Praying to the Holy Spirit

Jack Levison, author of Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired Life and 40 Days With the Holy Spirit (which I wrote about here and here) has just had another book published by Paraclete Press.  The book, Holy Spirit, I Pray, is a book of prayers to the Holy Spirit.

A slender, beautifully bound book, Holy Spirit, I Pray contains a series of prayers divided in categories – prayers for morning, prayers for nighttime, prayers for discernment, prayers for crisis and prayers for anytime.  Each prayer is accompanied by the Scripture text that inspired the creation of the prayer.

As I observed to parishioners at Our Lady of Lourdes when I led a book study of one of Levison’s earlier books two years ago, it seems to me that the Holy Spirit often gets short shrift. We know that we get the gift of the spirit at Pentecost, some of us can even list the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but we don’t spend a lot of time focusing on that person of the Trinity.  Levison observes in his introduction to this book, citing St. Basil,  the Holy Spirit is often seen as a medium of prayer and worship rather than as an object of prayer and worship.  (Clearly there are exceptions, and there are some well-known prayers to the Holy Spirit.)

There are many beautiful prayers in this book.  I thought I’d here share one of those that immediately resonated with me.

Holy Spirit
Spirit of Jesus
Spirit of Truth:
Ignite in me a passion for the truth
Instill in me a craving for knowledge
Inspire in me a hunger for wisdom.
Not just any truth, random knowledge, indiscriminate wisdom
But the truth about Jesus
who barked at his mother
who cried like a baby
who wore the towel of a servant and washed feeg
who prayed the night away
who broiled fish on a spring morning.
Come to me as
the Spirit of Truth
the Spirit of Jesus
Holy Spirit.
Amen.

You might consider this book as part of your Lenten prayer.

The Apostle We Love To Hate

I just finished reading Karen Armstrong’s new book, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate, which was part of my wedding anniversary gift from my husband. (What can I say: 25 years of marriage means he knows me well. Accompanying the book were several goat cheeses.)

This is Armstrong’s second book at Paul. Her first, The First Christian, relied heavily on Acts. In this book, she relies mainly on Paul’s letters. (Throughout the book, she points out differences between Luke’s and Paul’s accounts of the same events.) Acknowledging that there is much we will never learn about Paul, she suggests that “his letters bring him to live and are an extraordinary record of the passions that drove this man to change the world.”

I had a hard time putting this book down once I picked it up. Despite its brevity – it is only 125 pages – I found much here that enriched my appreciation of Paul and his letters. Let me share here just a few comments that I hope will entice you to read the book yourselves.

First, Armstrong does a good job of giving the context of Paul’s various letters. In doing so she reminds us that Paul was speaking to particular audiences in response to specific issues. His letters were never intended to lay down doctrine or guidelines for all Christians for all times. (And in this, I think she effectively combats claims that Paul is misogynist.)

Second, although I had already been aware of the view that certain letters historically attributable to Paul – such as Colossians and Ephesians – were not written by Paul, Armstrong has a helpful discussion of how those letters, in fact, misrepresent Paul’s teaching.

Third, the book does an effective job of creating a cohesive picture of Paul’s theology, a theology premised on the centrality of Jesus’ death and resurrection and the belief that if people “imitated Jesus’s kenosis in their daly behavior…they would experience a spiritual resurrection that brought with it a new freedom.”

Armstrong’s conclusion about Paul is that

Paul has been blamed for ideas that he never preached, and some of his best insights about the spiritual life have been ignored by the churches. His passionate identification with the poor is unheeded by those Christians who preach the Prosperity Gospel. His determination to eradicate the ethnic and cultural prejudices that divide us from one another, his rejection of all forms of “boasting” based on a spurious sense of privilege and superiority, and his visceral distrust of a self-indulgent spirituality that turns faith into an ego trip have not become part of the Christian mindset….Above all, we need to take seriously Paul’s insight that no virtue was valid unless it was imbued with a love that was not a luxurious emotion in the heart but must be expressed daily and practically in self-emptying concern for others.

There have been times I’ve heard words of Paul’s (and, as an aside) Armstrong reminds us that Paul’s letters were meant to be read aloud to people) and wondered what to do with them. This book encourages me to want to spend more time with his letters, aided by the context the book provides.

