I have a great fondness for the written word and treasure well-written books. I’m back reading Teresa of Avila’s The Book of My Life
Teresa of course is a great teacher and wisdom figure on prayer, and one of the reasons she is so wise on matters of prayer is because she had such a difficult time with it during various periods of her life. Early in the book Teresa notes how certain forms of prayer did absolutely nothing for her.
“I would think about a scene in his life and then try to picture it with my mind’s eye. But … my imagination was so clumsy that no matter how hard I tried to meditate on the Lord’s humanity, I could never quite succeed.” (p 21)
When this happens, the temptation is to think then that one can’t pray or doesn’t know how to pray. But Teresa came to a different conclusion. She tried something different — in fact, she tried something that she was quite fond of: books! In the midst of describing her struggles with praying using the imagination and mental prayer, Teresa writes, “But what I liked best was to read good books.” She goes on to say how reading good books (not just any books) helped her to keep her on track and not spin out of control in prayer or end up discouraged. Such books, writes Teresa, can be an aid in prayer and can anchor us when our prayer is difficult or arid.
“During all that time [of not being able to meditate], I never dared to sit down to pray unless I had a book close at hand…. Books were my companions, my consolation, my shield against the explosion of thoughts. If I didn’t have a book, I would suffer from terrible aridity. The minute I found myself without something to read, my soul would become immediately agitated and my mind would start to wander. But as soon as I started reading, the words acted like bait to lure my soul and my thoughts began to collect themselves again. Sometimes it was enough just to know that I had a book beside me; I didn’t even have to open it. Sometimes I read just a little, sometimes a lot, depending on the mercy of God.” (p 22)
Good books are for Teresa, as they are for me, wonderful spiritual companions. I think you know what one of my favorites to take to prayer is! What about for you? What book is your spiritual companion and why? If not a book, what is your spiritual companion in the sense of what Teresa is saying here?
* * *
Praying with the Sisters podcast is in experimentation mode! We’re trying out an evening time slot and a slightly new format. Join us today at 6 p.m. Central Time (time zone converter). Join us at at http://anunslife.org/live.
Email This Post
Print This Post
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I think books are, indeed, great companions when it comes to praying… Anyway, although I’ve read many spirtual books or books written by saints or saints lifes (and have indeed found them very useful for my prayer), there’s something I NEED to have when praying, the Everyday Liturgy magazine… I also find music good for praying, but it depends on the kind of prayer… Don’t like too much to have music when in Adoration…
Hey, so we are meeting at 6 pm today?? I think I’ll be home at that time… Mass ends arround 7:30, if I rush home I can get to todays live podcast!
Hope I can make it!!
Blessings!
I read Mi Vida to improve my Spanish, but it has meant a lot in my spiritual life. What impressed me was Theresa’s honesty before her sisters and before God. I pray for this grace.
I do a lot of lectio divina and find the writings of Henri Nouwen and Kathleen Norris particularly helpful for prayer. I have also found myself surprised by the prayerful aspects of some other titles that are not necessarily designed as prayer aids–recent favorites are the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a book called Take This Bread by Sara Miles.
I found a copy of Lying Awake at the secon hand book store last week. I am hoping reading it will help and inspire my prayer and spiritual life.
I have never opened a book during prayer, and though an avid reader I take my first love with me to my prayer time, music. I am a classically trained musician and so from very early in life music was my favorite means of expression. It allowed me to escape the not so pleasant parts of my life and be a part of something greater. If I am having difficulty staying focused, which happens more than I’d like, I just play a little Bach in the background. The cello suites are quite lovely played by YoYo Ma. This helps me to relax and stay centered. What books do you like to read besides the works of Teresa of Avila?
I always return to Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. I love the books by Teresa and John of the Cross, but Julian writes with a homey, almost grandmotherly warmth. I love it when she refers to the Lord as unpretentious!
Reading has been a joy for me forever. By the age of ten or eleven I could happily spend the day with my nose in a book – all kinds. Today I find that books come into my hands in answer to prayer. “Dear Lord, this is something I really need help on.” And then, sooner or later, and a lot of the time it is sooner, the help comes along in some wonderful book. I believe that my spiritual reading and my writing on spiritual subjects is prayer. Favorites – Thomas Merton – his corpus is huge and many new things are being written about him al the time. I like to read some of his books over and over again – New Seeds of Contemplation or The Basics of Monastic Spirituality or the new Inner Experience. Another favorite is Michael Casey, Trappist from Australia. Everything he has written is great – Lectio Divina -Fully Human Fully Divine – Strangers to the City, etc. etc. I like Kathleen Norris too. Anyone out there read her book Dakota a Spiritual Geography.
