Book Club
To grow...
Ronald Rolheiser makes sense of what is frequently a misunderstood word: spirituality. In posing the question "What is spirituality?" Father Rolheiser gets quickly to the heart of common difficulties with the subject, and shows through compelling anecdotes and personal examples how to channel that restlessness, that deep desire, into a healthy spirituality.
This book is for those searching to understand what Christian spirituality means and how to apply it to their own lives. Rolheiser explains the nonnegotiables--the importance of community worship, the imperatives surrounding social action, the centrality of the Incarnation, the sustenance of the spiritual life--and how spirituality necessarily impacts every aspect of human experience. At the core of this readable, deeply revealing book is an explanation of God and the Church in a world that more often than not doubts the credibility of both.
Deeply affecting, The Red Tent combines rich storytelling with a valuable contribution in modern fiction: a new perspective of female life in biblical society. It is a vast and stirring work described as what the Bible might have been had it been written by God's daughters instead of sons.
Far beyond the traditional women-of-the-Bible sagas in both impact and vigor, The Red Tent is based upon a mention in Genesis of Jacob's only female offspring--his daughter, Dinah.
Author Anita Diamant, in the voice of Dinah, gives an insider's look at the details of women's lives in biblical times and a chronicle of their earthy stories and long-ignored histories. The red tent of the title is the place where women were sequestered during their cycles of birthing, menses, and illness. It is here that Dinah hears the whispered stories of her four mothers--Jacob's wives Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--and tells their tales to us in remarkable and thought-provoking oratories. Familiar passages from the Bible take on new life as Dinah fills in what the Bible has left out--the lives of women. Dinah tells us of her initiation into the religious and sexual practices of the tribe; Jacob's courtship with Rachel and Leah; the ancient world of caravans, farmers, midwives, and slaves; her ill-fated sojourn in the city of Sechem; her years in Canaan; and her half-brother Joseph's rise in Egypt.
Skillfully interweaving biblical tales with characters of her own invention, the author re-creates the life of Dinah providing an illuminating portrait of a courageous woman and the life she might have lived. A new view of the panorama of life in biblical times emerges from the female perspective, and the red tent itself becomes a symbol of womanly strength, love, and wisdom.
The Red Tent is one of those extremely rare publishing phenomenons--a little promoted, but dynamically successful book (over 250,000 copies sold) that owes its success to enthusiastic word-of-mouth endorsements.
Book #2: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Book #1: The Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser
When he was 14, Hendra had an affair with a married woman. One afternoon, her husband, a devout Roman Catholic, discovered the two in each other's arms. The husband, acting more out of concern for Hendra's soul than out of anger, arranged for the teenager to spend several weeks under the tutelage of Father Joe at a Benedictine abbey in England. Expecting cruel treatment similar to that handed out by the monks in his Catholic elementary school, Hendra was surprised to meet instead a rotund, knobby-kneed confessor whose thoughtful, open manner changed Hendra's life forever. As Hendra reveals in this graceful, humorous tale, Father Joe acted not only as a confessor, but also as a friend and as the guiding spirit of Hendra's life (the author is now married with three children). Under the influence of Father Joe, Hendra passionately decided to follow the monastic life. At every turn, he met Father Joe's gentle insistence that he wasn't yet ready to enter the monastery. At Cambridge, Hendra discovered a new passion-comedy-and pursued it as ardently as he'd pursued religion. Hendra writes well (he spent several years as the head writer at National Lampoon), chronicling the failure of his first marriage, his descent into substance abuse, his self-hatred and his incessant search for meaning in compelling prose and with clear-eyed honesty. Throughout Hendra's life, Father Joe stands by his side, like a gentle shepherd leading a lost sheep back to a place where it can graze safely.
Book #3: Father Joe by Tony Hendra
Saint Paul outside the Walls, Rome
Part melodrama and part parable, Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven weaves together three stories, all told about the same man: 83-year-old Eddie, the head maintenance person at Ruby Point Amusement Park. As the novel opens, readers are told that Eddie, unsuspecting, is only minutes away from death as he goes about his typical business at the park. Albom then traces Eddie's world through his tragic final moments, his funeral, and the ensuing days as friends clean out his apartment and adjust to life without him. In alternating sections, Albom flashes back to Eddie's birthdays, telling his life story as a kind of progress report over candles and cake each year. And in the third and last thread of the novel, Albom follows Eddie into heaven where the maintenance man sequentially encounters five pivotal figures from his life (a la A Christmas Carol). Each person has been waiting for him in heaven, and, as Albom reveals, each life (and death) was woven into Eddie's own in ways he never suspected. Each soul has a story to tell, a secret to reveal, and a lesson to share. Through them Eddie understands the meaning of his own life even as his arrival brings closure to theirs.
