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 FORGOTTEN AMONG THE LILIES: Leaning to Love Beyond Our Fears, by Ronald Rolheiser, O.M.I. Doubleday.
300 pp. $21.95.
Reviewed by MARK M. WILKINS, a
teacher at St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati,
Ohio.
I STARTED READING this while riding
a charter bus home with 28 noisy students
providing the ambience for my
spiritual reflection. Usually not the best
circumstances for meditative
reading! Yet I found the
book engaging from the
first section.
Father Ronald Rolheiser
is a specialist in systematic
theology and spirituality,
as well as an author. He
writes a regular column in
his local Catholic paper and
is the author of The Holy
Longing and The Restless
Heart, both of which address
the issues of loneliness
and isolation in the modern age.
In this book he takes the next step by
focusing on our unhealthy obsessions
and the origins of them. He writes that
our preoccupations with romance,
material goods or status are linked to
the feeling that, no matter what it is we
have, we are somehow missing out on
what life really offers.
It is difficult to adequately summarize
72 essays and prayers in a brief
review. Father Rolheiser has chosen to
offer guided meditations on restlessness
and obsession, death and loss, passion and patience, God’s love and
human romance, social issues and
prayer, as well as daily life’s obscurity
and monasticism.
The Preface sets the tone for the
whole work. He states that life as experience
is rarely enough for us. In this
culture, people are generally too driven
and dissatisfied to be present to the
life we actually live. We are regularly
reminded that others have what we
don’t have: power, influence, celebrity,
wealth or the lifestyle of the rich and
famous. Furthermore, we also live in
fear of losing what we have or feeling
guilty for enjoying what others don’t
have.
The title of the work comes from St.
John of the Cross’s poem, The Dark
Night of the Soul. That Spanish mystic
shows how our spiritual journey is
meant to end up in a freedom that
allows us to live beyond all
of our obsessions, restlessness,
fear and guilt.
The longing we have for
fulfillment is a hint that we
yearn for God. It is much
easier, however, to fill ourselves
with the tangible and
material rather than with
the mystical. Rolheiser
writes that we have lowered
our sights and trivialized
our longings.
One of the key chapters
for me was “The Martyrdom of Obscurity.”
He writes: “Our lives always seem
too small for us. We sense ourselves as
extraordinary persons living very ordinary
lives. Because of this sense of
obscurity we are seldom satisfied, easeful
and happy with our lives.”
This lack of genuine self-expression
is a real death. Like death, it can be
seen as terminal or paschal. If
inevitable, then bitterness and broken
spirits ensue. If linked to the paschal
mystery of Jesus Christ, we have the
opportunity to enter the hidden life of
Christ and thereby transform our own
lives. Later on, he writes on the monasticism
of daily life, picking up these
themes again.
Surprisingly, the other chapters that
I came back to again were the ones on
passion, love and fantasy. Rolheiser
makes a case that the Church needs to
reclaim the healthy and positive aspects
of passion, love and fantasy as healthy
signs of God’s fire within us. Channeled
prudently and appropriately, they
challenge infidelity, cynicism and lack
of commitment rather than promoting
them.
We are sexual beings with a drive
for love and belonging. In looking for
love, we are looking for home, he says,
a place where we are accepted for who
we are and how we are. This is real intimacy.
A physical, genital relationship is
simply the easiest and quickest way to
experience that, but it only lasts a short
time. Rolheiser has a very positive way
of saying good things about human
sexuality while pointing out that we are
only discovering what is at the surface
of our longings.
I would classify this as a prayer book
because I sense that prayer is where it
comes from and that is where it leads
me. It fits into a busy schedule since the
essays are usually about three or four
pages in length. It often made me stop
to create an interior place of quiet and
solitude.
These essays helped me see again
that being a contemplative or mystic
doesn’t require a change in scenery,
just a change in perspective. God is
present all around and through all
things. I just have to remember to treat
God as something more than a tourist
attraction.
You can order FORGOTTEN AMONG THE LILIES: Learning to Love Beyond Our Fears from St.
Francis Bookshop.
