Yes, the language is a bit harsh to our modern ears.  But sometimes harsh is not only not bad, it’s necessary.  If you find it difficult, just let it tumble about in your brain for a bit.

I believe we shall never learn how to know ourselves except by endeavoring to know God, for, beholding His greatness we are struck by our own baseness, His purity shows our foulness , and by meditating on His humility we find how very far we are from being humble. — St. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, The First Mansions Ch. 2

I’m going to start right off by saying that I took a long time to write this review because this book twisted me in knots.  Part of that is, frankly, my own fault for getting ahead of myself.  You see, when I picked this book to review from Catholic Company I had my own plan for what this book would be.  As a good American I was all set for a Home Depot-style how-to book replete with charts and diagrams and a reading plan, telling this Bible-reading-challenged soul finally, once and for all, how to read the Bible and actually get it.  Remember that old saying about making God laugh by telling Him your plans?  Yeah, God was having a rib-splitter here.

This is, to put a fine point on it, not a self-help, step-by-step book on how to read the Bible and in a few months know the whole story.  But that is because there is no “insert Bible-challenged individual on one side, receive exegetical genius on the other” mechanism in this world.  No, this book is far more useful than that.  Rather than teaching you  how to read the Bible as if it were a technique one can learn like pitching a baseball or riding a horse this book does something far more important – it helps put you in the proper spiritual framework to understand the Book you’re trying to read.  It is, if you will, a “spiritual” how-to rather than a “technical” how-to.  The Bible, read properly, must become a personal experience and this book helps get you on that road.

Let me use Dr. Hahn’s words to illustrate my point.  This is taken from his essay, “My Words Are Spirit And Life”, a speech given to Catholic educators but relevant to any and every one of us:

We must not approach the mysteries of faith as mere fodder for lesson plans.  We need to let that truth sanctify us.  God wants to make us saints more than He wants to use us to make others saints.  And, make no mistake abou it, that’s what we’re doing when we’re teaching the faith, no matter what our venue, no matter what our methods or technology.  We must be saints whom God uses to make more saints.

If you want to let the Bible affect your life, and if you’re searching for a way to put joy in reading the Bible this book might just be the one for you.  No, it is not for the very beginner, but it is also not so advanced as to lose anyone else.  If you’re not sure you’re ready for it, try it anyway.  Your effort and His help will get you a long way.  We as Catholics must know our Bible and this is a ready resource to help us get there.

This review was written as part of the Catholic book Reviewer program from The Catholic Company. Visit The Catholic Company to find more information on Spirit and Life.

…or “Virtue stands in the middle”.  It’s an old saying attributed to Horace to which I all to infrequently turn as a reminder of how to keep my sanity.  Of late I’ve been allowing myself to get stretched in every direction, unwilling to show weakness by giving anything less than all I have to whom or whatever asks.  As you can imagine, giving all of yourself to everyone all the time can be tiring even for the saints, in whose blessed company I most certainly am not.  So the past two days I’ve taken the opportunity to spend just a little time reading purely for pleasure and have started a book you’ll be both shocked and appalled to know I’ve never before read.  Yes, somehow J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit has somehow eluded my viewing pleasure all these years.  Ah what peaceful bliss to read and not feel compelled to memorize, scrutinize and theorize.

Do yourself a favor.  In these hectic times, now and then, take a half-step back and immerse yourself in something simple like this.  God did not create us to burn ourselves out with constant worry and struggle, unless you’re one of the blessed few who can spend their whole life in such efforts.  It’s amazing how revitalizing a few orcs, goblins and hobits can be.  And to top it off, soon I won’t have to admit I’ve never read this series with head hung low.  A win, one might say, all around.  My apologies if I start to write in arcane prose or smatter my posts with poetry. (Okay, so the former happens now and the latter … well, doesn’t stand much of a chance.  But you get the idea.)

But first, a little story.  You know how it goes when you’re a kid – when you see a big box you assume “cool gift” and when you see something tiny you assume “oh brother, silly trinket”.  One year my grandmother (yeah, the Irish Catholic one) decided to teach me a little lesson.  As we were ripping through our gifts on Christmas I came across a decidedly small box to me from my grandparents.  Now, while they didn’t always have a lot of money my grandmother knew what we kids wanted and always seemed to come up with something that would induce a shriek of glee.  I’m quite sure a look that was a cross between dejected and quizzical came across my face at the sight of this tiny box because she piped right up, “go ahead and open it dear, sometimes good things come in small packages.”  It may be hard to believe but I don’t think I’d ever heard that term before.  So, grudgingly I opened the box.  A wallet.  Yay.  Just what every 9 year old is dreaming of.  Not to be stopped she quietly chided me, “keep going, you never know what you’ll find if you don’t look.”  Picture holder – check.  Slit for change – check.  Slit for cash – check.  Cash – che …  Yep, she’d slipped cash into the wallet that I was about to let get lost in the wrapping paper.  I don’t remember how much money was in there, but to this day I recall the lesson she taught me.  Sometimes though I have to be reminded.

