If you attend Spiritual Retreats (and everyone should, at least once a year), or are reading some of the hundreds of books published each year on Spirituality (ditto a few times a year), these writers/titles will be familiar to you: Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Carlo Carretto, Anthony d'Mello, The Cloud of Unknowing, The Philokalia, John of the Cross, David Steindl-Rast, Simone Weil...

You can now add Macrina Wiederkehr. She is a Benedictine Catholic monk (affirming church-as-community rather than church-as-institution), biblical, very prayerful, honest/humble (seeking to get in touch with her inner child), committed to 'creation spirituality', journaling, and is a nature-mystic. She's a 'soft feminist', believing the Vatican has a 'tragic flaw' about denying women leadership roles in the church. But she can get on with life without being too angry - except where gross injustices or 'holy screams' occur.

She's a very creative writer (ever seen 'miracled' as a verb?) and this is a beautiful book. It's to be read and digested slowly, in small daily doses, with lots of contemplative time after each intake. It will nourish your desperation to know more of yourself and more of God.

One morning, at dawn, the sunlight shimmered through a silver maple tree reminding her of Blake's 'tree filled with angels'. Macrina loves trees: she had a tree as 'spiritual director' for a year.

The spiritual life is about being 'at home' - with family/community, friends, church, oneself. It is about affirming the 'Great Little One' that is each of us in God's estimation. It is nourished by reading the Bible via the 'Lectio Divina' method (reading, meditation, prayer, contemplation; or lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio) - desiring to be transformed rather than merely informed, always reading the Scriptures with a heart ready to repent.

Males might find the images somewhat 'feminine' : my retort to that is that a spiritual exploration into the feminine side of you guys won't hurt you one little bit!

Think about these:

# Getting too absorbed in our littleness will cause us to despair. Getting too absorbed in our greatness will cause those around us to despair (p.12)

# A heresy is a truth pushed too far... One of the great lies of our day is that conversion is instant, like fast food. God can zap us and we're saved... Season your conversation with 'praise the Lord' and you're among the saved... (17)

# Two frail moments in the life of Jesus richly bless us: the crib and the cross. His birth was in poverty. His death was also in poverty, outside the walls of Jerusalem, an outcast. These two frail moments became glorious. Our own frail moments can become glorious too (24)

# There is nothing - no thing, no person, no experiences, no thought, no joy or pain - that cannot be harvested and used for nourishment on our journey to God (26)

# When someone criticizes me, even when the criticism is not given in love, I can learn from it. The choice is mine. I can sit in self-pity, licking my wound, or I can ask myself, 'Well what about it? Is there any truth in this?' Sometimes there is much truth in criticism (34)

# A sign on my calendar reads 'Don't talk unless you can improve on silence' (38)

# It has been such a struggle to get the Mary and Martha balanced in my life. Both are so important. They are the 'ora et labora' in the rule of Saint Benedict. Bernard of Clairvaux blesses me further by reminding me that Mary and Martha are sisters and they live in the same house (79)

# I smiled through my tears and prayed, 'My God, if you've kept all my tears, heaven is going to be pretty wet' (80)

# We have only two choices in life: to accept our innate poverty or to be a slave to anxiety (88)

# 'It is not what you are nor what you have been that God sees with his all-merciful eyes, but what you desire to be' (The Cloud of Unknowing) (89)

# 'God, devil and the world all wish to enter me / Of what great lineage my noble heart must be' (Angelus Silesius) (90)

# 'If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world' (C.S.Lewis) (91)

# 'Life is beautiful' (Etty Hillesum, writing in a Nazi concentration camp) (92)

# Saint Benedict tells us to keep death before our eyes. Walk with death as a friend (94)

# I find it distressing... that everyone seems to anxious to know what the _experts_ are saying about God (98)

# 'Prayer fastens the soul to God... When we come to heaven, our prayers shall be waiting for us as part of our delight with endless joyful thanks from God' (Julian of Norwich)... I have stopped praying _for_ people so much. I try to pray _about_ them instead (99)

# G.K.Chesterton's definition of a saint: one who exaggerates what the world neglects (103)

# David Steindl-Rast says that leisure is taking things separate, one by one, and singling them out for grateful consideration... Slow down. Take long looks at everything. Single many things our for grateful consideration... the quiet in me smiled on my noise / the slow in me smiled on my hurry / and my life miracled into a calm on the lake... (109/111)

# Does God excommunicate people for thinking? I do not have it in my heart to imagine that our God would ever say to anyone 'Anathama sit' ('Let it be condemned')... (I do not believe in excommunication. The only way it would be possible to excommunicate someone would be to prevent them from loving). Sometimes I think Rome honors the dead saints and persecutes the living ones... Galileo, Teilhard de Chardin and all those wounded saints whose wisdom was not recognized until they died (120, 129, 125)

# Sign in a friend's kitchen: 'Angels fly because they take themselves lightly' (134)

# Flannery O'Connor suggests that human nature is so faulty it can resist any amount of grace, and most of the time it does. To that truth I will add yet another giving birth to paradox. Human nature is so noble that it has the potential to become divine, and sometimes it does (137)

# The child within is blessing me today (137)

# There's one thing of which I am certain, WE OUGHT NOT DIE UNTIL WE LEARN TO LOVE (141)

# 'When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take that step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen... There will be something solid for us to stand on, or we will be taught to fly' (anon.) (150)

Rowland Croucher.