TO SING YOU MUST EXHALE, by
Kathryn Mulderink, O.C.D.S. Lulu
Press (www.lulu.com). 113 pp. $13.95.
Reviewed by JEAN HEIMANN, a freelance
writer, retired psychologist, poet and oblate
with the Congregation of St. John. She is
involved with several ministries in the Diocese
of Peoria.
KATHRYN MULDERINK is a uniquely
Catholic poet who enchants us with
her most intimate thoughts and feelings.
Her poignant, God-inspired words
speak the truth to our hearts. In a way
that no other literary work can, poetry
extends beyond the intellect
and touches the human
heart.
Kathryn’s poetry conveys
the intimate union she
shares with God as a modern
Catholic wife and
mother of seven, and opens
a door that directs us to the
inner chambers of God’s
heart, where the pure truth
of his love exists.
All of the poems in this
book share one golden
thread: They were all composed in the
Lord’s presence, spiritually, or before
the Blessed Sacrament. The reader can
instinctively feel and sense this while
searching for a deeper meaning of
God’s love in the poems, which range
from casual free verse to formal sonnets.
Some are written in a simple manner,
while others are a little more challenging
and are best understood after a
second or third reading. Reading
good poetry requires one to think
deeply and to meditate, as it challenges
the higher reasoning processes. All of
her poems are exciting, “electric” and
cutting-edge, and convey a special message
from God.
Kathryn presents poems written at
different periods in her life. Some were
written when she was an adolescent in
suburban Chicago, others as a high
school teacher, some as a young mother
in the scenic orchard belt of southwest
Michigan, and the most recent ones
as a 30-something homeschooling
mother.
Thus, Kathryn’s poetry touches and
appeals to a wide range of readers—to
those of various chronological ages as
well as those at various stages of spiritual
development and growth—as she
reveals her own experiences and stages
of spiritual growth.
The feminine aspect of Kathryn’s
poems was most appealing to me. A
gentleness, an acute sensitivity to the
Divine and to the sacred, a devotion to
the Blessed Virgin Mary and an emulation
of her sterling virtues, as they
relate to the woman who seeks out
spirituality in today’s world with its
many challenges, are all evident in her
work.
How does Kathryn cope
with these challenges and
reveal how God instructs
her to live in the modern
world as a Catholic woman?
Kathryn’s book of poetry
writes a simple but powerful
truth upon our hearts:
To Sing You Must Exhale is
her signature poem. Just as
the concert soloist begins
a piece by emptying her
lungs and filling them with
fresh air so that her voice fills the concert
hall, the Catholic must do the
same.
Our spiritual journey begins by emptying
ourselves, surrendering our hearts
to God, allowing the Holy Spirit to
enter in and to purify us, accepting all
that he has to give us, and exhaling, letting
our voices sing out what we have
learned through our words, our example,
touching and molding the hearts
and souls of those around us.
This is the heart of Catholic femininity—to nourish others as we have
been fed. This is exactly what Kathryn
accomplishes so successfully in her
book of Catholic poems and this is
exactly why I will continue to read
these precious gems of truth over and
over—they feed my soul.
You can order TO SING YOU MUST EXHALE from St.
Francis Bookshop.
THE SLAUGHTER OF CITIES: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing, by E.
Michael Jones. St. Augustine’s Press.
639 pp. $40.
Reviewed by the REV. LAWRENCE M.
VENTLINE, D.Min., a Catholic priest and
licensed psychotherapist who is currently
on special assignment for the Archdiocese
of Detroit. His latest book is Securing Serenity in Troubling Times: Living a
Day at a Time (Xulon Press).
WHAT DETROIT’S MAYOR ordered in
the mid-’80s was tantamount to ethnic
cleansing through housing policies,
concludes E. Michael Jones. This has
happened in other places.
In a Prologue, 63 chapters, an extensive
bibliography and an index, Jones
documents that clearly
defined ecclesiastical and
corporate elites in Boston,
Philadelphia, Chicago and
Detroit orchestrated federal
housing policy to
destroy the political base
of parishioners of Polish,
Italian, Irish and other ethnic
Americans in these
industrial cities.
