Faith & Spirituality in Review

Why Rites of Reconciliation matter, Gerard Moore, St Paul’s Publications, 2008, 80 pp, pb, rrp $19.95.

When you want to understand sacraments better, catechisms and theology give you the words that faith has found to describe them. But if you want to know how they came to have this meaning, you will want to explore the different ways in which they have been celebrated over the centuries.

This is particularly true of the sacrament of reconciliation, the privileged way in which we are opened to receive God’s forgiveness and to return to the church community. Initially Christians looked to baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and sought reconciliation through prayer and the Eucharist. Later for very serious sins people did a long period of public penance before they could be reconciled in the church. Still later, they confessed sins and received a penance. The penance completed, they received absolution. We are familiar with modified form of this rite, in which more emphasis is placed on absolution than on the penance. In our own day the rites are situated within the context of community prayer. Three of the four rites that came out of the Second Vatican Council indeed are celebrated communally.

Gerard Moore, who is clearly a masterly teacher, has written a short account of the development of the Sacrament of Penance. He shows how much the way in which it has been celebrated and seen has changed. But he also makes the heart of reconciliation clear – that God forgives us before we ask, and that in confession we do more than confess our sins. We also confess our faith and confess God’s goodness and mercy towards us. So it is important that we celebrate the sacrament prayerfully as communities where we can express these three forms of confession.

The book is simple, engaging and positive in its message. It is ideal reading for broadening our perspective on the sacrament of penance.

Prayer, Orbis Books, Joyce Rupp, 2007, 128 pp, pb, rrp $14.95

The qualities of Joyce Rupp’s latest book are captured in its title. It is simple and unadorned. It assumes that the topic is important and interesting enough not to need selling. The writer has become a very popular retreat director and speaker on spirituality. This book shows why she is in such demand.

Like all good guides in prayer, she is encouraging. In the phrase of Frank Wallace, the Australian spiritual guide, she sees prayer as about encounter and not as about performance. Praying calls for the same steady, not flashy, virtues that are so important in relationships. Prayer is about hanging in, being open and honest, letting our relationship develop, gradually becoming attentive to the mystery that God is. Our only achievement in prayer is to lose ourselves in the relationship.

Like many spiritual writers, Joyce Rupp always keeps a pencil in hand when she reads. She quotes to good effect both classical and modern writers on prayer. She also writes helpfully out of her own experience as a Servite Sister, and shares many down-to-earth anecdotes.

I was particularly struck by her reflections on a suggestion by a retreat leader of a school retreat. He had suggested that the students be asked to surrender themselves without reserve and with boundless self confidence into God’s hands. She was horrified, knowing how terrified she herself was at the prospect. (As I read, I shared her horror). The guide replied lightly, ‘That doesn’t say much about who your God is, does it?’

Believers: Does Australian Catholicism have a future? Paul Collins, University of New South Wales Press, 2008, 224 pp, pb, rrp $34.95.

Paul Collins’ book, written with his usual grace and graciousness, assumes it does matter that Australian Catholicism has a future. Many of the things he describes about the way that churches make people’s lives better and influence society for the better certainly count as evidence that it matters.

He also offers much evidence that the Australian church is in decline – the inability to accommodate women, the incidence of sexual abuse by clergy, the inability of Catholics to pass on their faith to younger generations and the lack of good local leadership caused by the limiting ordination to celibate males, and a central authority stifling initiative and adversarial in its relationship to the modern world.

His recipes for survival focus on good leadership, empowering the laity, good education and a non-polemical approach to the broader world and its attitudes.

All of these are good things, no doubt, and far better than the images of dysfunction that he cites. But one wonders whether, even if the changes he suggests were implemented, the Australian Catholic Church would be like what we have known either before or after the Vatican Council. The leaves have fallen, the seed is still in the ground, and what will emerge has yet to be seen.

Ultimately, too, the church is made up of believers brought together by their faith in Jesus. Two or three gathered together make the Church. Paul Collins’ thoughtful book leads us back to Jesus’ question, ‘When the Son of Man returns, will he still find faith on earth’? That is not a despairing question, because the answer in the hands of God who is trustworthy.

Taking God to Heart: A living spirituality, Brian Gallagher msc, St Pauls, 2008, 80 pp, pb, rrp $14.95.

Prayer and Relationships: Staying connected – An Ignatian perspective, Patrick O’Sullivan sj, David Lovell Publishing, 2008, 128 pp. pb, rrp $24.95.

It is surprising that two books by spiritual masters should be so similar and yet so different. Brian Gallagher has been involved in spirituality for twenty five years as a Missionary of the Sacred Heart. He founded the Heart of Life Spirituality Centre in Melbourne. Patrick O’Sullivan has accompanied the Christian Life Communities for many years, and has also been Jesuit Tertian Instructor. Both are much in demand for spiritual direction and retreats.

They deal with similar themes. Both are committed to a spirituality of the heart. This means attending to the longing for God at the heart of ourselves, being able to recognise and live within our vulnerability, and to find freedom.

But within this similarity the two books are very different. Brian Gallagher is a teacher who takes us through a path to contemplation. The path takes us through the language and the teaching of great spiritual masters like John of the Cross.

Patrick O’Sullivan, who has written much for Madonna, reads less like a teacher, more like the lad who talks in class. His style is a bit more cheeky, full of jokes including many against himself, with an earthiness to his wisdom. This is the teaching that comes through life, about the life that goes with prayer. At the core of the book is Jesus, and Jesus is quietly subversive, the sender of the Spirit that blows through the corridors of the church and blows much that is stale out the windows.

These are books for different occasions. But both include the marvelous advice of St Vincent de Paul: ‘When you help the poor you had better love them, because otherwise they will never forgive you for it’. The choice of the phrase commends both books. Good spirituality is like that—earthy, unillusioned, attentive.