Recent literary releases offer outstanding spiritual writing, insights on two popular saints, and perspectives on Jesus.
Christians' spiritual journey: A treasure trove
Modern Spiritual Masters: Writings on Contemplation and Compassion
Edited by Robert Ellsberg. Orbis (Maryknoll, N.Y., 2008). 183 pp., $18.
The Best American Spiritual Writing
Edited by Philip Zaleski. Houghton Mifflin (Boston, 2008). 229 pp., $28.
People from around the world may look on Americans as materialistic, assertive and insensitive in foreign relations, and lacking in either an inner spirit or compassion. However, the fact is that the United States is among the most religious communities in the North Atlantic world. In the midst of its pluralism, affluence and international power, there are deep religious sensibilities and a variety of rich traditions of prayer, contemplation and human caring.
"Writings on Contemplation and Compassion" and "The Best American Spiritual Writing," from different perspectives, provide treasure troves of both spiritual reading and illustrative material for introducing a congregation or class to the spiritual journey.
The former volume, edited by Robert Ellsberg, includes selections from spiritual authors, mostly recognizable to the Catholic reader. All are Christian, save Mohandas Gandhi, whose influence from the Christian Gospel and on Christian nonviolent spirituality makes him a spiritual companion for many.
The book is designed as a companion to the "Modern Spiritual Masters" series assembled by this editor. The masters included are Thomas Merton, Mother Teresa, Madeleine Delbrel, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, the Rev. Howard Thurman, Mother Maria Skobtsova, Archbishop Helder Camara, Sister Thea Bowman, Father Henri Nouwen and Dorothy Day. Each chapter includes a concise overview of the life and spiritual emphases of each master and selections from his or her writings.
The author has deftly provided texts that illustrate both the central motifs of each author's relationship with God and their counsel to the spiritual seeker. It provides a suitable guide for both introducing the beginner to the richness of Christian spirituality and a resource for spiritual reading for the active Christians in the world.
Philip Zaleski offers a very different collection. It assembles some of the best writing from a wide plurality of voices, from the explicitly religious to secular reflections from the depths of the human spirit. The selections include poetry, magazine articles, critical essays and personal narratives. The essays range from reflections on faith and quantum theory and Einstein's spiritual quest, to Buddhist and Catholic pilgrimages. The catholicity of the Catholic selections is demonstrated by the juxtaposition of Mexican-American author Richard Rodriguez and Father Richard Neuhaus, editor of the monthly journal First Things, to the same spiritual point --- the inadequacy of the secularizing dimensions of American culture.
Even for the nonreligious reader, the selections in this volume provide a unique window into the American spirit. The Catholic reader will be edified by many of the Christian selections, enriched by the religious witness of the struggles of other believers, and challenged by some of the secular spiritual essays. Tales of imprisonment and martyrdom, of struggles with amnesia, of the re-emergence of the church in China are punctuated with poetry and even fiction, which discloses the depth of the human quest, discerned as spiritual writing by the editor.
Some readers' spiritual lives will be enriched by one or another of these two volumes, but both in their own way provide an accessible window into resources for prayer, reflection and the deepening of one's relationship to God, one's neighbor and the world.
---Brother Jeffrey Gros, FSC
Sts. Patrick and Francis: Radical Christian lives
Ireland's Saint: The Essential Biography of St. Patrick
By J.B. Bury, edited with introduction and annotations by Jon M. Sweeney. Paraclete Press (Brewster, Mass., 2008). 205 pp., $21.95.
A Mended and Broken Heart: The Life and Love of Francis of Assisi
By Wendy Murray. Basic Books (New York, 2008). 251 pp. $25.95.
Though they lived 750 actual years and cultural light-years apart, St. Patrick of Ireland and St. Francis of Assisi, Italy, shared a calling: They lived radical Christian lives because they believed God asked them to.
"Ireland's Saint: The Essential Biography of St. Patrick" is a new edition of John Bagnell Bury's 1905 biography, "The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History." Bury was a Protestant Irish historian and scholar of the Greek and Roman empires. His book was regarded as the final word on St. Patrick for the first half of the 20th century.
Editor Jon M. Sweeney has added throughout the text numerous sidebars that provide information, opinions and sometimes corrections from more recent historians. One note, for example, explains that the Dalriadans and Picts mentioned often by Bury are tribal peoples in the north of Ireland and central to northern Scotland, respectively.
One of the key changes Sweeney made was to the structure of Bury's work, moving his summary chapter on the saint's place in history from the back to the front of the book. Since the remaining chapters put flesh on the bones of Patrick's mission, this was helpful, signaling in brief what readers could expect to find in more detail.
In Bury's account, Patrick did three things in Ireland: "He organized the Christianity which already existed. He converted kingdoms which were still pagan, especially in the west. And he brought Ireland into connection with the church of the (Roman) Empire, making Ireland formally part of universal Christendom."
Sweeney's Patrick is very much Bury's Patrick, a humble, prayerful man who believes he has been called by God to missionary work in the still largely pagan island where he was enslaved as a youth and who toils faithfully for 30 years, circa 432-461, despite severe hardships, repeated dangers and not much support or guidance from Rome.
Bury made this assessment of Patrick: "The man who wrote the 'Confession' and the 'Letter Against Coroticus' had strength of will, energy of action, resolution without overconfidence, and the capacity for resisting pressure from others. ... Perhaps most important, he possessed practical qualities that were essential for carrying through the task that he had been divinely inspired to fulfill."
In "A Mended and Broken Heart: The Life and Love of Francis of Assisi," author Wendy Murray, formerly a senior writer for Christianity Today, asserts that a traditionally overlooked aspect of the story of the founder of the Order of Friars Minor, or Franciscans, is that his relationship with St. Clare of Assisi, the founder of the female arm of the order, the Poor Clares, was rooted in love.
