MEETINGS

Chapter meetings are now being held at 31 Stiles Ave, Rivervale. Meetings

 commence at 2.00pm prompt.

June –      There will be no regular Chapter meeting held this month. The annual

                 retreat for oblates at  New Norcia will take place at this time instead.

                The retreat will be on Holy Trinity weekend  8,9 & 10 June.        

July  -      Regular Chapter meeting 15 July – Rule No.67.

August   - Regular Chapter meeting 19 August - Rule No.68.

 

PRAYER LIST

Please remember all our sick oblates, - In particular Tom Gollop.

Please also remember to pray for our parent community in New Norcia.

Would oblates please include Rhod Metcalf in their prayers, as he has expressed need of such spiritual assistance at this present time.

ITEMS OF INTEREST

We had a good roll up of people, oblates and enquirers, seventeen in number, at our March meeting during which we welcomed our new Spiritual Director, Fr. Anthony. Father gave us a brief history of his life to date including a summary of his recent overseas trip. We look forward to a good ongoing relationship with him and will appreciate the spiritual guidance he can give us.

Apologies to anyone who turned up for our April meeting which was listed in our last newsletter, but which fell on Easter Sunday, an error from the editor who was duly castigated. Hopefully any who were not at our March meeting were contacted about this change.

Our annual retreat at New Norcia is almost upon us, to be held on Trinity Sunday weekend 8,9 & 10 June. This will be a special occasion, as we will have two or more enquirers being received as Novices and two Novices taking their final oblation.

A request has been made for the donation of a tape recorder/radio for a good cause, if someone has one surplus to their requirements. (please contact the editor).

Oblates may be interested in attending the 10^th. Annual New Norcia Studies Day; entitled “Two Centenaries in One” Bishop Salvado & Federation. This will be held on Saturday 7 July 2001 at St. Ildephonsus College, New Norcia.

Bishop Salvado died on 29 December 1900, on the eve of Australia’s Federation. Hailed as the greatest friend the Aborigines ever had by some, condemned as a greedy land-grabber by others, Rosendo Salvado was certainly a towering figure in Western Australian history. This day looks at Salvado’s contribution to society, especially his central work with Aborigine people. Also a look at New Norcia in relation to Federation. Did the birth pangs of a nation have any impact on a Spanish mission in the wilds of the Western Australian bush? In addition a report on the 18 restoration projects currently in progress across New Norcia, thanks to the Commonwealth’s $1.8M Centenary of Federation grant.

Cost: $30 per person or $25 student concession. Includes morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea. Registration at 10.00am, closing at 4.00pm.

Speakers: Dr. Anna Haebich, Prof Katharine Massam, Prof Geoffrey Bolton, Rev Dr. John Smith, George Russo, Robin Campbell, Dr. Ingrid van Bremen and Daniel O’Connor.

FAITH FORMATION

Stability

The vow of stability is the distinctive monastic vow. Unlike the non monastic orders which focus on external work of some kind, the monastic orders have no specific aim. They are communities of prayer and in this sense stability focuses on the community life of the monastic family. It is a special merit of St. Benedict and one of his great contributions to monastic life, that he made stability so important. Benedict wanted to form a community of faith, bound by mutual respect and solidarity, therefore stability is never defined simply in terms of being fixed in a place.

Stability of the heart is the term that more clearly defines the subject matter. It seeks to avoid the restlessness of mind and heart, which in these our times seem to thirst for new experiences and the allure of worldly life. With these pursuits, life becomes superficial, an unceasing search for new and exciting adventures.

Clearly it is our free choice to associate with the values of the Benedictine life, which include constant striving to respond to God’s call, poverty of spirit and obedience to the movements of the Holy Spirit. These values make stability of the heart possible. The sense of purpose, of guided meaning in life, is the first fruit of stability. Our commitments do not exempt us from temptation, to think so would be naïve. However we have a constant goal and light to guide us. Very importantly, when we make our oblation in this monastic way of life, we acquire the right to call on the support and love of our community. Oblates work out their personal salvation in the company of fellow travellers.

Benedict constantly encourages us to remain stable in the love of our community and faithful to the challenges and opportunities it offers. As a result, he promises a freedom of mind and heart that is a delicious foretaste of the joys of the heavenly life. It is a strange paradox indeed; by the discipline of stability of the heart, the finest fruit will be gathered – freedom. But it is so.