Book #4: The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
Hosseini's stunning debut novel starts as an eloquent Afghan version of the American immigrant experience in the late 20th century, but betrayal and redemption come to the forefront when the narrator, a writer, returns to his ravaged homeland to rescue the son of his childhood friend after the boy's parents are shot during the Taliban takeover in the mid '90s. Amir, the son of a well-to-do Kabul merchant, is the first-person narrator, who marries, moves to California and becomes a successful novelist. But he remains haunted by a childhood incident in which he betrayed the trust of his best friend, a Hazara boy named Hassan, who receives a brutal beating from some local bullies. After establishing himself in America, Amir learns that the Taliban have murdered Hassan and his wife, raising questions about the fate of his son, Sohrab. Spurred on by childhood guilt, Amir makes the difficult journey to Kabul, only to learn the boy has been enslaved by a former childhood bully who has become a prominent Taliban official. The price Amir must pay to recover the boy is just one of several brilliant, startling plot twists that make this book memorable both as a political chronicle and a deeply personal tale about how childhood choices affect our adult lives. The character studies alone would make this a noteworthy debut, from the portrait of the sensitive, insecure Amir to the multilayered development of his father, Baba, whose sacrifices and scandalous behavior are fully revealed only when Amir returns to Afghanistan and learns the true nature of his relationship to Hassan. Add an incisive, perceptive examination of recent Afghan history and its ramifications in both America and the Middle East, and the result is a complete work of literature that succeeds in exploring the culture of a previously obscure nation that has become a pivot point in the global politics of the new millennium.
Book #5: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Book #6: The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen
The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming is a spiritual adventure story. A chance encounter with a poster depicting a detail of Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son set in motion a chain of events that enabled Nouwen to redefine and claim his vocation late in his life. In this book, which interweaves elements of art history, memoir, Midrash, and self-help, Nouwen brings the parable to life with empathic analyses of each character. Nouwen's absorption in the story (and the painting) is so complete that the father's challenge to love the son, and the son's challenge to receive that love, become Nouwen's own. And Nouwen's writing is so clear and his tone is so appealingly frank and humble that readers--no matter how far from home--will find hope for themselves in the prodigal peace Nouwen ultimately achieves.
Book #7: The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
The Great Divorce is C.S. Lewis's Divine Comedy: the narrator bears strong resemblance to Lewis (by way of Dante); his Virgil is the fantasy writer George MacDonald; and upon boarding a bus in a nondescript neighborhood, the narrator is taken to Heaven and Hell. The book's primary message is presented with almost oblique tidiness--"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'" However, the narrator's descriptions of sin and temptation will hit quite close to home for many readers. Lewis has a genius for describing the intricacies of vanity and self-deception, and this book is tremendously persistent in forcing its reader to consider the ultimate consequences of everyday pettiness.
The Heavenwards Book Club
The book for December–January will be:
Godric: A Novel
by Frederick Buechner
Click this link to download the discussion questions for this book:
Meeting dates to discuss this book:
Middletown: Monday, January 12th, 7:15 PM, at St. Joseph’s Parish
Dover: Wednesday January 14th, 10:30 AM, at the Countrie Eatery Restaurant
Hope you can join us!
The book for February will be:
Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
by Immaculee Ilibagiza.
Dates and times to be announced.
By the way—
As you read these books, please send your impressions to:
Book #8: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their Georgia peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words “Tiburon, South Carolina” scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her dead mother. Although the plot threads are too neatly trimmed, The Secret Life of Bees is a carefully crafted novel with an inspired depiction of character. The legend of the Black Madonna and the brave, kind, peculiar women who perpetuate Lily's story dominate the second half of the book, placing Kidd's debut novel squarely in the honored tradition of the Southern Gothic.
Book #9: The Innocent Man by John Grisham
Grisham's first work of nonfiction focuses on the tragedy of Ron Williamson, a baseball hero from a small town in Oklahoma who winds up a dissolute, mentally unstable Major League washout railroaded onto death row for a hometown rape and murder he did not commit. Judging by this author-approved abridgment, Grisham has chosen to present Williamson's painful story (and that of his equally innocent "co-conspirator," Dennis Fritz) as straightforward journalism, eschewing the more familiar "nonfiction novel" approach with its reconstructed dialogues and other adjustments for dramatic purpose. This has resulted in a book that, while it includes such intriguing elements as murder, rape, detection and judicial injustice, consists primarily of objective reportage, albeit shaded by the now-proven fact of Williamson's innocence. The absence of dialogue or character point of view could make for a rather bland audio. Boutsikaris avoids that by reverting to what might be called old-fashioned round-the-campfire storytelling, treating the lengthy exposition to vocal interpretations, subtle and substantial. He narrates the events leading up to the 1982 rape and murder of a young cocktail waitress with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, moving on to astonishment at the prosecution's use of deceit and false testimony to convict Williamson and Fritz and, eventually, elation at the exoneration of the two innocent men. Throughout, he maintains an appealing conversational tone, an effect made all the more remarkable by the book's nearly total absence of conversation.
Johnson offers a succinct and excellent overview of middle- and late-20th century Roman Catholic Christologies, the study of Christ's person and qualities. These have been renewed by waves of emphasis upon Jesus' genuine humanity, upon Jesus' own historical context, upon liberation of the poor and oppressed, upon the equality and dignity of women, upon the truth and greatness of other religious traditions, and upon preservation of the environment. The book fairly presents a wide body of diverse theological speculation in a form which clarifies the ongoing need for new Christologies and expectantly anticipates further developments.
