Notes from the book pile

Although it's been awhile since I posted a book review, I've actually been reading quite a bit since nursing allows one to hold a book (or an iphone with Facebook open...), but not to do much else.  Unlike everyone else, I have not read Jen Fulwiler's book, mostly because I have to be very careful about letting books into the house because they don't leave and we have that weight limit thing hovering...  (that said, I did order a large stack of books for Easter for the kids, which I haven't done in awhile.  Boys got Peter Kreeft's Surfing books which I intend to read myself, 14 year old got Father Brown collection, 11 year old got the JPII high school book - judge is out on that, some pretty picture books for the youngers: thumbs up to these: Lolek, I already mentioned, Take It To the Queen, Clare and Francis, Elsa Beskow's Children of the Forest, and old favorites Each Peach, Pear, Plum, and The Best Loved Doll)

On my own shelf: I finally finished, after YEARS, St. Francis de Sales Thy Will Be Done,  which is excerpts from his letters to people in the world. It has some good nuggets of wisdom, but must be read in small snatches; otherwise, the letters all sounded the same. I'd start them over and over again, and not remember I had read it a week earlier. Some pieces of advice struck me as good enough to mark down, but I perhaps didn't absorb the wisdom of St. Francis de Sales as I should have.

Some bits of Salesian wisdom:
To Jane de Chantal: De Sales encourages her to remain strong in her practice of faith, despite challenges, by practicing small virtues: "Let us advance; let us make our way through these low valleys of the humble and little virtues. We shall see in them the roses amid the thorns, charity that shows its beauty among interior and exterior afflictions, the lilies of purity, the violets of mortification: what virtues shall we not see? Above all, I love the three little virtues -- sweetness of heart, poverty of spirit, and simplicity of life -- and the substantial exercises -- visiting the  sick, serving the  poor, comforting the afflicted, and the like. But the whole without eagerness, with a true liberty."

This liberty he describes in a later letter: It is "a detachment of the Christian heart from all things in order to follow the known will of God."- our hearts should not only not be be attached to material goods, but also free of attachment to spiritual consolations, spiritual exercises, nor privations, nor other mortifications. The result of this liberty of the soul is a sweet temper not attached to any inclinations of self-love.  In a later letter, he describes self-love as only dying when we do, but we must continually reject it. But when we do give in, we should not give up, but ask for mercy and re-tune our heartstrings to follow Christ again.

St. Francis uses an image of bees buzzing about your face as a metaphor for how temptation is all around us, but only if we touch it will we be stung. Do not be afraid or troubled, he writes, but pass on to avoid temptations. "Live joyful, and be generous" a recurring refrain.  We must "be charitable" to our souls - let go of our self-afflictions, and instead "live joyously" knowing that God loves us in spite of our imperfections.

In order to live joyfully, de Sales reminds his followers to be resigned to accepting the trials of life without making them worse by focusing on what they prevent. Desire a cure, but cherish the suffering is another frequent bit of advice. His letters contain many reminders to his followers to let go of their complaints about their failings.  He writes to a housewife: "You see, my daughter, those who often eat honey find bitter things more bitter and sour things more sour, and are easily disgusted with coarse meats. Your soul, often occupying itself with spiritual exercises that are sweet and agreeable to the spirit, when it returns to corporal matters, exterior and material, finds them very rough and disagreeable, and so it easily gets impatient. And therefore, my dear daughter, you must see in these exercises the will of God, which is there, and not merely the thing that is done."

And later he addresses a man's anger at the state of the world: "To be dissatisfied and fret about the world when we must of necessity be in it, is a great temptation. God's Providence is wiser than we. We fancy that by changing our ships, we shall get on better; yes, if we change ourselves."

There are a series of letters to a pregnant woman (or the women?) in which Francis urges her to not take on more than she needs to in order to be faithful and holy. Suffer the "heaviness" of pregnancy with "consideration of the honor that God will receive from your work. It is your image that will be placed in the eternal temple of the heavenly Jerusalem" - in other words, don't exert more energy than you need to so that you will not be robbed of contentment in your state. "Do not torment yourself to do much, but suffer with love what you have to suffer."