Stability – Perseverance in the crucible.    A Carthusian perspective

‘The monk who continues faithfully in his cell and lets himself be moulded by it, will gradually find that his whole life tends to become one continual prayer. But he cannot attain to this repose except at the cost of stern battle; both by living austerely in fidelity to the law of the Cross and willingly accepting tribulations by which God will try him as gold in the furnace. In this way, having been cleansed in the night of patience and having been consoled and sustained by assiduous meditation of the scriptures and having been led by the Holy Spirit into the depths of his own soul, he is now ready, not only to serve God, but even to cleave to Him in love.’  Carthusian Statutes 3.2

Let us now look more closely at perseverance and this work of purification, which we find has two aspects, one active and the other passive.

Active  The active purification is that which we undertake on our own initiative, following Christ in fidelity and conforming ourselves to Him; poor, chaste, obedient and sharing in His suffering for the love of our brothers.

God gave us our senses and they are therefore good, for our senses are the windows of the soul. Also pleasure is necessary to life. Our senses are a powerful asset, provided they are kept in their right place and subject to our mind and will. Otherwise they can be a blind force and destructive of us personally. In actual fact self-discipline is necessary in order to bring our sensitive life into harmony with the intellectual and spiritual life and to transform our sensual appetites into spiritual desires. This cannot be achieved without a certain experience of deprivation. Therein lies the spiritual value of fasting and temperance and it is the price to be paid for basic human freedom. Self-assertion is also a good thing, but we are inclined to put self at the centre of everything and to see everything as revolving around ourselves. In short we are born self centred and superficial. To put Christ at the centre of everything, to see everything, including ourselves, in relation to Him, to love and act in the light of this perspective, involves a death to self and a deep transformation of our heart. It is always a question of passing from disordered self-love to the love of God. Chastity bears directly on the purification of our affections by easing the passage from a narcissistic love of self and self-centred love of someone else, to a love that is a gift of self to someone else and God. All this applies to the spiritual man in general. In addition, our prayers, solitude, silence, lectio, focussing on the Lord, trying to remain recollected – all these little by little help to purify the heart.

Sooner or later however, we begin to realise that what we can achieve by ourselves is limited, even with the help of grace. As a result, our will remains weak and inconstant, easily seduced by outward goods, by our imagination and unable of itself to break free completely from the bonds of self love. Despite everything we are our own masters and even our spiritual progress can be an additional possession and can foster a subtle complacency and pride.

How then is Christ’s life in us to be released?

Passive It can only be released by the action of God Himself. All that is asked of us is our ‘yes’ to this action, our free consent. This is the passive purification, the ‘visits of the Lord’. Like Peter, each of us will hear addressed to himself, sooner or later, the words of Christ indicating the conditions of all spiritual fruitfulness: ‘somebody else will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go’ (Jn21:19). This is how the Lord frees us from ourselves and centres us on His will and His love.

We should not think of the active and passive as being two separate periods of time, for the Lord is directly at work on our souls from the outset. Nevertheless, it is usual for the active purification to be predominant in the first stages of the spiritual life and the passive purification later.

The task is to have patience and perseverance in all situations that God places us in. The people God places around us, the place, the time, health or sickness, the run of events – all these can mould and form us, either oppressing or lifting up, making us rebellious or sanctifying us. The essential thing here is to recognise the will of God at work, to accept it with the

suppleness of the reed blown by the wind, not being bound up by our own wisdom but letting ourselves be moulded by the all powerful hands of the Creator.

This is easy to say and hard indeed to live, but patience and perseverance are forms of passivity and essential components of this act of stability.. They are the fruit of great force and great faith. It is not a resignation but in fact a deliberate embracing of a dearly loved will; an act of love all the purer in that it has been done on earth as it is in heaven, Father, Your will not mine.

Christ saw His executioners as agents of His Father’s will. We in our turn must learn to see this same will, this same love, in all the circumstances, pleasant or unpleasant, that surround our life.

To stand firm however, in certain painful circumstances can demand much courage; the long night of waiting, the loneliness of not being understood, unjust treatment, poor health, personal defects etc. We have to know how to stand firm in pure faith when we seem to be only weakness, seem to be only sin. We have to consent in advance to all that, to the desert of the desert. We have to desire the purity which only suffering can teach.