When I opened the box containing Prayers for Catholic Men I have to admit my heart sunk a bit.  I had been expecting something much larger – a real beefy book I could get my hands around that could help me straighten out some of the crooked parts of my spiritual life.  At about 3″x4″ and only 96 pages long this wasn’t what I was expecting.  Sometimes I’m not the brightest bulb on the tree.  While it’s small this book is packed with prayers for men young and old, single, married, divorced and widowed.  There is something in here for just about everyone from the age of about ten on up.

It isn’t just a collection of prayers though, there are some very insightful reflections interspersed throughout the book.  Some of these reflections I wish I had read when I was younger as they could have helped me to avoid some very stupid decisions.  The brilliance in this book being so small is there is no reason for you to not bring it with you everywhere – home, work, anywhere.  Inside this little cover is  a pack of power enough to move the mountains of a sluggish culture.  It is a reminder that prayer – that faith – does not need to be long and ornate to be effective, it just needs to be honest and from the heart.

Even if you, like me, have shelves full of books this is one with which you won’t go wrong.  But do me a favor – don’t put it on your shelf.  Put it in your pocket or your briefcase or your bag.  Put it to work, and let this little dynamo move your soul closer to God.

This review was written as part of the Catholic book Reviewer program from The Catholic Company. Visit The Catholic Company to find more information on Prayers for Catholic Men.

Well, most of it, anyway.  And besides being far busier than I should have been to get out of Lent what I could have.  But we can beat up on me later.

Just before Ash Wednesday I received a box in the mail from my dear old Irish Catholic grandmother.  As I opened the box the smell that wafted up let me know whatever was inside had been in her house for a long time – there’s just something about the smell of her house I’ll never quite forget.  Inside I found three books and was suddenly struck by a realization both sobering and uplifting.  Her eyesight has been getting worse as she’s gotten older, and her high blood pressure certainly hasn’t helped.  The last time we were together she lamented how difficult it has become for her to read which was painful for her as she has always loved to read spiritual works and particularly the Bible.    While I have no proof I can’t help but be haunted by the thought that she is sending me, as her only family member who is an actively practicing Catholic, bits and pieces of a library she can no longer read.  My previous plans for Lenten reading mattered no more – I had to read whatever it was she sent, and I’m glad I did.

Among the books she sent me was A.G. Sertillanges’ classic What Jesus Saw from the Cross.  The book follows Jesus from multiple points of view – centered on, as one would guess, what He could see upon the Cross, and dives deeply into the events that happened in the places He could and couldn’t see.  Fr. Sertillanges spent time in Jerusalem and his first-hand contact with the Holy Land is evidenced throughout the book.  With an artistic flourish I could only hope some day to imitate in the slightest way he paints the events of those fateful days in the reader’s mind.

More than a historical treatise this is a spiritual work that helps unite the reader with the happenings of those days.  Yet even calling it a spiritual work doesn’t fully encompass what is inside.  It is by turns historical, spiritual, apologetic, and theological – and perhaps a few other things I haven’t quite categorized.  Even though the book is now more than sixty years old so very much of his commentary is still not only relevant but timely.  An example for your edification:

Jesus is not mocked today; but is He not generally forgotten?  Compassion is rare, still rarer is active devotion.  And when we say that Jesus is no longer mocked we are thinking only of His person, to which Jesus Himself attaches far less importance than to His work and to our salvation.

How many insults are hurled at the doctrines, the practices, the ministers, the precepts, the promises, the words, the deeds, the institutions, and the persons connected with the name and work of Jesus crucified!  Here, too, there are those who mock and wag their heads; here, too, are drinkers of win – the wine of sophistry and licentiousness – who sing after Jesus as He passes.

The Passover of mankind still continues.  Men pitch their tents and move on; men drink and dance; men worry and become absorbed in business; men form attachments and break them; men love and hate – and Christ hangs on the Cross.  His sorrow meets only with contempt, and His appeal, His offer of salvation, arouses nothing but a vague and distracted smile.

Lent may now be all but over, but there is never a bad time to read a book so moving, challenging and educational.  Buy two and give one to someone else much like my dear grandmother has done for me.

Because, you know, in a way it does.  Certainly we can live without prayer, but as for me, life without talking to God and doing my best to listen to Him just doesn’t quite measure up.  I’ve been reading through Pope Benedict’s The Church Fathers: From Clement of Rome to Augustine, the collation of his addresses on the early Fathers of the Church and came across a quote so good that I’m not going to wait until I write up a review of the book for it.  In his address on St. Gregory Nazianzen, we find:

Gregory teaches us first and foremost the importance and necessity of prayer.  He says:  “It is necessary to remember God more often than one breathes” (Orationes 27, 4: PG 250, 78), because prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with our thirst.  God is thirsting for us to thirst for him (cf. Orationes 40, 27: SC 358, 260).  In prayer, we must turn our hearts to God, to consign ourselves to him as an offering to be purified and transformed.  In prayer we see all things in the light of Christ; we let our masks fall and immerse ourselves in the truth and in listening to God, feeding the fire of love.