Short Stories by Jesus

I just finished reading Amy-Jill Levine’s book, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. I am a big fan of Levine and have benefitted greatly both from lectures she has given on the Old and New Testaments and from her essays in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, and thus have been greatly looking forward to reading this book. It did not disappoint.

Levine’s starting point is that parables are intended to challenge us, to make us feel uncomfortable. Commenting on religion’s role “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable,” she observes that “we do well to think of the parables of Jesus as doing the afflicting. Therefore, if we hear a parable and think, ‘I really like that’ or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough.”  In fact, she suggests, if we hear a parable and are not disturbed, “there is something seriously amiss with our moral compass.”

Levine believes that, unfortunately, we too often ignore that challenge. That we take easy lessons form the parable that “lose the way Jesus’ first followers would have heard the parables,” and thus “lose the genius of Jesus’s teachings.”  (The framing of the parables by the Gospel writers sometimes encourage our taking the easy way out, she suggests.)

Levine discusses nine well known-parables in her book, including the Prodigal Son (which she thinks is better called “The Lost Son”), the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, and the Rich Man and Lazarus. Rather than trying to tell us what the parables mean, she encourages us to treat them as invitations for reflection and to be open to various interpretations – especially those that force us to ask hard questions of ourselves.  She does so, in part, by helping us to understand how Jesus’ audience would have heard the parables.  While she does not think historical context is all that matters, I think she is correct in her observation that “the more we know about the original contexts, the richer our understanding becomes.”

Reading this book caused me to think differently about a number of Jesus’ parables, including some I have prayed with with some frequency.  That in itself is a sign of the success of the book.

The Anchoress

While in the bookstore shopping for a gift for a friend, I noticed a novel by Robyn Cadwallader titled The Anchoress.  Drawn to the title by my love for Julian of Norwich, who was an anchoress, and feeling the need for a break from my work, I added it to my purchases.

Cadwallader’s novel (her first) was inspired by medieval women who lived their lives as anchoresses.  The term “anchoress” comes from a Greek word that means “withdrawn from the world.”   An anchoress was a person who, with the permission of the local bishop, completely withdrew from society and committed herself to Christ, living a life of prayer and contemplation. Often the anchoress’ living quarters (called an “anchorhold”) was a small room built right into a wall of a church. Although these anchoresses lived a generally removed and secluded life, it was not a life completely divorced from contact with others (who would come to seek advice from the anchoress, speaking to her through a small window).

The novel opens in the year 1255 in England (a century before the time of Julian), with the decision of a seventeen year-old girl named Sarah who has just chosen to become an anchoress.  Her reasons are a mixture of her natural piety and religious devotion and uneasiness about her body. The interest of a local lord in marrying her, her sister’s dying in childbirth, church teaching about the sinfulness of the female body all play a role.

While the book is clearly a novel and makes no claim to historical accuracy in its description of the life of women like the protagonist, it does give a picture of what such a life much have been like.  It conveys effectively that withdrawing from the world means more than building a physical wall around oneself.  It addresses issues of isolation, the human need for connection and touch.  It touches on difficult issues of attitudes toward the body and acceptance of the self.  And it gives a real sense of the physical experience (I could feel the smallness of the space).

The author also paints a vivid picture of the time period in which the novel takes place takes place. I read an interview with the author in which she said that “the thirteenth-century was both deeply ordinary and, to us, profoundly strange. In writing, I was trying to keep this balance, mindful of giving the reader enough information to understand all that was needed for the narrative (though always without using clunky exposition of the term).”

While this is not a book I would imagine re-reading, I did find it an enjoyable (and quick) and worthwhile read.

 

Silence

One of the books that has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite some time, but which I finally sat down to read this Lent is Silence, by Shusaku Endo.

Shusaku Endo was one of Japan’s foremost novelists, and he wrote from the perspective of a Japanese Roman Catholic.  Sometimes referred to as  Japan’s Graham Greene, Endo’s novels engage in questions such as how Christians should engage a culture when that culture is foreign.

That he addressed such questions is not surprising; I read in one piece about him that “The Christian faith never did rest easily on Endo’s shoulders. Ever since his baptism at the age of 11 at the behest of his mother, Endo often spoke of a faith as awkward as a forced marriage, as uncomfortable as a Western suit of clothes. ‘This clothing did not suit me,’ he later wrote. ‘The clothes and my body were not made for each other.'”  In the novel, he has a Japanese officer argue to the protagonist that  “A tree which flourishes in one kind of soil may wither if the soil is changed.  As for the tree of Christianity, in a foreign country its leaves may grow thick and the buds may be rich, while in Japan the leaves wither and not bud appears.”  (Later in the book, a former Catholic priest makes the same argument to the protagonist.)