Those who do not know how to persevere, to bring to completion that which they have begun will never achieve anything worthwhile in their lives.

Let us take all this and construct our house. Let us build on what is solid; on Christ. There is no other foundation. If we are to progress, step by step, and come nearer to God, we need a force within us to keep us unswervingly directed towards Him.

This then is what stability is all about and we must not imagine that it is some sort of immobility or unchanging rigidity. It is a human attitude, a living fidelity, a manifestation of life. We have an example of stability in the seed cast into the ground, where it appears to die, decompose and struggle with all kinds of obstacles, which actually help it to transform and become victorious, a force which grows and develops according to the laws of nature and eventually bears fruit.

The closing few lines of the prologue in RB sum up the thoughts above. ‘But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run in the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love. Never swerving from His instructions, then, but faithfully observing His teaching in the monastery until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in His kingdom. Amen.’

A Message from our Abbot

Taken from Abbot Placid’s conference to the community on 6th February 2001: a version adapted for distribution to the oblates of New Norcia. 

Admission to probation or to oblation

In a way it could be true to say that what the oblates of New Norcia would really like would be to be monks of our community, but that is not possible because of your other obligations and circumstances. So we establish the system of oblation, to help you realise your desires as it were conditionally.

On the other hand, we wouldn’t be proceeding at all unless there were an element of unconditional intention on your part and ours. Subject to the conditions of your state of life and your personal circumstances, you want to give yourself, to offer yourself, entirely to God, to make a total oblation of your life to Him. That’s what we mean by wanting to be a monk, or a novice, or an oblate. In most cases it is something you have been trying to do as best you could in your circumstances, for a very long time. On our part too, we don’t play at being monks, at celebrating monastic professions or clothings of novices, or at encouraging people to take on the responsibility of becoming secular oblates of our community. These are serious matters and we take our time over making up our minds to proceed with them. We want our decision to be as full and final and unconditional as we can make it

Because we are human beings, inevitably every step we take must be conditional.  We are conditioned by many things that have happened in our personal and collective pasts.  We know that our future is wholly conditional.  What happens next week depends on what happens between now and then.  We are at the mercy of all kinds of present forces – physical forces like atmospheric pressure and the availability of a water supply, psychological forces like a certain level of self-awareness and self-determination on the one hand and the support of social interaction on the other hand and of course spiritual forces; our very existence and our desire for God are conditional on God’s desire to share His being with us.

His unconditional being.  His happiness is unlimited, and he wants us to share it, infinitely.  And our longing for it is unlimited.  God does not depend on anything else for His happiness.  And we do not seek to share it for the sake of any other goal.  “We mean himself, and none of his goods,” says the Cloud of Unknowing (ch 3).  “What else have I in heaven but you, and apart from you I want nothing on earth,” says Psalm 72 (v.25).

Oblates of New Norcia initially go through two ceremonies, of enrolment as a novice, and of final oblation; and then you renew your oblation each year.  Basically what you are saying in all these ceremonies is simply this: God is what I want, and it seems that He wants me in association with the monastic community of New Norcia.  You make this profession in this formula: ‘I offer myself to almighty God through the Blessed Virgin Mary and our holy father Benedict as an  oblate

of Holy Trinity Abbey, New Norcia, and I promise before God and all the saints the reformation of my life by following the Rule of our holy father Benedict in so far as my state of life permits’. The reformation of one’s life, conversatio morum, is the one promise that secular oblates can make and keep as well as, and better than, monks can.  Stability and obedience are not possible for you in the way they are for monks, and in most or even all cases, not desirable either in the way they are for monks.  But conversatio, major change, reformation: that’s very possible and highly desirable for all of us, every day, and monks and oblates alike are genuine to the extent that they want it, every day.

 I’ve talked a fair amount about what you are trying to do, and what we are trying to do in this series of ceremonies, and it is good that we should think hard about that.  But very much more important than what we think we’re doing is what God thinks He’s doing.  The other day at the end of a particularly distracted prayer time, I found myself asking what I had been

doing, and what I had accomplished in that very unsatisfactory half hour?  Nothing, seemed to be the right answer.  But then the thought presented itself to me, Well, you silly goat, it doesn’t matter what you were doing or what you accomplished.  The right question is - What has God been doing for the last half hour? 