Book #10: Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology by Elizabeth A. Johnson
Set at the end of this century, Father Elijah is an apocalyptic novel exploring the state of the modern world and religious scene by following the experiences of Fr. Elijah Schafer, a Carmelite priest on a secret mission for the Vatican which embroils him in a series of crises and subterfuges affecting the ultimate destiny of the Church. Father Elijah is a convert from Judaism, a survivor of the Holocaust, a man once powerful in Israel. For twenty years he has been "buried in the dark night of Carmel" on the mountain of the prophet Elijah. The Pope and the Cardinal Secretary of State call him out of obscurity and give him a task of the highest sensitivity: to penetrate into the inner circles of a man whom they believe may be the Antichrist. Their purpose is to call the Man of Sin to repentance, and thus to postpone the great tribulation long enough to preach the Gospel to the whole world. In this richly textured tale, Father Elijah crosses Europe and the middle East, moves through the echelons of world power, meets saints and sinners, presidents, judges, mystics, embattled Catholic journalists, faithful priests and a conspiracy of traitors within the very House of God. This is an apocalypse in the old literary sense and written in the light of Christian revelation. Father Elijah is an engaging, can't-put-it-down novel! --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book #11: Father Elijah: An Apocalypse by MIchael D. O’Brien
The Gift Of Peace is the final legacy left to us by one of America's most beloved and respected clerics. Preparing The Gift Of Peace was an extraordinary effort which consumed Joseph Cardinal Bernardin's final days and offers deeply personal reflections about his last three headline-filled years. The Gift Of Peace also reveals the Cardinal's spiritual growth amidst a string of traumatic events: false accusations of sexual abuse; reconciliation a year later with his accuser (who had earlier recanted the charges); a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and surgery; the return of cancer (in his liver); his decision to discontinue chemotherapy and live his remaining days as fully as possible. Even after Cardinal Bernardin relinquished the day-to-day operation of the Archdiocese in his final weeks, he continued to work on The Gift Of Peace. Cardinal Bernardin was known for his gift of reconciliation, and for a "consistent ethic of life" that urged a reverence for life from conception to natural death. In his final years he made a trip to Israel with Jewish leaders, launched the Catholic Common Ground Initiative to heal rifts among America's Catholics, and sent a letter to the Supreme Court urging them not to approve "physician-assisted" suicide. The Gift Of Peace is a worthy testament to the memory of a Christian life amidst contemporary issues and modern day challenges of life in the last years of the 20th century.
Book #12: The Gift of Peace by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin
Father Andrew Greeley is well known for his sometimes spicy murder mysteries and his always progressive view of religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. It comes as no surprise that he would pen this delightful exploration of Jesus’ relationships with women. Focusing largely on the parables, the book brings fresh meaning to these familiar stories, infusing them with what Greeley terms “the good news of a Great Surprise,” the marvelous revelation of God's love and acceptance of women in a largely male-dominated society. Many of the women are unnamed — the Samaritan woman, the woman at the well, etc. — and some are named, like Mary of Magdala, who may have had a romantic relationship with Jesus. Greeley is certainly a prolific author—he's written some 50 works of fiction and more than 100 works of nonfiction — and this book illustrates why he is so popular. He takes the familiar — in this case, the parables of Jesus — and infuses it with new life and meaning. He leaves behind the dour, solemn proclamations of the church fathers and reminds us that “Jesus delights in surprising those he loves.” In fact, Greeley's observations go far beyond Jesus’ relationships with women, reminding us that God's love extends to even the least of us.
Book #13: Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships with Women
by Fr. Andrew Greeley
Book #14: Godric: A Novel
by Frederick Buechner
If you think a novel about a saint is likely to be a dry and airy sort of thing, think again. Godric was a 12th-century saint—born to Anglo-Saxon parents in Norfolk almost in the year of the Norman invasion (1066 for those of you long unschooled!). He was a peddler and wanderer long before he settled into the life of a hermit in northern England, led there by the famous hermit St. Cuthbert, who told him, “your true nesting place lies farther on, [and] until you reach it, every other place you find will fret you like a cage.”
In Godric Frederick Buechner captures the voice and the times of this saint with a style that recalls the richly alliterative language of Middle English poetry. So too does it recall the beautiful earthiness of that literature, reminding us that this time of deep spirituality was also a time of real flesh-and-blood folk. And in some ways this is the deepest point of this delightful (and at times comic) novel: these people, like those who live among us today, become saints not by leaving the body behind but by finding a way to live more deeply within it. They find a way to turn it to glory.
Book #15: Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
by Immaculée Ilibagiza
Immaculée Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculée’s family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans.
Incredibly, Immaculée survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them.
It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculée discovered the power of prayer, eventually shedding her fear of death and forging a profound and lasting relationship with God. She emerged from her bathroom hideout having discovered the meaning of truly unconditional love—a love so strong she was able seek out and forgive her family’s killers. The triumphant story of this remarkable young woman’s journey through the darkness of genocide will inspire anyone whose life has been touched by fear, suffering, and loss.