My favourites at the moment are Arthur Nolan and Timothy Radcliffe, both helping me to pray and at times bringing me back to earth.
Sorry, I forgot Joan Chittester. She sustained me with her praying with the psalms in the 80s and 90s and now I only seem to stretch to her NCR entries, but she is always inspiring.
Does anyone know of the book: ‘He and i’ by Gabrielle Bossis?
I find it extraordinary. It is one book I have ‘dipped into’ for many years now, and would feel very lost without it.
Sr Joan OP -
Did you mean Albert Nolan? His work is, I think, exceptional. I have been reading him in tandem with Sr Thea Bowman, Fr Bede Adam, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero and the Bible (I love the beautiful language of the Douay Rheims).
Nolan’s work is providing the framework for my discernment and preparation for my move, in January, to a Catholic Worker house, with a community committed to short/longterm hospitality for refugees from two war-ravaged (primarily) Islamic countries and a deep, joyful involvement in the rich traditional spirituality and ritual and daily life of the Roman Catholic Church, even as the community seeks to engage the institutional Church in its own “examination of conscience” and process of reconciliation with God’s people and world.
I chose this particular Worker community because it will allow me to be in close and frequent contact with the one progressive active/contemplative community that continues to compel me because of its openness and comfort with the possibility that the community, and its members, may be as wrong and only as right as any other community and group of individuals in the Roman Catholic community; that what has been prophetic may no longer be so by the very next stroke of midnight; that a new prophetic voice may cost the last prophets dearly in their lives of human desires and struggles and habits. It suggests to me that this community is willing to risk deep change and sacrifice significantly to maintain continuity of presence and forum for the Holy Spirit through Catholic spiritual life in this increasingly desperate and deteriorating country. I hear it questioning basic assumptions about the way it “lives community” and its vows, trying to throw out its sometimes obsfucating religious jargon, trying to get down to the brass tacks and stark facts of the way they live their lives and WHAT margins their lives beckon the rest of society toward. They are looking at their lives as they are actually factually lived hour to hour, day to day, in response to their awareness that the context for religious life now is American realities that are very different from those of the 70s, 80s and that a huge number of today’s discerners were BORN in the early 1990s (!!!!) in an American world comfortable with “good works” but profoundly adverse to the idea of a spirituality that embraces and celebrates and talks about and practices sacrifice as a paradoxically painful but healing aspect of the Reign of God in this world so wildly and destructively avoidant of the need for overt, concrete sacrifice by any one of us who has more of any thing or resource (and maybe even opportunity) than we need. That is what is missing for me in much of what I encounter in progressive communities, and it is what I admire in this very new generation of Catholics: being formed in a spirituality of the cross and personal sacrifice is not anathema for them. It is not about submission to authority. Sacrifice is an act of love in a world where there **is** enough for everyone (the Earth itself and all creatures included) but most of us do not understand or have a practice of the daily mechanics of the sacrifice required of each of us if each is to gain access to her God-given share. That is what I hear in the voices and see in the actions of these young women who are choosing more traditional Roman Catholic religious communities: I hear a prophetic, joyful, loving voice calling us to a “little way” of personal and communal sacrifice; a prophetic voice that has developed as quickly as the promise of the 60s and 70s has deteriorated and in direct response to that deterioration. It strikes me that the Catholic emphasis on sacrifice – both in our spiritual practice and in our active, communal lives – may never have been so necessary, so revolutionary, so healing, so creative, so prophetic. Nor so difficult because the construct of “sacrifice” has been so politicized that, I think, we tend to respond to the concept of sacrifice with every faculty and resource and language but those of our spirits.
Related is a fabulous article by Laurie Brink OP, “Can we allow a new generation to shape religious life?” (published in the Winter 2007 issue of HORIZON; I found it on the internet last winter).
Her work and Nolan’s, informed by the others I mentioned above, are thrilling to me. A single paragraph of Nolan, combined with a few lines from one of the others, can guide me into a very peaceful and challenging conversation with God.
Jean
Some of the people I turn to for spiritual sustenance are Richard Foster, Edward Hays, Joyce Rupp and Robert Wicks.