Faith & Spirituality in Review

Blessed be God: Hymns of St Paul, Edmund Power osb, St Paul’s Publications, Strathfield, 64 pp, HB, illustrated, rrp $9.95.

Sometimes I idly imagine Biblical writers like John or Paul wandering into one of our bookshops and picking up a book about themselves. I wonder what they might have made it.

I suspect that St Paul would have been pretty happy with Blessed be God. Mind you, he might have scratched his head when he read that the book was written to celebrate the Year of St Paul. And the Paul who was never slow to boast of what God had done in him might have been secretly delighted at the cover illustration that shows him preaching at Damascus with his hearers demonstratively struck to the quick.

He would certainly have been delighted by the modesty of this work, another of a very attractive line of little books from St Paul’s Publications. They present biblical texts with a short introduction that apply the texts to daily life and are followed by a prayer. Benedictine Edmund Power brings together the texts very simply, and the ninth century miniatures from the Bible of St Paul’s without the Walls in Rome are genial and thought provoking.

These little books sit firmly within the Benedictine tradition of oratio divina, the meditative reading on Scripture. The illustrations and the elegant and spacious presentation of the text use the great resources of contemporary bookmaking to add delight to the eye as well as to appeal to the inner ear.

40 Days with Paul, Henry Wansbrough, St Paul’s, Strathfield, 144 pp, pb, rrp $17.95.

Forty is a biblical number. When it appears in the title of a religious book you know you will be led on a journey that recalls the years that the Israelites wandered in the desert, the days that Jesus spent in the wilderness, or the days that we spend preparing for Jesus’ death and Resurrection at Lent.

In 40 Days with St Paul, another book inspired by the Year of St Paul, Henry Wansbrough, a monk of Ampleforth Abbey, invites us to spend forty days meditating on key passages from St Paul’s letters. Wansbrough is a good scripture scholar and teacher. His choice of passages is excellent. He explains clearly the context of St Paul’s letters and helps us think how these passages might bear on our life today.

If you finish the journey, you will have also feel more familiar with St Paul and respond to the richness and urgency of his writing. Paul is passionate about the Gospel and, if we spend time with him, that rubs off.

Snake and Lizard, Joy Cowley, illus. Gavin Bishop, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2007, 104 pp, pb, rrp $19.95.

Joy Cowley is well known in her native New Zealand, and this book will endear her to an Australian audience too. She will be visiting next year for the Australian Children’s Book Council’s conference in Brisbane.

Snake and Lizard meet over an argument, but come through that to get to know each other and begin a firm friendship. They remain best friends through a series of adventures and misadventures. These characters, and others they meet, are warm and appealing, and the stories contain a great deal of practical wisdom. The book is designed beautifully and the full-colour pen and wash illustrations add greatly to its appeal.

Leaving My Beloved Children Behind, Takashi Nagai, St Paul’s Publications, Strathfield, pb rrp $22.95.

At a time when the stories of devastation and despair were emerging from Victoria’s bushfires, I was encouraged to read a story of devotion to faith in the most trying conditions. Worked off his feet as a radiologist in wartime Japan, Takashi Nagai continued to treat his patients even after developing radiation sickness in the form of bone marrow leukaemia. Soon after his diagnosis, Nagai’s wife was taken from him in a blinding flash of light by the atomic bomb that decimated Nagasaki. Even faced with the knowledge that his children would soon become orphans, Nagai found comfort in his faith.

Leaving my beloved children behind is a collection of short ruminations on politics, mortality and the nature of God penned by Nagai from his sickbed and originally published serially in a Japanese magazine in the 1950s. This edition is the first translation of what has since become a spiritual classic in Japan. The translators have faithfully maintained Nagai’s stunning metaphors, such as Nagai’s description of the plight of an orphan: like a pinkie whose nail has been torn off in a minor accident, it is unprotected and sensitive, and alone amongst the other fingers in its sensitivity. The elegant descriptions and touching narrative snapshots, sadly, are few and far between. Most chapters depart from Nagai’s personal situation to argue about, for example, the type of person who should work in an orphanage (a highly respected professional, such as an engineer or businessman) or how we should practice religion (without ceremony and in our daily lives).

I found some of these prescriptions hard to accept, and was frequently distracted by extremely conservative and often anachronistic assertions, such as the importance of ‘blood ties’. Nonetheless some readers will enjoy this book’s idiosyncratically Japanese style of storytelling, and its earnest sermons may guide and stimulate reflection at a time of crisis.

The Paschal Paradox: A Meditation on the Contemporary Challenge of Priestly Life, David Ranson, St Paul’s, Strathfield, 112 pp, pb, $17.95.

The test of a good book for priests is whether any reader will read it with interest. The important challenge priests face is to be good and faithful human beings, and they share that with the rest of the human race. So the best writing catches the dreams, perplexities and unguarded moments that we recognise as human.This calls for modest and simple language.

These are high standards. Judged by them The Paschal Paradox is illuminating, as we might expect from a spiritual writer who is a diocesan priest and has been a Cistercian monk.

He has written much for priests and has given them many retreats. He catches the nicely sardonic and domestic temper with which dedicated priests go about God’s work. In a lovely quotation one priest describes his relief at the end of the Holy Week ceremonies when he no longer has to think of what comes next in the liturgy:

‘And, eventually, coming to the sweetest, most lovely, relaxing and comforting words in the whole Roman Missal: “Mass continues in the usual way”. And uttering a prayer of relief, “Oh, thank you, God”.’

Throughout the book Ranson explores the tension between our own imperfection and the large hopes and dreams to which in faith we offer hospitality. This is the heart of the Paschal paradox. He counsels us persuasively never to give up on the large invitation of Christ and never to deny our fragile human reality to which God directs the invitation.

He develops this theme in discussing how to respond to change and loss, to yield our securities, to offer leadership and to live within the parish. These are tasks for priests, certainly, but also for any Christian.