By Ronald Rolheiser
DoubleDay/1999/257 pages

Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing is a modern classic.  It has been read and endorsed by clergy and lay people across the Christian world.  Essential reading for those seeking to understand and deepen their practice of Christian spirituality, this book explains the complexion of one’s personal spirituality and how to apply it to our worship, and our day-to-day lives.  This book is for folks with questions about what Christians believe and what it means to actually live life by faith, following the example of Jesus and the Saints.  It unpacks the key ingredients of an attractive, authentic spiritual life.

Rolheiser probes this question: “What is spirituality?”  He writes about the confusion that can surround this subject amid the wide assortment of spiritual beliefs and practices of our day.  With great sensitivity to debates and challenges swirling around the faith-life, he explains the “Nonnegotiable Essentials,” including the importance of community worship, the richness of ritual, the imperatives surrounding social justice, peacemaking, sexuality, the centrality of the Trinity, and more.  The book presents an outline of Christian spirituality that reflects the continuing search for meaning at the heart of the human experience.  Rolheiser writes about the search for love and wholeness in language accessible to all.

Ronald Rolheiser is a Canadian.  He hails from Cactus Lake, Saskatchewan.  He is a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.  He serves as President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas, is author of the several books The Restless Heart, Forgotten Among the Lilies, The Shattered Lantern, Against An Infinite Horizon, and Sacred Fire: A vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity. He is a community-builder, lecturer and writer, and his weekly column appears in more than 90 Catholic publications.   Rolheiser received an honorary doctorate from Fredericton’s St. Thomas University in 2005.  A substantial selection of his articles and reflections are available online at ronrolheiser.com

Selected quotes from Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing:

“Becoming like Jesus is as much as about having a relaxed and joyful heart as it is about believing and doing the right thing, as much about proper energy as about proper truth.”

“In this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. Our deep longings are never really satisfied. What this means, among other things, is that we are not restful creatures who sometimes get restless, fulfilled people who sometimes are dissatisfied, serene people who sometimes experience disquiet. Rather, we are restless people who occasionally find rest, dissatisfied people who occasionally find fulfillment, and disquieted people who occasionally find serenity.”

“Spirituality…is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her. Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicit religious idea, we act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter. What shapes our actions is our spirituality.

“Write a book,” he told me, “that I can give to my adult children to explain why I still believe in God and why I still go to church—and that I can read on days when I am no longer sure why I believe or go to church.”

Gregg Finley

Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

By: N.T. Wright
Harper-Collins / 2014 / 320 pages

N.T. Wright is a widely-read British Bible scholar and retired Anglican bishop. According to Time Magazine, Wright is one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought. He served as Bishop of Durham between 2003 and 2010.  Currently he is Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary’s College, University of St. Andrews in Scotland.   Some commentators have referred to him as a modern C.S. Lewis.

His writing actually opens up the Bible so that it can “speak” into the down-to-earth realities of one’s life. Wright offers fresh perspectives on how to approach Scripture; how readers can be nourished by the Bible day by day.  He presents good reasons to ponder and pray through sections of biblical text. His insights encourage readers to ask important questions about how to go deeper in their faith-journey.

The 12 chapters of this book present a collection of N.T. Wright’s essays and talks — case studies that explore how and why the Bible speaks to some of the most pressing contemporary issues.  There are interesting surprises between the covers of Surprised by Scripture.   Some chapter titles follow:

• Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?
• 9/11, Tsunamis, and the New Problem of Evil
• Idolatry 2.0
• Our Politics Are Too Small

Selected quotes from N.T. Wright’s Surprised By Scripture:

“The question for us, as we learn again and again the lessons of hope for ourselves, is how we can be for the world what Jesus was for Thomas: how we can show to the world the signs of love, how we can reach out our hands in love, wounded though they will be if the love has been true, how we can invite those whose hearts have grown shrunken and shriveled with sorrow and disbelief to come and see what love has done, what love is doing, in our communities, our neighborhoods:”

“science takes things apart to see how they work, but religion puts things together to see what they mean.”

“But from the start the early Christians believed that the resurrection body, though it would certainly be a body in the sense of a physical object, would be a transformed body, a body whose material, created from the old material, would have new properties. That is what Paul means by the “spiritual body”: not a body made out of nonphysical spirit, but a physical body animated by the Spirit, a Spirit-driven body if you like: still what we would call physical but differently animated.”

“The church is not simply a religious body looking for a safe place to do its own thing within a wider political or social world. The church is neither more nor less than people who bear witness, by their very existence and in particular their holiness and their unity (Colossians 3), that Jesus is the world’s true lord, ridiculous or even scandalous though this may seem.”

“Here is the challenge, I believe, for the Christian artist, in whatever sphere: to tell the story of the new world so that people can taste it and want it, even while acknowledging the reality of the desert in which we presently live.”

Gregg Finley