Faith & Spirituality in Review

Prayers for the Journey, James M. Fitzpatrick OMI, St Paul’s, 2007, 160 pp., hb, rrp 19.95.

This is an unpretentious book. It is not about prayer as a science, but is an aid to prayer as a daily practice. It simply offers short prayers for each day of the Church year. The prayers are mostly short – a line or two. The thoughts and the language are simple and unadorned. They meet us in our daily lives before we dress to put on our public face to the world.

Short prayers that will stay with us during the day need to make a simple point, but also occasionally surprise us with a deft phrase. This collection of prayers is appropriately wry. A prayer I liked particularly was:

Morning has broken…
Lord, help me keep the rest of my day together.

Fr Fitzpatrick was the very effective director of National Catholic Enquiry Centre. His experience there is evident in these prayers. They display a careful ear for the insights and language of those whom he meets, a preference for straightforward and simple words, and an ease in going to the heart of the question.

Some people may find it helpful to use the prayers on the days suggested. I suspect that most will prefer simply to dip into them and find prayers that fit the mood and circumstances they find themselves in on any given day.

Benedictus. A Book of Blessings, John O’Donohue, Random House, 2007, 233 pp., hb, rrp $39.95.

Blessings are gracious both in the giving and the receiving. They can soothe our edgy and doubting selves and leave us to sit comfortably with the intimate places of our hearts. But in a world in which religious traditions are not generally shared it is often hard to find blessings that everyone can use comfortably.

John O’Donohue’s book of blessings is a precious resource. He has written blessings for every occasion and mood. They are suffused with faith, but mostly do not suppose his readers belong to any particular religious tradition. They are varied. Among his two hundred blessings, he has one for the artist at the start of day, for love in a time of conflict, a blessing for a parent on the death of a child, others on meeting a stranger,a blessing for loneliness, for a new home, for broken trust.

It is hard enough to imagine so many occasions for blessing. It is even harder to compose them. A good blessing takes you out of bustle into the more tranquil, more delicate and deeper rhythms of the world. The language of blessing is musical and grave.

John O’Donohue is an accomplished writer who in his books evokes rather than describes the movements of the heart and of the Holy Spirit. An earlier book inspired the current widespread interest in Celtic spirituality. In this book, he expands on the meaning of blessing in a preparatory and concluding chapter as well as in introductory remarks to each section of blessings.

But in his blessings he goes beyond the rounded eloquence of his descriptive writing to a simplicity in which he names the simple things of life and allows their depth to appear. He does not need to use old-fashioned words to suggest transcendence. People who have occasion to use these blessings will find they read easily and evocatively.

When you are teaching, quotations and stories are like gold. You become tired of your own voice, and it is a blessing when you can spice the regular menu of your own teaching with other people’s great lines.

Christopher Gleeson, our Madonna Editor, was headmaster of two Jesuit schools for many years. He knows the demands made of teachers and has a deep respect for their calling. In this book, he gathers together many of the quotations that he has found helpful when teaching and reflecting with teachers on their work.

In the divisions of the book he outlines the large challenges that teachers face: to accompany, listen, tell stories, free, bless and to build communities. Under headings that capture aspects of each of these challenges he arranges quotations from Scripture and a variety of other sources.

His quotations are catholic in the best sense of the word. They find God confidently in the most varied and unexpected places. They are consistently positive and encouraging. The book itself is a work of encouragement and of appreciation of a much under-appreciated task. Not something to read right through but to dip into for illumination.

The Cat of Portovecchio: Corfu Tales, Maria Strani-Potts, Brandl and Schlesinger, 2007, 276 pp, pb, rrp $26.95.

Mamee, the abandoned cat, is an unspeaking observer of the lives of people in Portovecchio. We see her in people’s homes and in the streets. At one moment she leads a religious procession as if the most important character in town; at another she creeps through the shrubbery to comfort a woman who herself feels abandoned years after her husband’s execution.

Just as nothing happens without Mamee, nothing happens without food. The tastes and smells of sikomaida, bourdeto and loukoumades waft through the pages as ingredients are listed and methods explained. Not everyone is a good cook however as indicated by this title chapter: ‘The cat steals, eats and sleeps well, while Joy cooks an inedible pastitsada.’

But this is more than a bit of tourist-style nostalgia about life, cats and food in an old fishing village. Maria Strani-Potts, a native of Corfu, writes with an insider’s honesty and clear-sightedness.

When launching The Cat of Portovecchio in November 2007, David Malouf described it as a ‘genuinely charming book’ whose writer allows for ‘all sorts of ordinary human follies and indiscretions, for bad humour as well as good, but with a sense that what all this makes up is a picture of the way we are.’ All this also makes for a very satisfying read!