In monastic life as in prayer, a great part of our job is not to be doing things, but to be stepping back and allowing God to do what He wants, - what He is doing anyway?  Our job is just to let that happen to us.  If we set ourselves to achieve a certain measure of change for the better every day, a certain level of conversatio morum, we’ll drive ourselves and our brethren mad.  If we forget ourselves daily  and many times a day in private prayer and in community prayer, in work and service and lectio and recreation, in listening to God and to our brethren, then God can have a whale of a time bringing about an immense amount of conversatio in our mores.

St John of the Cross was not a Benedictine monk, as my novice-master used to remind me. But novice masters to the contrary notwithstanding, John of the Cross was a master in the life of prayer, and one particularly experienced in, and sensitive to, times of change, of conversatio, in the development of prayer. You make a quite significant change in your life when you become an oblate, and we monks make one too in the relationships of our monastic community.  I think John of the Cross has something to tell both you and us about the frame of mind in which we should be making this change.

If the change is of God, then let us not try to direct it or to control it ourselves.  When God is at work, taking over our lives, “this soul must be quite annihilated in its natural operations, disencumbered, at ease, quiet, peaceful, serene ...” (Living Flame of Love,3.34. 2^nd  redaction). Let us not think too hard about what we’re doing on these occasions. Let our minds and hearts wander to what God is doing.  He can do it most effectively if we are at ease, quiet, at peace, just letting Him do whatever He wants, today, tomorrow, all our life long, for all eternity. These events are just ceremonies.  But what God is up to in these ceremonies is infinite reality.

I HAVE A DREAM

Taken from ‘The Oblate’ newsletter April 1964, published by the monks of

 St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville. Minnesota.

We thought the oblates may be interested in re- reading the address by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King given at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC on 28 August, 1963.

It would appear that these words are just as applicable today in Australia as we look at some of the divisions in our ethnic and religious cultures.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self- evident that all men were created equal.

I have a dream that one day in the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream that one day little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain made low, the rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all shall see it together.

This is our faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning: ‘My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside let freedom ring.’

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring. From the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, let freedom ring. From the mighty mountains of New York, let freedom ring. From the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, let freedom ring. From the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado, let freedom ring. From the curvaceous slopes of California let freedom ring. But not only that: let freedom ring from the stone mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside let freedom ring.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last, free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last.’

• Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on 4 April 1968 in Memphis. Tennessee.

HAPPINESS

Taken from ‘Searching for God’ by Cardinal Basil Hume.

In what does happiness consist? It consists in wanting things and having those wants satisfied. What is this but to say that happiness consists in loving and being loved! Complete happiness – that for which we were made and the only one that can satisfy – consists therefore, in loving God and being loved by God. The main problem of Christians and others, it often seems to me, is not so much that they do not love God or do not want to love God or, in trying to love God, are conscious of not being successful. The problem consists much more in the fact that we do not allow God to love us. Somehow or other we do not face up to the demands made upon us as a result of realising the extent and intensity of God’s love for us. Again, many of us have had a faulty upbringing in the things of God – the emphasis, perhaps, put too much on the punitive, disciplinarian aspects of God and not on His love. The motive power of our spiritual life, early on, was fear rather than love. Moreover, we fail to allow ourselves to be loved; as a result of ignorance we have not thought sufficiently about God’s love. Yet the key to the spiritual life, the authentic beginning, is the realisation of God’s love for us. Love calls love. Abyssus abyssum invocat.

It is a matter of common experience that we dislike people who dislike us. The converse is true – we like those who like us. Have you ever found yourself instinctively disliking someone until the day you discovered that he or she rather liked you? Then your attitude begins to change. There are people too, whom you hold perhaps in contempt and then you discover that they admire you and you begin to find things in them which you admire. So when God’s love becomes a reality in our minds, then it begins to become a fact in our lives. Then comes our response. It is explicit in St. John’s Gospel: ‘In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the expiation for our sins.

Let us think about the nature of God’s love. These are simple, elementary truths; but for all their simplicity they call for constant thought. Remember that love is a primary reality; before it is a human fact Love exists in God. Remember that we love people because they are there but with God it is the other way around; because He loves them, they are there. This is an important truth, because it means there is something lovable in all that has been created. It means there is something lovable in every person; if it were not so, that person would not have been created. It is our task to look for whatever is lovable in others.

