years he has also sent out, to a group of willing readers, a "thinksheet"-a few pages reflecting on current events or reflections on his Bible study or ruminations on church life...
...In other words: this is a book to look at and to read and, preferably, when doing the latter, read out loud...
...One can only hope that some of Delbrel's more important spiritual writings will appear in English...
...It has been out of print for some time, so it is good news that Morehouse has reissued this quite readable work in an inexpensive paperback format...
...Madeleine Delbrel (1904-64), converted in the early 1930s, and moved to the town of Ivry, a Communist suburb of Paris-part of the "Red Belt" of the city...
...the desert of the Southwestern United States...
...Her approach to prayer, as far as I could determine from what Mann tells us, has echoes of Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection's (another Parisian...
...That would please him because, as Kenneth Woodward says in his introduction to the volume, this is not a "newsletter" but an ongoing conversation...
...Franz Jagerstatter...
...It all seemed just right...
...book called True Prayer (1980...
...perhaps an anthology, if a suitably judicious translator (and publisher...
...I like the way he goes about things even when I do not like all the things he says...
...practice of the presence of God and Therese of Lisieux's "Little Way...
...For the past two decades he has been a scholar-in-residence at a retreat house on Cape Cod...
...A poem on the liturgy for "those who have no Divine Office to attend" linked prayer with the everyday activities of the people she saw working and drinking in a cafe where, in fact, she composed the poem...
...To that work of prose we can now add this volume...
...Leech's sources are a nice ecumenical blend of Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican works...
...Between his now classic Soul Friend (1977) and Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality (1985), the Anglican theologian Kenneth Leech published a little True Prayer: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality, by Kenneth Leech, Morehouse, $12.95,202 pp...
...Thomas Merton...
...With a few companions who lived with her (these professional women resisted to the end becoming a secular institute or otherwise being categorized Madeleine Delbrel: A Life Beyond Boundaries, by Charles F. Mann, New World Press, $12.95,208 pp...
...Leech possesses a facility for intertwining classic works of spirituality with selections from belles lettres in an inviting sort of way...
...The pictures have a stark crisp-ness to them with rare examples of the "impressionistic...
...Matthew Kelty) and places that have always moved me (Paris's church of Saint Severin...
...He is also adept at keeping prayer set within the context of the public life of the church and true to the demands of social justice...
...However, I would like to know far more about her spiritual life than Mann tells us in this little work...
...My own clumsy attempts at sonnet writing have always left me frustrated by an incapacity to write fourteen lines on a single subject that scan, much less wrapping the whole Clay Vessels and Other Poems, by John McNamee, Sheed & Ward, $18.95,66 pp...
...Nonetheless, I greatly admired his Diary of a City Priest (1993) in which this Philadelphia inner-city parish priest views his world with such an unerring eye...
...Micah Marty carried his bellows-equipped camera from the Midwest (especially to rural churches in Nebraska) to the East Coast to capture churches which reflect the Gothic renaissance in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American church building...
...It only saddens me that Morehouse, in reissuing this work, did not see fit to have Leech (or someone) update the bibliography...
...In fact, only three of them name Jesus explicitly, even though the whole tenor of the text is deeply and lovingly biblical...
...The meditations are independent enough to be used without reading straight through...
...When asked how to pray, she spoke of the "prayer of the agenda" by which she meant loving awareness of the ordinary tasks and places one encountered...
...One does not get the impression that her contributions in these areas came from any systematic program but from her own profound faith and her dedication to the poor...
...Elliott describes himself as a "contrarian Christian...
...It was a mark of her success that by the outbreak of the war she was well integrated into the social fabric of Ivry, rendering mainly informal social services to the poorest and most abandoned of the area...
...That is true in more ways than one...
...Her marked-up Bible was studded with clippings, photos, ticket stubs, notes, etc., so that her reading would always be done in the presence of what she called "icons of humanity...