A novel of historical fiction, Silence is the story of a Jesuit missionary who endured persecution in Japan, and most of the book is written in the form of a letter written by him. As many people know, although early efforts to bring Christianity to Japan met with some success, Christianity was outlawed in the early part of the 17th Century, ushering in a period of great persecution of Christians.  The priest is presented (or at least sees himself), particularly in the latter part of the book, as a Christ figure, and Endo gives us a Judas figure in the form of the Japanese man who betrays the priest and other Japanese Christians.

The “silence” of the title is the silence of God in the face of suffering.  God’s silence is remarked on a various times, but becomes almost unbearable when the priest is in prison hearing the sounds of Japanese Christians who are being tortured.  They are being tortured, not so that they will renounce Christianity – they have already done so under the strain of the torture, but so that he will.  If the missionary is willing to step on an image of Christ, they will be released.

In the pain of that situation, the priest prays, “Lord, it is now that you should break the silence.  You must not remain silent.  Prove that you are justice, that you are goodness, that you are love.  You must say something to show the world that you are the august one.”  As his mind remembers others who have died in Japan for their faith, he recalls that then, too, God was silent.  Why, he asks, “Why is God continually silent while those groaning voices go on?”  As question that has been asked at so many times by so many people who suffer or witness suffering.

In fact, the silence goes on.  God’s silence is not broken until the moment when the priest is led to the image of Christ and encouraged to step on it.  At that point, as he looks at the image, “the Christ in bronze speaks to the priest: ‘Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot.  Trample!  It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world.  It is to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”  And so the priest placed his foot on the image.

Was his act of apostatsy a sin?  The priest does not believe so, although he knows he will be judged harshly by those that hear of his act.  I suspect Endo himself may not believe so.  Earlier in the book we read, “Sin is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies.  Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.”

Whatever one’s judgment of the protagonist’s actions, the book will offer much to reflect about – with respect to faith, suffering and the effect to spread Christianity to other cultures.

Change of Heart

I posted the other day on the subject of Lent reading.  Here is another one to add to your list: Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy and Making Peace with My Sister’s Killer, by Jeanne Bishop.

Jeanne is a dear friend of mine and so I was treated to reading the manuscript of this book before it was published.  I was thrilled to open the mail earlier this week to find my signed copy of the actual book.  I immediately sat down and read it again.

The story begins twenty-five years ago, when, after a family dinner celebrating the pregnancy of Jeanne’s sister Nancy, Nancy and her husband returned home.  An intruder was sitting and waiting for them, gun in hand.  He shot and killed them.

As the title and subtitle of the book reveals, this is the story of how Jeanne moved to forgiveness and, even more, to compassion toward the man who murdered her beloved sister.  How she moved from not even being able to speak the killer’s name, to writing to him and visiting him in prison.  From being an advocate for life without parole for juveniles to advocating against such a punishment.  (The killer was a junior in high school when the murders took place.)  Her story is one of restorative justice and of Christian love.  It is also a story of the cost of discipleship, as some of Jeanne’s actions (such as testifying in favor of reducing the life without parole sentence of people like this killer) sometimes put her on the other side of the aisle of other family members and generated harsh (and sometimes vicious) criticism from others.

Jeanne says this in the opening chapter of the book:

This is the story of how God rolled away that stone [the stone over her heart], loosened the fingers that gripped that rock [the rock she wanted to throw at the perpetrator], till it thudded in the dirt – and grew in its stead the green shoots of transformation and new life, renewal and change.

It is my story, but it is also yours, because God who loves us all and wrought this miracle in my life has the power to transform yours as well, to lead you into places you never dreamed you would go

Jeanne is wonderful model of Christian discipleship.  I admire her greatly and am honored to call her a friend.

I don’t doubt you will find this a compelling story and one of amazing grace.  It would make for good reading during this Lent.

“Mixed” Marriages

I do a lot of parish-based adult faith formation in Catholic parishes. I know from that experience that many people are in “mixed marriages,” that is marriages where only one spouse is Catholic. That in itself creates issues regarding how and where to worship and how children are raised.