Again, remember that divine love is the prototype of human love and so we should have the same attitude towards others as God has towards each one of us. We have to love others because God loves them and finds them lovable. It is well to keep in mind; ‘I would not be here unless God loved me’. To recognise His love is the starting point of my response. We cannot whip ourselves up to love God as a kind of moral exercise. We have to allow ourselves to be gripped by the thought of His love for us; then inevitably, we want to respond. I hope this is not too ‘unclassical’ a reflection on love. I have never been impressed by the various distinctions about love made by the classical philosophers.

Loving is essentially an outpouring, a giving, a communication. Nowhere is this more fully realised than in God. Love is the beginning, therefore, of the whole spiritual life, the beginning of the whole economy of grace.

Let us consider divine love as we see it in our Lord. ‘The Word became flesh’ translates divine realities into human terms. In the reactions of our Lord and in His activities we see, human-wise, the divine reaction and attitude; we could not have understood these truths except in terms intelligible to man and so in the Son of God made flesh. Study the attitude of our Lord towards people. See the strength of divine love.

When you feel depressed, when life seems not worth living, when everything gets you down, read in the fifteenth chapter of St. Luke the stories of the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep. Observe the divine reaction – the stimulant to provide us with the right response.

So our happiness must consist in loving God and being loved by Him. If we fail to respond, it is because we are sometimes afraid of the demands He may make. But it is the law of our being that we should want to be happy and again, the law of our being that we should want to love God. God’s love is there for us. When our Lord took up the words of God the Father that the first commandment was to ‘love the Lord your God with your whole heart and the second like unto this, to love your neighbour as yourself’, He was telling us what in fact is this very law of our being – the only thing that could make sense of life and so the only thing that can ultimately bring us happiness.

St. Thomas More and the Benedictine Idea

By Rosemary Rendel taken from ‘The Chapter’1993

As oblates, we ought to have a special affection for Thomas More because he was one of us, though one step higher up. He was a confrater of St. Augustine’s Benedictine Monastery just outside Canterbury, as was his father.

The experts seem to think that, at that date, being on the monastery’s confrater list was only a formal thank you for donations or other support to the house, but I am not sure they are right. When you realise how closely Thomas More followed the spirit of St. Benedict, it could well be that he carried out the normal obligations expected of a confrater whatever they may have been. But we do know at what period of his life this was.

Thomas More spent two years or so in Cardinal Morton’s household, as a boy page. Morton as Archbishop of Canterbury had close connections with both St. Augustine’s Monastery and with Christ’s College, Oxford (the predecessor to Wolsey’s Christchurch) where Thomas More went for about a year between the ages of fourteen and sixteen.

In his early youth, More was much attracted to the Greyfriars, but when he went back to London from Oxford to start his legal studies, he decided to live at the London Charterhouse, which he did for four years, carrying on his legal training and commuting to work from there.

Because of Erasmus’s famous remark that Thomas More told him that he would rather be a ‘chaste husband than a bad priest’, many people think he went to the Carthusians to see if he could become a monk but felt too strongly drawn to marriage. However, just as many people think that when he went to the Charterhouse he already knew that he was going to be a lawyer and the head of a family, but he wanted to acquire an absolutely disciplined pattern of prayer, asceticism and spiritual priorities that would stay with him however busy his professional life.

Bernard Basset SJ (whose life of Thomas More, Born for Friendship, is one of the best) says we must recognise in Thomas More ‘a deep and genuine desire for the austere and solitary life of study and prayer’ if we are to understand him. Although he longed for that, I often think to myself that knowing his father would have wanted him to found a family and put the More’s on the map, as it were (he was the eldest son), he would have gone along with that unless he felt an absolutely compelling vocation to be a monk. E E Reynolds thinks that Erasmus’s remark is more accurately translated as ‘a faithful husband, rather than an indifferent priest’ and this seems more in character with Thomas More’s known humility and diffidence as a young man. However, here lies the real innovation that Thomas More gives us. He shows us a lay life lived right in the centre of the world and wholly obedient to the state of life in which he found himself, but with prayer and the study of the scriptures as its heart and its support. This was quite new in the Church.

