Night’s Bright Darkness by Sally Read, Ignatius Press, £14.50
The story of a person’s conversion is often inspiring, and the poet Sally Read’s account of her own dramatic change of heart and mind is no exception. A staunch atheist, feminist and believer in euthanasia and abortion, the author, who trained as a psychiatric nurse, related that after her father’s death when she was 26, she admitted to herself: “This is hell. I’m in hell.”
It took some time, a longing to write “one true poem”, research for a book on women’s sexual health and many conversations with an exiled Ukrainian priest whom she met in Italy, before the author had a life-changing experience in 2010 which made her desperate to become a Catholic. “After a lifetime of lacking Christ in the Eucharist, I could barely wait another day,” she writes. This was a huge, grace-filled volte-face for someone as prejudiced against the Church as Read admits she was.
In particular, her talks with Fr Gregory Hrynkiw grew out of her curiosity “to know how someone intelligent, someone moral, could belong to such a Church”. Eventually, one night, paralysed in her attempts to write, “The fact of God penetrated me like the fact of my own existence.” Read joins a long and venerable tradition in this experience.
All the obstacles to belief, such as the Church’s “misogyny”, fell away. “Why should I baulk now at a structure – historical, literary, biological and supernatural – that was the ultimate poem?” One senses that Read’s own understanding of poetry found its true bearings within the Church, as she realises it possessed “the mystics, the poets, the doctors of the Church, the saints, the art, the Mass … It was a universe of formal beauty.”
The day of her actual entry into the Church during a Roman winter, on a day when the city had been partly closed down because of terrorist threats, and the occasion of her first Confession are related with a mixture of humour and deep seriousness. What Read grasped (and many cradle or cultural Catholics do not) is that “without the encounter with Christ and the love that this inspires, no true conversion is possible.”
For a writer and poet, the sacramental presence of God in the world “was like gradually regaining my sight and hearing”. This was an ongoing revelation that touched every circumstance: Read’s friendships, her marriage to her loyal but puzzled husband, Fabio, and her poetic vocation. As she writes, “The Church taught what I had instinctively always felt as a writer: the smallness of a life does not diminish it; the brevity of a moment does not reduce its importance; death is not the end.”
A-Z of Spiritual Living by Gerard Bogan, CTS, £2.50
Fr Bogan has arranged this useful booklet alphabetically by spiritual themes. If this seems somewhat forced, the result is not – a series of reflections designed to provoke, jolt, engage and otherwise attract readers’ attention in order to help them to deepen their prayer life.
Chapters include “Asceticism”, “Gratitude”, “Kairos”, “Quietness” and “Upsets”. For “Z” (a difficult letter to devise a suitable word from – “Zen” would hardly be appropriate) he puts “Z to A” and asks: “What comes after the letter Z of the spiritual life?” Fr Bogan’s response is to quote TS Eliot’s lines: “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
Each chapter concludes with a suggestion. For “Ordinariness”, he advises: “Try to live the ordinary things as lovingly as possible.” This is sensible advice, for our lives, including the lives of saints such as Mother Teresa, include much that is mundane, necessary and unglamorous. For “Kairos”, defined as “God’s moment”, he comments: “Be aware of the possibility of God interrupting you.” This is not something, in our highly controlled and busy lives, we would normally think about – but it remains a useful reminder.
Works of Love are Works of Peace: Mother Teresa of Calcutta – a Photographic Record by Michael Collopy, Ignatius Press, £14
Mother Teresa, now canonised, once wrote: “We did not come to be social workers but to belong to Jesus … Our life has no other reason or motivation. This is a point many people do not understand.” Indeed, her critics would be well advised to look at the powerful black and white photographs in this book, put together by a professional photographer who first met her in 1982.
Michael Collopy includes many images of Kalighat, the Sisters’ House for the Dying, where he writes that a sense of peace mingled with the smell of death. Other photos show the Missionaries of Charity running a leprosy centre in India, a medical dispensary in a Mexican slum and an Aids hospice in New York which has witnessed several deathbed conversions among its patients. As Mother Teresa explains: “The complete change in [these men’s] lives” came about “because they have received love by the Sisters … That love, that care, to have somebody who loves them.”
We are reminded, by Mother Teresa’s example, that holiness is simply making God’s love present to those we meet. This book would make an excellent gift for a teenager.
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