I just love those twin images – “let our masks fall” and “feeding the fire of love.”  It’s like drawing a picture with words.

I was blessed to receive this book some time ago.  Due to a confluence of different forces it has been sitting on my desk waiting patiently to be cracked open; while I am quite the procrastinator, this was a bit longer than even I am accustomed to.  Well, God being omnipotent and all, let’s just say He put even that procrastination to good use.  But more on that later.

As with any review, we must first comment on the construction of the book, particularly in this case as it’s designed as a take-along companion.  The book is sufficiently small (7″ x 5″ x 1/2″) that it can be carried along in just about any purse, briefcase, laptop or other bag.  It is not hard-bound, making it lighter, but it also does not use a paper cover but rather a heavier imitation leather which will stand up to life in a purse or bag, and the cover sufficiently over-hangs the pages to provide them protection.  The binding is glued which is, for a book of this size, perfectly expected.  The pages are, for a religious book, surprisingly thick and sturdy – again, great for a book designed for travel.  While I wouldn’t recommend it (we are talking about a book on the Eucharist after all), you could even put this book in a back pocket and due to its construction I believe it would weather the trip just fine.  But you don’t buy a book for its construction, now do you?

The heart of the book is thirty meditations designed for Eucharistic Adoration.  If you haven’t been to Adoration, or haven’t been for a long time, reading this book will make you feel almost like you’re there – the depth and intensity of the writing saturates each page.  The author, Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P., has clearly spent much time before Our Lord and writes not only from research but from experience.  Now, some of the meditations are absolutely centered directly on Eucharistic Adoration, but some others are a little more loose and could be used elsewhere.  I would say, in fact, that this could be read as a book, page-to-page, rather than in thirty separate sittings and the reader would still get a tremendous amount out of it.  Each meditation, all of which are between two and three pages, starts with a short scripture passage, then a reflection which provides the meat of the meditation, followed by three reflection questions and closed with a prayer – perfectly designed to begin a stay in front of the Blessed Sacrament.  The reflections are based largely but not exclusively on quotations from a variety of authors, but are primarily centered on the works of Pope Benedict XVI, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Catherine of Siena.  As the author is a Dominican you can see a certain Dominican influence in his choices of references, but that serves only to make the reader love the Dominican order all the more rather than distract from the topic.  One could do far worse than Aquinas and Catherine of Siena.  Pleasantly, all four parts are well-integrated and form a cohesive whole.  For my part, some of the reflection questions were not only insightful but even a little difficult – I felt myself challenged repeatedly while reading this book.

If that were all to the book it’d be enough for me to say it would be a good purchase,but that only makes up the first two-thirds of the book.  Following that are Eucharistic meditations on the mysteries of the Rosary (and linking each mystery of the Rosary to the Eucharist is something I had not heretofore considered, but is brilliantly done), a Eucharistic colloquy (written in the first-person from Jesus’ point of view and, again, most moving), a Eucharistic litany based on Sacramentum Caritatis, and closing with a Via Eucharistia – twelve stations of the Way of the Eucharist.

So why did I say at the beginning that God put my procrastination to good use?  Well, this weekend we will be discussing (*drumroll*) the Eucharist at RCIA.  The connection is so perfect I couldn’t possibly have planned it.  Further, I was so impressed with the Eucharistic Litany that I hope to be able to open our RCIA session with that as our opening prayer.  With the Dominican reputation for study and preaching, I’m not at all surprised that this book is as wonderful as it has turned out to be.  If you’re looking for something to kick-start your Eucharistic Adoration, this would be a great selection.  If you think you’re “beyond” needing direction at Adoration, pick this up anyway – you’ll be amazed at how it helps keep your time with Our Lord more focused and directed.

This review was written as part of the Catholic book Reviewer program from The Catholic Company. Visit The Catholic Company to find more information on Jesus, Present Before Me – Meditations for Eucharistic Adoration.

It’s a book that can rightfully claim the title of a “classic”.  First written in 1958, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s Life of Christ is a walk through the events of, well, the life of Christ.  It is classic Sheen – simultaneously erudite and approachable, orthodox without being overbearing.