In the same vein, to a sterile woman he writes,  "Do you think, my dear daughter, that Sara, Rebecca, Rachel, Anne (the mother of Samuel), St. Anne (the mother of our Lady), and St. Elizabeth were less agreeable to God when they were barren than when they were fruitful? We must walk faithfully in the way of our Lord, and remain in peace as much in the winter of sterility as in the autumn of fruitfulness."

Other practical bits of advice: Make your devotion attractive by doing all with love, take frequent communion, confess humbly, pray before leaving home and before going to bed, beware of bad books!, include in your day half an hour of spiritual reading, never speak evil of your neighbor, and love abjection. These are ways we can be "for God," which in the last letter in the collection, de Sales uses as a pun on "adieu": Someone who is "for God" ("A Dieu") seeks only God, is never sorrowful, wishes only to please God, to share Him, and to remain united to Him.

None of this is new advice, nor was it in the early 17th century, when de Sales was writing. But I need to hear it again and again, as did these men and women who received these letters.  How handy to have a saint write to you and remind you of just what you need to do to become a saint yourself!

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My other spiritual reading for Lent was Dorothy Day's Loaves and Fishes - I loved reading this. I have read about Dorothy Day and read selections of her work, but I have never read a whole book by her.  So much meat in this book about living in Christian poverty. Day was a radical Christian, but perhaps she might claim she had much in common with the people who petitioned de Sales for spiritual guidance.  I think she recognized the difficulty of living the way she did. She writes honestly about some of the offkilter people who came to live and work with her and the others who founded the Catholic Worker movement. I first heard about the Catholic Worker movement in college in association with the priests and nuns and other protesters who broke into military installations and hammered on nuclear warheads.  I primarily thought of them as a group of pacifists who sometimes engaged in violent acts to protest war.  Later, when we lived in Norfolk, I felt a little revolutionary because I signed up to prepare sandwiches once a month for a Catholic Worker home that housed ex-convicts and other people with nowhere to go -- and I was a military dependent.  But my small effort was nothing compared to the work that Day began.  (Note: another radical Christian is profiled in ND Magazine, a SOLT priest living in a violent Mexican town near Laredo.)

A priest once told Dorothy Day to go to daily Communion with these words: "'You go because you need food to nourish you for your pilgrimage on this earth. You need the strength, the grace, that the bread of life gives.'" She then catechizes her brother, who calls it cannibalism: "'We drink milk from the breast of our mother. We are nourished while we are in the womb by the blood of her heart. From her flesh and from her blood we grow before we enter into this life, and so from the Body and Blood of Jesus we are nourished for life eternal.'" Day certainly received strength from this nourishment, as she persevered in her mission for years despite only small consolations.

One of the characters about whom she shares a story has the same message as de Sales. This is Fr. Roy, a tall joyful priest who lost his mental acuity too soon after a stroke of some sort. But even in a mental institution where Day went to visit him, he was able to tell her to "Rejoice!" even as he showed her bruises he received from other patients and told of some of the indignities he suffered.

Day also tells of some of the hard women she met when she was imprisoned for a few months. She had to learn to see Jesus in the women who mocked and tormented her and the other protesters who were arrested. She is penitent and remorseful when she is harsh to one belligerent woman.  "Remembering Salinger [Franny's revelation that 'Jesus is the fat lady'] [and St. Catherine of Siena's message from Jesus that "I have placed you in the midst of your fellows that you may do to them what you cannot do to ME, that is to say,. . . that you may love your neighbors without expecting any return from them, and what you do to them I count as done to Me."], and Dostoevkski's Father Zossima, and Alyosha, and the Honest Thief, and Tolstoi's short stories made me feel again that I had failed. We had the luxury of books, our horizons were widened though we were imprisoned. We could certainly not consider ourselves poor.  ... Yes, we fail in love, we make our judgments and we fail to see that we are all brothers; we are all seeking love, seeking God, seeking the beatific vision. All sin is a perversion, a turning from God and a turning to creatures. If only our love had been stronger and truer, casting out fear, I would not have taken the stand I did. . . . Thank God for retroactive prayer! St. Paul said that he did not judge himself, nor must we judge ourselves. We can turn to our Lord Jesus Christ, who has already repaired the greatest evil that ever happened or could ever happen, and trust that He will make up for our falls, for our neglects, for our failures in love."

