Faith & Spirituality in Review
Grace Notes, Brian Doyle, ACTA Publications, Chicago, 2011, pb, rrp $27.95
Brian Doyle, who lives in the United States, will be well known to many Australians through his wry contributions to Eureka Street. The breadth of his interest and the quirkiness of his eye are caught in the subtitle of this collection of short reflections. ‘True stories about sins, sons shrines, silence, marriage, homework, jail, miracles, dads, legs, basketball, the sinewy grace of women, bullets, music, infirmaries, the power of powerlessness, the ubiquity of prayers, & some other matters’, he says.
The list suggests the tumbling elegance of his writing with its passion for lists, and his compassion. He always discovers human depth and poignancy in people and places that we would ordinarily dismiss. In Grace Notes the ‘I’ of the writer is always present, but it is present as an ‘I’ who looks out at reality and sees it freshly, not as a ‘me’ who is to be seen and admired.
I am tempted to recommend the short essays in the book as bedtime reading. But that is problematic. They are so engrossing and stimulate such wild connections in your mind that they are likely to keep you awake. This book is best read when the noonday devil takes away the freshness of things and dusts over your heart. They stir you to notice the beauty of God’s world.
Mary a Window to the Light, Barbara Bowring & Marie T Farrell rsm, St Pauls, Strathfield, 2011, hb, rrp $14.95.
The Art of Worship: Paintings Prayers and Readings for Meditation, Nicholas Holtam, National Gallery, London, 2011, hb, rrp $29.95.
Art and prayer have gone together from the beginning. Their relationship has sometimes been testy, as the number of decapitated statues in churches and of smashed ancient religious monuments testify. But normally, art and faith have been companions, with art carrying some of the burden of teaching. The stained glass windows of medieval churches were the blackboards for generations of children. They still can help in prayer.
Mary. A Window to the Light is a very simple book, showing and explaining the details of the parish of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, Randwick. It contains splendid colour photographs by Jeremy Bowring of the panels of the window, and explanations of the iconography. The book itself encourages meditation, and also leads the reader to want to see the church itself, which has just celebrated its 125th anniversary.
The Art of Worship is a more ambitious and equally successful book. Nicholas Holtam is vicar in the London Church of St Martin in the Fields, notable for its outreach to the poor and its encouragement of the Arts. In this book he reproduces paintings in the adjacent National Gallery. The paintings, mainly from the 15th to the 18th centuries, are accompanied by short comments that help the reader to understand the subject matter and to appreciate the subtleties of the paintings. Each painting is also accompanied by ancient and modern prayers.
This is a modest work by a clearly cultured and devout writer with a gentle sense of humour. I enjoyed particularly the prayer by Sir Francis Drake, of piratical fame, attached to Turner’s painting, The Fighting Temeraire.
A great help to prayer on those days when you are bored and need to add spice to the soul’s usual food.
Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, Richard Rohr, St Anthony Messenger Press, Cincinnati, 2011, pb, rrp $22.95.
Richard Rohr is a well-known spiritual writer and director of a centre of spirituality in New Mexico. He brings deep psychological insights to his reflection on faith. In Breathing under Water he relates Christian faith to the Twelve Steps program for recovering from addiction.
Rohr describes the salvation that Christ brings as a liberation and healing of pain. Images are significant, as we can see when we remember that salvation is often presented as a story of crime, imprisonment and setting free. It is a healing from pain and the sin that denies our pain. To find healing we need to acknowledge our need for healing and to recognise our addictions, as the Twelve Steps do.
For Rohr, the root of all addictions, and itself the most serious addiction, is our addiction to our way of thinking. We think in ways that hold us away from reality and result in hurts, lack of forgiveness and evasive behaviour.
So to find liberation we need to be freed from our addictive ways of looking at the world. That, and not simply overcoming addiction, is the goal of the Twelve Steps. On this journey the only people who can do that are people who have suffered. That is why Jesus suffered to save us. In Rohr’s view, those who have recognised their addiction and have learned from it are privileged because they have done what we all need to do. It is a challenging spirituality, but one with great consequence.
A Short History of Christianity, Geoffrey Blainey, Viking, Melbourne, 2011, pb, rrp $45.00
Geoffrey Blainey is a fine historian who has introduced many Australians to our story. He writes very clearly and simply. He also has a wonderful gift for the human feel of events and for the telling story that encapsulates them. At this best, as for example in The Tyranny of Distance, he is able to name an aspect of our world that becomes obvious once you notice it. But we need someone to make us notice it.
A Short History of Christianity is 600 pages long, but still feels reasonably short. Blainey moves briskly across the centuries, stopping to paint vivid pictures along the way. He covers the main movements in Western Christian history along the way. He is at his best describing people, with an eye for vivid detail. The book helps us understand what the significant players in history were up to and why they did what they did.
Despite the writer’s best efforts, the worlds he describes in the book are very much like our own, full of genial and sympathetic people like Blainey himself. It does not make us wonder at how different from ourselves Christians of past ages were.
Although Australian church history is but a fingernail on the body of the story of Christianity, this book has a distinctively Australian feel. It owes partly to Blainey’s laconic story telling. But it also comes from little explanatory details. A Book of Hours is held in Ballarat. One of the illustrations is of Pope John Paul II at Alice Springs.
A very readable book that you can take up, put down again and return to as a friend.
Happy, Holy, Healthy: Learning to let go and let God, Susie Hii, David Lovell Publishing, Melbourne, 2011, pb, rrp $24.95
On our spiritual journeys it is always encouraging to have companions. They don’t have to be geographers. Like us they will not have walked the route before. But just by being walkers they will be able to show us aspects of the terrain we have missed, and ways to deal with the steep climbs and cold nights camping out we all encounter. They help us not because they are expert travellers but because they are ordinary travellers like us they encourage us to keep on going.
In her little book Susie Hii is such a walking companion. The title, Happy, Healthy, Holy describes the goal of the journey, and some of the ways in which we come closer to it as we walk. So it is a book of healing as much as it is an account of health.
This is not an expert’s travel book with authoritative descriptions of the landscape and its history, but is more like a series of letters home in which she describes her experiences and reflects on her own journey. She describes the turns that her own faith has taken in her life, what has helped keep her going, and the ways in which she has come to understand her faith. All of this is a work in progress.
The things that she describes are the dead ordinary, dead serious events of life: childhood dreams and humiliations, youthful religious fervour, the insights that come with marriage and children, the deepening of spiritual life through healing and Ignatian spirituality, the death of a father and sickness of a mother.
Many readers will find within this gentle account echoes of their own journey, hints for handling its present stages, and encouragement to keep going (from the Foreword).