One of the great beauties of this book is that it is unapologetic.  By that I mean not that it does not defend the Catholic faith, but rather that it does so with the easy confidence so typical of Bishop Sheen.  If the Bible says Jesus said something, he said it and we just move on; similarly if tradition says something happened a particular way it is simply stated and the story moves on.  There is no dithering with possible alternate conclusions or attempting to psychoanalyze either Jesus or His companions.  Surely there will be those who disagree with some element or another of his biblical scholarship (acknowledging that he relied heavily on the work of Scripture scholar Msgr. Myles Bourke) they cannot deny that his conclusions have a firm grounding in both academic study and tradition.  The relief of reading this easy confidence is palpable when compared with much that passes for modern scripture scholarship which is too weighted down with, as Pope Benedict would say, the hermeneutic of suspicion rather than lifted up by the hermeneutic of trust.  Bishop Sheen trusted the Bible and the Church, and it shows on every page.

The book is certainly not a single-sitting type, at least not for the average reader, weighing in at 658 pages.  Yet the reading is generally light and the pace just quick enough to befit the greatest life ever lived.  As I wrote above, Bishop Sheen never allows himself to get trapped in the theological minutiae of some part of Christ’s life and in a few cases will refer the reader to alternate books which treat a particular subject in greater detail.

Would I recommend this book?  If you’re a Scripture scholar you may find it light reading and its lack of deference to modern scholarship off-putting, but then you also should have a certain deference to the traditions of reading the Bible which this book exemplifies.  If you are an avid Communist or a great fan of Freudian psychoanalysis you may find many of his allusions to these ideologies grating, but then you should at the very least understand them so as to be able to address them or perhaps be changed by them.  If you’re someone who loves the Bible and is willing to be led along by the hand in a walk through the Gospels, I’d recommend this book in a heartbeat.  If you have the time, I’d go one step further and recommend you read this book back-to-back with Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth as they complement each other extraordinarily well.  After reading this you may not read the Gospels quite the same way again.

Update: I meant to add this quote when I originally wrote the review.  It’s typical of the rest of the book in that it is both insightful and counter-intuitive in that it turns our normal consideration of the Sermon on the Mount from an idyllic passive occurrence to one which was directly responsible for His death:

The Sermon on the Mount is so much at variance with all that our world holds dear that the world will crucify anyone who tries to live up to its values.  Because Christ preached them, He had to die.  Calvary was the price he paid for the Sermon on the Mount.  Only mediocrity survives.  Those who call black black, and white white, are sentenced for intolerance.  Only the grays live.

I recently finished reading Frank Sheed’s Theology and Sanity.  It is, in short, quintessentially Frank Sheed, delivered with the stark clarity that typifies his writing.  I can’t say for sure that it was his intent, but this book makes a perfect follow-on to his excellent Theology for Beginners.  These two books would serve well as a launching point for anyone interested in dipping their toe into theology.

To put it simply, Sheed doesn’t waste any time qualifying his positions or mincing his words in this book – what is, simply is, and what is not simply is not.  You quickly realize he truly means the word “Sanity” in the title of the book – a proper understanding of the topics presented leads to a more sane understanding of this creation God has made.  Perhaps an illustration is called for:

God, we say, moves the will, which moves the intellect.  But God does not do violence to nature.  He does not force either will or intellect to act against the nature He has given them.  The function of prayer and humility is to to prepare the will that when the impulsion comes from God it is ready to go with that impulsion, with no violence done to its own nature as a will.  The function of evidence and argument is so to prepare the intellect that when it feels the impulsion of the God-moved will, it too will be prepared to co-operate with that impulsion, with no violence to its own nature as an intellect.  It would be outside God’s normal mode of working upon man to move his intellect to an assent for which nothing had prepared it, against which much of its own experience as an intellect might well have predisposed it.

And again, because it is so relevant to the world in which we live today:

Whether this point is grasped or not, a moral code must be founded on something.  A society can accept a moral code without any conscious awareness of its foundation, provided the code is of long standing and not questioned.  But in a generation like ours where everything is questioned, the foundation must be clearly seen; and apart from God the foundation cannot be clearly seen.  The practical result for the average man of our generation is tha twhen he is faced with what his grandparents would have called a temptation, he has nothing to judge it by.  His first reaction is “Why shouldn’t I?”  Conscience may put up a brief resistance; but conscience, as we have seen, is the judgment of our intellect, and it is precisely our intellect that is confused; and in any event our modern man wil have heard half a dozen theories to explain conscience away.  All this is too weak a barrier against any really strong rush of temptation.  From the initial “Why shouldn’t I?” he passes with an uneasiness too slight to affect his decision to “I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”  As we have already seen, this last statement is precise almost to the point of pedantry.  He does not see why he shouldn’t; he does not see anything, because he has turned out the lights, or had them turned out for him:  he is simply conscious of a lot of urges and appetites in the dark, and there is no mistaking their direction.

Sanity is the same no matter what generation.  It is works like this book that help us to remember that only in, with and through God can we keep our wits about us in a world that seems determined to lose theirs.