The potential issues for conflict are magnified in a situation where the Catholicism of one spouse results from that spouse’s conversion. Hence the title of Lynn Nordhagen’s book When Only One Converts, recommended to me by someone with whom I work at a local parish. The book seeks to address the question of “what happens when the two most important relationships in your life seem to be on a collision course?

The book pulls together a number of stories of people who have faced this situation. As the introduction to the book notes, the stories “all witness to the strength and complexity of both the marital bond and the inexorably magnetic pull of Catholicism. Some of these accounts include happy resolutions to the initial rupture caused by the conversion of one spouse. Others remain unresolved but hopeful – even where further rupture has occurred.”

One of the things that stood out for me in reading the book is the need for God’s grace in what is essentially a matter of the heart, not the head. As one of the writers observed

Grace is the key. Without God’s grace we would have never cut through the “hodgepodge” of erroneous ideas and ingrained misconceptions. With God’s grace, the fears subsided, the path was made straight, and the light of truth scattered our darkness.

This recognition of the role of grace is the key when one spouse converts ahead of the other. Argumentation accomplishes little. In fact, it is impossible to simply argue someone into the kingdom of God. If it were, conversion would be reducible to a merely intellectual exercise. However, conversion, while involving the intellect, is essentially spiritual and, therefore, is primarily the work of the Holy Spirit.

That recognition also has implications for all of our efforts to evangelize others, in a marital relationship or otherwise. The book quotes from the journal of Elisabeth Leseur, a French convert of the late 19th Century. What she wrote is as relevant today as it was when she wrote it:

To go more and more to souls, approaching them with respect and delicacy, touching them with love. To try always to understand everything and everyone. Not to argue; to work instead through contact and example; to dissipate prejudice, to reveal God and make him felt without speaking of him; to strengthen one’s intelligence, to enlarge one’s soul…’ to love without tiring, in spite of disappointment and indifference…to disclose Truth in its entirety and yet make it known according to the degree of light that each soul can bear.

I recommend the book for couples struggling to deal with the challenges raised by the conversion of one spouse as well as for those ministering in a parish setting.

Zealot

One of the advantages of moving to St. Paul is the ability to get to the Law School via the shuttle between the University of St. Thomas’ two campuses rather than driving to school. And the advantage of that is that I get to read during my commute.

The extra reading time this week allowed me to finish Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. The book, which reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list, has generated a lot of heat in many quarters and, after hearing and reading about it so often, I was interested in reading it.

I am not a Biblical scholar and so I do not have the expertise to independently assess the quality of Aslan’s scholarship. My reading of those who do have expertise suggests that the book does not make any claims that have not been made before and many question the quality of the author’s research and claims. According to one professor of New Testament, “Aslan seems to have bought into an outdated model of Christian development.” According to another, the book presents “a historically reconstructed Jesus, not the Jesus that appears on the pages of Scripture.” Another suggests Alsan offer a “superficial caricature” of Jesus. (Many other things have been written by people who do not seem to have read the book; I ignore those for obvious reasons.)

All of that may be true, but I found the book an interesting and provocative read. It offers some alternative readings of familiar Gospel passages (such as Jesus’ instruction to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s) that are worth sitting with. And, while much of what is there may not be new, the book is written in an accessible manner that anyone can read. Many people accept uncritically things they learned as a child about their faith. Everyone, in my view, benefits from thinking critically about their faith and if reading this book encourages Christians to do so, that is a good, not a bad thing.

I also agree with an early New York Times review of the book that one of the book’s strengths is its picture of first-century Palestine. Many Christians have very little knowledge of the religious, economic and political environment into which Jesus was born and preached. Understanding the relationship between Rome and the Jewish upper class, as well as the role of the Temple and the power of those who controlled it, is a helpful aid in reading the Gospels.

Among criticisms of the book that I find disturbing is the feeling among some conservatives that it is somehow offensive for a Muslim scholar to write a book about Jesus. Why that is more controversial than a Christian scholar’s writing a book about Islam or Muhammad is baffling to me.

While it would be a mistake to read this book uncritically, accepting the truth of all Aslan suggests, I do think it is a worthwhile read – both in its discussion of Jesus’ life and in its treatment of the early Church after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Untying the Knots

I just finished reading Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, by Paul Vallely, which was recommended (and lent) to me by my friend Fr. Dan Griffith.