...The present book can be ordered from: New World Press/Box 640432/San Francisco, CA 94164-0432...
...Her basic approach to prayer was to insist on bringing an eye of transcendent awareness to the ordinary...
...Of course, one would not have to follow a Lenten reading program...
...In a poem describing the last rites given to an elderly patient, the priest poet sees a cleaning person about her duties...
...D. from Chicago and was, for years, a seminary professor in New York City...
...I very much like to see how a highly literate Christian, steeped in the Bible tradition (Elliott is no fundamentalist), can focus, in a few readable pages, on a topic and bring a fresh angle or a new approach to it...
...That there are forty-seven pictures and text has no mystical significance...
...Unfortunately, Mann was not able to quote directly from Delbrel's work because of copyright problems, so we have only paraphrases of her spiritual writings...
...It is not clear to me that abortion and wholesale contraception are the solution to the population problem (which Elliott describes in apocalyptic language), just as it is not clear to me that Latin American liberation theology is reducible to Marxism...
...Is, then, Elliott a liberal...
...Others will bristle at his profound distaste for gender inclusive language in Bible translations, but still others might applaud his unsentimental critique of the relentless godlessness of public education...
...McNamee, in short, is a poet of the glimpse, but in his words the glimpse takes on sacramental meaning...
...This rich volume is all the richer with the inclusion of a series of strong woodcuts made by the poet's friend, Robert McGovern...
...Who, having ever looked at baroque painting, would not feel recognition at his Christmas poem which ends, "The Old masters knew what they were about/with the light coming off the Child...
...Henri de Lubac...
...The result is a portfolio of forty-seven black-and-white photographs of churches and elements of those churches...
...His world is very much a Protestant one...
...Graham Greene...
...Father McNamee has an obvious love for the preconciliar French Catholicism which produced some of the boldest experiments and most creative scholarship of this century...
...Mann sketches out her involvement in Parisian church life, her staunch belief in the value of the Christian-Marxist dialogue, her support for the priest-workers, and, eventually, her role as an advisor to the French bishops at the council for matters dealing with the laity...
...To these handsome photos, Martin Marty has added a series of meditations prefaced by verses from Christian hymnody and rounded off with a suggested Bible passage...
...Our Hope for Years to Come: The Search for Spiritual Sanctuary, by Micah Marty and Martin Marty, Augsburg, $14.99,112 pp...
...He is contrarian in the sense that he is unabashedly and enthusiastically a Christian and, in that sense, stands against the pretensions of contemporary secular culture...
...He is also a contrarian in that his opinions are stated baldly enough that almost any reader will want to take him on with a "Yes, but...
...and decides that she is a "Madonna disappearing/in my rear view mirror...
...Many of the poems are about people whom I treasure (Simone Weil...
...thing up with a rhyming couplet...
...the Dublin Bay of Joyce's Portrait...
...That, however, is as it should be when reading a contrarian Christian...
...Nonetheless, it is to the old Thomistic vocation of "handing on to others the things already contemplated" (contem-plata aliis tradere) that I would appeal to describe what he is about...
...The best pages, for my money, were Elliott's reflections on how to read the Bible...
...In short: a handsome and decidedly contemplative volume...
...To some of the older thinksheets a "1995 Supplement'' has been added...
...My favorite is a straightforward shot of some pillars in Saint Thomas Church in New York City where the crispness of the picture brings out the marks of the stone carver...
...In these I discovered, in a new language, what has always been important for me: reading strategies that combine a critical sense with a sapiential one...
...Well, the better term is his: a "contrarian...
...old inner-city parishes...
...could be found...
...Apart from a short quote from Thomas Aquinas in the epilogue, Elliott never quotes a Catholic author or comments on matters Catholic...
...Who would doubt a love for the poor in a poem in which, from the warmth of his car, the poet sees her "unseasonal white shoes her transit pass/her worn daily bag...
Vol. 123 • May 1996 • No. 9