She tells how the poet W. H. Auden appeared one day to pay a fine to the housing office for the Catholic Worker household. He looked like a man in need himself. We don't know who among us is suffering or saving.

She also encounters Evelyn Waugh, who sets up an interview with her at a fancy hotel. She asks him to meet her at the CW house on Mott street instead of at  the fancy hotel, which he appreciates.

Much of the early part of the book is about Peter Maurin, the inspiring force behind the Catholic Worker movement:

"Peter Maurin's teaching - his philosophy of work, his stress on the need for farming communes and agronomic universities -- has yet to be applied to the problems of unemployment and automation. Much of the world has changed to a new society where collective and communal ownership is being emphasized to handle the matter of man and his work. But these changes have been brought about by violence and coercion, at the expense of man's freedom.

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us? When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers, with that burning love, that passion, which led to the Cross, then we can truly say, 'Now I have begun.'" She goes on to compare the bread line as a kind of walk to Calvary without Veronica or Simon of Cyrene.

Peter Maurin frequently pronounced poetic manifestos about how to fix the world, for instance: 

"The World would be better off

if people tried to become better,

and people would become better

if they stopped trying to become better off.

For when everyone tries to become

better off

nobody is better off.

But when everyone tries to become better

everybody is better off.

Everyone would be rich

if nobody tried to become richer,

and nobody would be poor

if everybody tried to be the poorest.

And everybody would be what he ought to be

if everybody tried to be

what he wants the other fellow to be."

Day describes how Peter would read philosophy as scholars worked in fields: Don Luigi Sturzo, writings about the kibbutzim of Israel, Eric Fromm, Martin Buber, Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan in India, Danilo Dolci in Sicily. "First of all,' Peter used to say, 'one must give up one's life to save it. Voluntary poverty is essential. To live poor, to start poor, to make beginnings even with meager means at hand, this is to get the 'green revolution' under way." We need to love Lady Poverty like St. Francis, not letting politicians feed the poor.  This is the radical philosophy of the CW movement, but a call to walk with the poor and suffering is the message of the Passion. 

Once, after a particularly trying day dealing with disgruntled and disruptive clients, Day asks Maurin: "Is this what you meant, Peter?" . . .

"Well," he hesitated. "At least it arouses the conscience."

Which is something."

That's what this book does; it's a sharp pinprick to the conscience. But what does a person do who is not in the state of life to sell all and live with the poor and mentally ill?

In face of how little reform is accomplished, Day writes: "By our suffering and our failures, by our acceptance of the Cross, by our struggle to grow in faith, hope and charity, we unleash forces that help to overcome evil in the world. ... it is good to be able to see things in this perspective and to laugh with others who laugh at us when they see our 'Brother Juniper' attempts at social reform. Our farmer's failures are our own; but we must forgive ourselves as well as him. Thinking about all his work and goodness, my criticism turns to gratitude and love, and so my heart is warmed and I am comforted."

"We get used to ugliness so quickly. What we avert our eyes from today can be borne tomorrow when we have learned a little more about love. Nurses know this, and so do mothers. " Voluntary poverty - avoiding being comfortable through the exploitation of others or a war economy and living with "Precarity" - living with the possibility that ruin is near  - have been rejected by contemporary society.  We need our savings accounts and college plans and resources for tomorrow - we can't give those away. But this book challenges me to look more closely at ways we can help others.  I want to congratulate ourselves for writing a check every now and then, for showing up to serve meals for the homeless once a month or so, for passing on our extras to the thrift shops.  But those gestures are not radical at all.  They don't challenge our comfort. We must eat the last bit of food "before the miracle of the increase comes about. Any large family knows these things -- that somehow everything works out. It works out naturally and it works out religiously."

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Ok, I was going to write up a couple more book summaries, but got too involved in these.  More to follow eventually.