A Great Book

Life is exciting these days, and busy. With our children and grandchildren on vacation with us, days are filled with fun and laughter, games and conversations, meals and washing dishes.
Prayer times become prayer moments, when the prayer becomes short and direct as an arrow, “I love You, Godde. Thank you for everything.”
I rarely read fiction; it has been this way for a long time. These days, I am working on two things: Benedict’s latest encyclical and a book I bought years ago when we visited our daughter at Emory University in Atlanta.
Caritas in veritate, Love in truth, is about as exciting as a U.N. document by its style and its format. In fact, it is as if whole parts of the document had been lifted out of U.N. working papers. Rome and the U.N. have one point in common: they write for themselves rather than for the rest of the world, as if the rest of the world were never going to read their output anyway.
I am a third of the way. Like Darcy says in Pride and Prejudice, “I will conquer this.” Don’t hold your breath anyway: the document is in the image of its author — very Theology from Above, knowledgeable while sounding a bit pedantic and pretentious (as if the reader might not quite be able to understand the document for lack of formation or intelligence). Our pope should participate in a Cursillo: it would improve his style. He would learn to let the Spirit do the writing.
The book is To Pray and to Love: Conversations on Prayer with the Early Church, written by Prof. Roberta C. Bondi, and published in 1991... The date means that it has been on my bookshelves pretty much all this time and it is only now that I have opened it. But opening the book is like opening the Ark of the Covenant in an Indiana Jones movie: a magnificent light comes out of it and penetrates everything it touches.
I would like just to give you a few excerpts to share with you the joy I experience as I read this book a couple of pages at night before I fall asleep. They are taken from chapter 2, Living into the Image of God[de].
“Love is the final goal of the life of prayer, and loving and learning how to love are the daily work and pleasure of prayer.”
“The early Church believed that God[de]’s love for us as human beings precedes, enables, and gives meaning to all human love and prayer.”
“To God[de], we are lovable and valuable, however damaged we may be... It is a love that does not depend upon our “being good”.”
“Out of the tender and persistent love Godde has for us, each of us has been given God[de]’s own image that can never be completely lost.”
“The image of God[de]’s that is in us is the part of ourselves that never stops desiring to move toward love.”
“[B]ecause of the persistent presence of the image of God[de], there is a fundamental goodness in every human being that always connects us to God[de] and to each other as well.”
“The best theology of the early church emphatically rejects ... self-hatred. In fact in one of his letters to the monks, Anthony says:
“[The one} who can love himself [or herself], loves all.”
Conversely, an attitude of self-contempt or self-hatred is horribly destructive of our ability to love and to pray.”
It is a book which I would like to read straight through to find out how it ends, then pick it up again and again until my very bones remember it word for word. It makes me want fall on my knees and kiss the earth, while saying Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.
I do believe change comes in one’s life when one feels loved. Nothing can beat feeling loved by Godde. The day our pastors understand this, the world will change.
But then, maybe our pastors need us to tell them that if Godde can love us, She undoubtedly loves them as well. Then, they too will weep and bless Godde’s name.
In Christ’s name.

Illustration: Desert Mothers,
Journey with Jesus