"This love, in turn, evolved into mutual renunciation as each pursued their individual life as penitent religious. This book asserts that their renounced physical love ultimately defined the inner landscape of their devotional lives," Murray writes in the preface.
Though Murray does not, and really cannot, prove this premise, she has crafted a very engaging history of the time as well as compact bios of Francis and Clare. They lived from the late 1100s into the 1200s, a time of danger both in Italy, with constant warring between communes and kingdoms, and internationally, with the Crusades dominating two centuries of Mediterranean politics.
There are other vivid sketches, of friars who collaborated with and succeeded Francis, and of the popes, the emperors and a sultan with whom he interacted. To supplement her text, Murray fills more than 40 pages with maps, a glossary, source material and explanatory notes.
But Francis is the star. Murray recounts familiar details --- his playboy youth, renunciation of family, foundation of a new mendicant order and embrace of physical suffering, including the stigmata.
But she also describes the Francis who was brought to trial for stealing from his own father and whose yearlong imprisonment as a POW turned his Round-Table fascination with knighthood into a commitment to nonviolence, even as he participated in the Fifth Crusade. Here is the Francis who preached naked in solidarity with Christ's humiliation on the cross and who battled his own Franciscan brothers over his more severe rule to govern their communal life.
That Francis and Clare may have considered marrying each other is an interesting idea. However, their shared story that can be documented shows a lifelong interdependence. As Murray says, "To know Francis truly one must also know Clare."
Readers will find in these biographies no warm and fuzzy images of Patrick and Francis, but portraits of such unwavering Christian saints that their contemporaries "canonized" them even before they died.
---Nancy Hartnagel
Scholarly works on Jesus: Complementary perspectives
Jesus: Word Made Flesh
By Gerard S. Sloyan. Liturgical Press (Collegeville, Minn., 2008). 194 pp., $19.95.
"Jesus: A Portrait"
By Gerald O'Collins, S.J. Orbis (Maryknoll, N.Y., 2008). 246 pp., $25.
Father Gerard Sloyan's "Jesus: Word Made Flesh" and "Jesus: A Portrait" by Jesuit Father Gerald O'Collins offer complementary rather than competing discussions on Jesus. Both are demanding, scholarly authors; Father Sloyan closely analyzes the New Testament account of Jesus, while Father O'Collins starts with theology before turning to the biblical evidence.
Father O'Collins offers a faith-based approach that often reads like a Sunday homily, making the book slightly more accessible than Father Sloyan's. He has a sense of the Jesus of faith for whom Christians hunger. He therefore takes a liberal approach with filling in the gaps in the record on Jesus' life.
"Jesus embodied the message of the divine kingdom before preaching it," Father O'Collins writes. "His life at Nazareth expressed in advance the hidden, humble quality of the kingdom." At this point, he turns to Scripture to find something specific.
Father O'Collins loves to think about the kinds of experiences Jesus must have had. He takes the interesting viewpoint that we can learn about Jesus' early life from the parables, so many of which were agricultural. Jesus would have witnessed repeatedly and at close range the workings of vineyards and winemaking, sowing and harvesting, and even dishonest management of these operations, as attested to by one of his parables.
This simplicity came through more generally in Jesus' personality and the "hereness and nowness" of his approach. Jesus did not concern himself with history or old feuds, but with the lives of the people he met every day. His language was "earthly" and therefore accessible to the poor, illiterate people who followed him.
Father O'Collins manages to keep his focus on an intimate portrayal of Jesus that is nonetheless faithful to the church's teachings and to the biblical account. His faith-based approach allows him to be pastoral with the reader, including the following zinger, which is more about Jesus' followers (and potential followers) than about Jesus himself: "I continue to suspect that it is the significance rather than the fact of these miracles which poses a problem for some or even many people."
Father Sloyan gets his theology about Jesus from a much closer reading of the New Testament witness than Father O'Collins, and this can at times bog things down. Rather than presenting a coherent vision of Jesus, which is most helpful in the case of Father O'Collins, he gives a coherent vision of the New Testament writings.
In fact, the book is more about the New Testament and how we can interpret its various writings than it is about Jesus. The reader will probably be closer to the Bible at the end of the reading, but not necessarily closer to Christ.
The book does offer some thoughts that can help us more deeply understand Jesus at a personal level, though this closely follows the New Testament perspective, as in the discussion of the Gospel of Mark: "His (Jesus') business was to proclaim God his father, not himself or the redemptive act, if indeed he knew anything of it beforehand."
The author has interesting things to say about Paul's vision of Jesus. This is a refreshing discussion, as Father Sloyan pushes the reader none too gently past the 1970s' Jesus-is-your-best-friend spirituality, and invokes the view of "Christ now in glory with the Father, with whom every baptized member in all the churches is in an intimate personal relation."
Father Sloyan holds doctorates in both theology and Scripture, so he naturally bases his theology on a close reading of the various biblical Greek writings. This makes for very energetic scholarship and advanced theology, as at a third-year university level. But it doesn't offer much to those who don't have a more basic training in the Bible or theology.
In this case, the more pastoral and freely written book by Father O'Collins does the trick.
---Brian Welter The Reviewers:
Christian Brother Jeffrey Gros is a professor of ecumenical and historical theology at Memphis Theological Seminary in Memphis, Tenn., and a former staff member of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.
Nancy Hartnagel is wire editor at Catholic News Service.
Brian Welter is a freelance contributor to the B.C. Catholic, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Vancouver, British Columbia, and is studying for his doctorate in systematic theology. |