Jones, a critic of culture
with a string of books to
his credit, claims that the
WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant)
establishment differs from other ethnic
groups in that it is a ruling and authoritarian
elite. When the mushrooming
influence of ethnic labor unions on
the auto industry became intolerable to
Henry Ford, he called on local black
ministers to recruit unskilled labor from
the South, even though Detroit had
many skilled workers. His new workforce
was more willing to put up with
deplorable living conditions.
Furthermore, Jones argues that the
federal government’s WASP elite used
southern blacks as pawns
in its “psychological warfare
campaign” against
unassimilated white ethnics,
particularly urban
Catholics and their parishes.
Legitimately upset and
perhaps paranoid, Jones
castigates the planning
elite and their patrons in
Washington as he details
the ghastly consequences
of federal planning on urban
neighborhoods. Jones blames federally
coordinated social engineering
for creating today’s ghettos.
Jones says that the federal government
manipulated the housing market,
making homes inexpensive for the
Protestant immigrants from the South
and pressuring local residents to flee to
the suburbs. In fact, Jones documents
that the Federal Housing Authority,
along with the Quakers (the American
Friends Service Committee), made
loans available at low rates in the suburbs
while refusing loans to those same
ethnics to maintain their old neighborhoods.
Father Francis Skalski, pastor of St.
Hyacinth Church in Detroit for
decades, watched his community fade.
He acclaimed this book: “The publisher
is to be applauded for Jones’s outstanding
and spectacular masterpiece.”
In fact, when Immaculate Conception
Parish in Detroit was sold to General
Motors in 1981 and Cardinal John
Dearden announced the parish would
be suppressed, a last-minute offer to
move the church to another location
was rejected by the archdiocese.
Seven months later, Father Joseph
Karaskiewicz, the 59-year-old embattled
former pastor of Immaculate Conception,
died. To express their displeasure
with the Church, some people turned
their backs on the new archbishop,
Edmund Szoka, as he passed by on the
day of Karaskiewicz’s funeral. Father
Skalski called Karaskiewicz someone
“who tried to slow and sway the heavy
hand of corporate, materialistic, economic
objectives, masking themselves
as the common good, while in actuality
it would seem they were serving
the rich.”
Urban renewal efforts in the East and
Midwest from the 1930s through the ’60s get an entirely fresh interpretation
by Jones. He blames intentional plans
that were hardly about civic improvement
(an abject failure in that regard)
and more about ethnic cleansing.
The book’s jacket sums up Jones’s
riveting indictment: “What began as
the World War II intelligence community’s
attempt to solve America’s
‘nationalities problem’ and provide
workers for the nation’s war industries
degenerated by the early postwar period
into full-blown ethnic cleansing.”
This book is a courageous confrontation
with ecclesiastical and corporate
giants by ordinary citizens and
parishioners who found little support
except from their pastors. What is happening
currently with clustering of suburban
and city parishes in the face of
shrinking numbers of clergy might be
similar. The problem that now rotates
around a clergy shortage begs for fresh
imagination and solutions.
You can order THE SLAUGHTER OF CITIES: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing from St. Francis Bookshop.
MONSIGNOR ROMERO: A Bishop for the Third Millennium, edited by
Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C. University of
Notre Dame Press. 128 pp. $22.50.
Reviewed by MICHAEL J. DALEY, a writer
and teacher at St. Xavier High School in
Cincinnati, Ohio. He recently coedited
(with William Madges) Vatican II: Forty
Personal Stories, available through
Twenty-Third Publications.
“THE BLOOD of the martyrs is the seeds
of faith.” This phrase is often used to
describe the martyrdoms and persecutions
the early Church faced. As editor
Father Robert Pelton, professor of theology
at the University of Notre Dame,
makes clear in Monsignor Romero, it can
just as readily be used to speak of the
Church today and one person in particular,
Oscar Romero, the assassinated
archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador.
The book is a collection
of speeches given as part
of an annual lecture series
at the University of Notre
Dame. Its chief purpose
is keeping memory alive.
This memory is not about
Romero’s person, however.