The title of the book comes from a Baroque painting Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio came across many years ago in a church in Germany, titled Mary Untier of Knots. It was a painting he prayed in front of many time.

Vallely’s book, based on many meetings with those who have known Pope Francis over the many years of his life, is well-worth reading. It is a book of transformation, of conversion. It shows the growth of a young man of great pride to one of openness and humility, the transformation from an authoritarian to a seeker of collegiality, a movement from almost reactionary to radical, and the development of a deep commitment to the poor.

One of the things Vallely emphasizes in talking about the change in Pope Francis is the importance of prayer in his life. He writes

For the change in Jorge Mario Bergoglio may not have been triggered by an event so much as a process. Bergoglio’s key decisions are all made during his long sessions of daily prayer. It is difficult to overstate the importance of prayer in his life, says his former close aide Guillermo Marco: “He liked to wake at 4:30a.m. to 5a.m. every morning to pray. He makes decisions while he prays.” Prayer, Bergoglio has said, “should be an experience of giving way, of surrendering, where our entire being enters in to the presence of God.”…In Buenos Aires he often prayed for two hours before the start of his day.

I confess that the early Bergoglio was not a man I found very attractive. Perhaps he was simply put in too high a position too early, but there is no denying he did not handle his job as Provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina. And while not all the facts are clear about (to use a chapter title) “What Really Happened in the Dirty War” in Argentina, it seems clear the way he handled the situation withe the Jesuits Yorio and Jalics contributed to their arrest and torture. (That is not to take away from the fact that it appears he acted with “considerable courage over the six years which followed as the Dirty War.”)

I’m guessing the early Bergoglio is also not a man Pope Francis finds all that attractive. He said in one interview

I don’t want to mislead anyone – the truth is that I’m a sinner who God in His mercy has chosen to love in a privileged manner. From a young age, life pushed me into leadership roles – as soon as I was ordained as a priest, I was designated as the master of novices, and two and a half years later, leader of the province – and I had to learn from my errors along the way, because to tell you the truth, I made hundreds of errors. Errors and sins. It would be wrong for me to say that these days I ask forgiveness for the sins and offenses I might have committed. Today I ask forgiveness for the sins and offenses I did indeed commit.

The question is not whether we have sinned; we are all sinners. Rather, the question is whether we can be open to the grace of God, open to conversion and transformation. Clearly the man who is now Pope Francis was.

Pope Francis has his fans and his detractors. Both would benefit from leaning more about what made the man who he is today. This book is a good way of doing that.

An Invitation to Meet Jesus

I love the writing of James Martin, S.J., and have benefitted from each of the books he has written as well as from many of his articles in America and otherwise. This is no less true of his newest book, which I just finished reading: Jesus: A Pilgrimage.

Martin describes his book as “an invitation for you to meet the Jesus I have studied, the Jesus I follow, and the Jesus I met in the Holy Land,” with the aim of prompting readers to explore more about Jesus. He does this through chapters that explore major stories of the Gospels through the lens of his own life and prayer (and Martin’s honesty about his own weaknesses is both admirable and encouraging), stories from his teachers, and his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Each chapter ends with the Gospel passage, the story of which was the subject of the chapter, inviting prayerful reflection before moving on.

I should have been writing posts about the content of this book as I read it, because there is way to much to share in a single blog post, although I suppose I could simply say (a) put this on your summer reading list if it is not there already, and (b) Martin’s descriptions of his time in the Holy Land increase my desire to visit there.

But I will share here just three of the things that I found particularly helpful and worth reflecting on. First, in Martin’s discussion of Luke’s account of the miraculous catch of fish (Luke 5:1-11), Martin zeroes in on Peter’s reaction to the miraculous catch: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” Martin suggests we “can try to imagine Peter’s possible frame of mind when he asked Jesus to leave him, but it is just as important to understand why we say to God, ‘Go away from me.'” He spends the next several pages looking at the some possible reasons, discussing our feelings of unworthiness, fear (of God and God’s power), fear of change, and fear of intimacy. He ends this helpful discussion with the reminder of Jesus’ response to Peter’s “Go away” – Jesus does not depart form Peter, but calls him to join him in his mission. Likewise, he does not depart from us when our fears cause us to move away.