In addition, he carried out the Benedictine virtue of hospitality in an astonishingly complete way, gathering together an extended family of which he was both the centre and the head. To realise how busy he was, one has only to read his letter to Peter Giles: ‘..my other cares did leave me almost less than no leisure. While I spend almost all day away from home (on law matters), I leave to myself no time. For when I come home, I must commune with my wife, chat with my children and talk with my servants. Which things I reckon among business, for as much as they must of necessity be done, unless a man will be a stranger in his own house.’

That pretty well describes modern life for most people! That isn’t even including the many friends who crowded to his house and with whom he corresponded. We are rather overwhelmed by it ourselves, but Thomas More had the stamina that holiness gives to the saints! He spent four hours in prayer and study in the early hours, whenever possible.

Perhaps one could go further and say that his wonderful gift for friendship which drew so many people to him arose out of Benedictine ‘conversion of manners’, for I do not think you could say that Thomas More was naturally gregarious or affable as a young man.

The other fascinating thing about him is that each century finds something new in him that provides a model for current problems. People are not now quite so interested in his death for the Papacy and for the unity of the Church. They are immensely interested instead in his ideas on education and the way in which he taught his children and his wards in a domestic school at home.

He was a natural European as well as, essentially, a very English Englishman, known throughout Europe for his absolute integrity and it has been suggested that he might be named as patron of statesmen! Professor Brooks of Cambridge in last year’s Thomas More lecture at Chelsea Old Church, said he thought Thomas More would be most important in the future for ecumenical progress. Not many people, least of all Anglicans I think, know that in 1984, the Anglican Church put Thomas More into their liturgical calendar with a commemorative day on 6 July, the date of his martyrdom. But there is no doubt that it will gradually work through to a general consciousness.

BOOK REVIEW

Currently available to oblates from the Chapter library.

Towards God.

by Michael Casey, OCSO.

A new edition of a modern classic on the Western Contemplative Tradition.

Michael Casey is emerging as one of the most significant voices in Christian spirituality today. In Towards God we have an exceptionally good guide to the ways of contemplative prayer. The approach is altogether simple and sound – rooted in Scripture, centred in liturgy, attentive to tradition, informed by theology and grounded in experience.

Michael Downey, Editor – The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality.

Towards God has established itself as a leading guide to contemplative spirituality. This erudite but thoroughly approachable introduction to the fertile Western tradition of prayer is available now in a revised and expanded edition.

In clear and often delightful prose, Michael Casey brings out the personal techniques and practicalities involved in the life dedicated to prayerfulness. The freshness of his language reinforces the basic premise of Towards God – that spiritual union with God must be lived, not merely be an object of detached study. Michael Casey grounds himself in the perennial wisdom of the Fathers of the Western Church. However Towards God is not simply a historical study of the Fathers but rather an inspiring demonstration of how their writings speak to today’s spiritual seekers.

Michael Casey explores the nature of prayer, the conditions necessary for its authenticity, the efforts needed to practice it and the value of it for our lives. All this Casey deals with in a personal way, allowing the reader to accompany him on his own quest for God. In doing so he gives us not a dry theoretical treatise, but a rich and warmly human insight into the great Western tradition of contemplative prayer.

Ross Collins OCD. Author – The Way of the Christian Mystics: John of the Cross.

 

Recommended Oblate

daily reading. Gospel &

July 2001

Gospel                     RB

1  Lk9:51-62           24

2  Mt8:18-22           25

3  Jn20:24-29          26

4  Mt8:28-34           27

5  Mt9:1-8               28

6  Mt9:9-13             29

7  Mt9:14-17           30

8  Lk10:1-12,17-20 

                                31:1-12

9  Mt6:18-26           31:13-19

10 Mt9:32-38          32

11 Mt10:1-7            33

12 Mt10:7-15          34

13 Mt10:16-23        35:1-11

14 Mt10:24-38        35:12-18

15 Lk10:25-37        36

16 Mk10:34-11:1    37

17 Mk11:20-24       38

18 Mt11:25-27        39

19 Mt11:28-30        40

20 Mt12:1-8            41

21 Mt12:14-21        42

22 Lk10:38-42        43:1-12

23 Mk12:38-42       43:13-19

24 Mt12:46-50        44

25 Mt20:20-28        45

26 Mt13:10-17        46

27 Mt13:18-23        47

28 Mt13:24-30        48:1-9

29 Lk11:1-13          48:10-21

30 Mt13:31-35        48:22-25