It is more about his commitment:
the Church being
the champion of the poor,
victimized and dispossessed.
As Romero’s assassination
while celebrating Mass
on March 24, 1980, attests, this task
remains unfinished.
Included in this work are the speeches
of notable and distinguished prelates
and priests, human-rights advocates and
Latin American civic leaders. Demonstrating
the breadth and depth of
Romero’s social-justice concerns, the
topics include: leadership; solidarity and
the promotion of awareness of institutional
violence; protection of God-given
human rights; loyalty and commitment
to the institutional Church; awareness
of contemporary martyrs; and the role
of Christian education, especially in the
universities, to promote social justice.
The collection of essays begins with
a brief biography of Romero. In them
we discover a person of deep faith.
Shortly after his appointment as archbishop
in 1977, the social and economic
disparities in El Salvador reached
a boiling point. This is symbolized in
the assassination of Romero’s longtime
friend Jesuit Rutilio Grande.
For the next three years, Romero
would face repeated death threats and
daily denouncements on state-controlled
media for insisting that the Church make
a “preferential option for the poor.” His
prophetic words challenged Salvadoran
society at its very foundation.
Throughout his life and during his
period as archbishop of San Salvador,
Romero took seriously the social-justice
teachings of the Church. Many speak of
his story as one of conversion on behalf
of justice. Romero himself liked to
speak of it as an evolution, his gradual
and growing discipleship in Christ.
Whatever the case may be, he didn’t
allow his office to insulate or exempt
him from the sufferings of his people. He
became one with the countless
victimized and nameless
Salvadorans. Tragically,
in the end, he would suffer
their fate as well.
An important point
brought up in this work
about Romero is that, besides
individual conversion,
there is another form as
important, if not more so.
This is that institutional or
social conversion needs to
take place. So much of the
violence and sin that exist in our lives
today is not done by people individually
but by economic, educational,
social and political institutions built
into society. What got Archbishop
Romero killed wasn’t just a bullet fired
from the gun of a lone assassin, but
also his witness against and challenge
to unjust social structures that existed
in El Salvador (which were supported
by the United States government).
Far from quelling the spirit and hope
of Salvadorans, the assassination of
Archbishop Oscar Romero provided the
inspiration and energy for thousands of
people to demand their God-given
human rights and justice for all.
For those who have yet to be introduced
to this “saint of our time,”
Monsignor Romero is a powerful and substantial
introduction to his person.
For
those who already know him, this book
provides new and interesting perspectives,
from a wide range of people, on
his life and continuing significance.
You can order MONSIGNOR ROMERO: A Bishop for the Third Millennium from St.
Francis Bookshop.
THE ARK: A Pop-up, by Matthew
Reinhart. Simon & Schuster. 12 pp.
$16.95.
Reviewed by SUSAN HINES-BRIGGER, an
assistant editor of this publication, and her
six-year-old daughter, Madison.
IT’S BEEN QUITE A WHILE since I’ve
seen a pop-up book, despite the fact
that I have two young children. So
Matthew Reinhart’s book The Ark promised to be a pleasant trip down
memory lane for this reviewer.
The book tells the tale of Noah’s Ark
with the help of elaborate batik-style
artwork created using actual wood
laminate. Within the main pages are
hidden—I use that word based on my
own experience—several smaller minibooklets
containing text. Fortunately,
my daughter was so enthralled with
the artwork that she didn’t even notice
that the story didn’t make much sense,
thanks to the “hidden” text I completely
skipped over.
Reinhart was the model maker for
the Nickelodeon children’s show Blue’s
Clues and has previously done other
pop-up books, such as The Pop-up Book
of Phobias and its sequel, The Pop-up
Book of Nightmares.
This book is a visual dream for parents
and kids alike. I only wish, given
the intricacies of the artwork, that it
could have been a little easier to read
the story. Placing text behind flaps—some obstructed by the actual popup—made for some challenging and
confusing reading. But with this book,
a picture really is worth a thousand
words. Madison got the story—despite
all of her mom’s mess-ups.
You can order THE ARK: A Pop-up from St. Francis Bookshop.
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