3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must for your Lenten journey!, February 15, 2012
This review is from: Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit (Ave Maria Press) (Paperback)
I sat down to read Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit, by Paula Huston, with the intention of just reading the first section. Then I decided I could read the first couple of sections.
And then I read the whole book.
In my defense, I had a whole evening before me and I needed to get the review written for the Patheos Book Club. What I found with this book, though, was much different than what I expected.
I don't know what, exactly, I expected, but I'm sure it had to do with preaching and a feeling of insignificance at the end. I was excited at the premise and what the book jacket promised, but maybe a little sure that I would not be able to approach Lent using this book as an actual resource.
"It will be good for someone, though," I thought, "and I can surely read it and see what I have to look forward to."
(Negative much?)
I was gloriously, wonderfully WRONG. I found myself reading, shaking my head, and looking forward to Lent, when I can dig in.
Will I fail? Yeah, probably. I do every year. In the failure is the kernel I need from Lent, I think, and success isn't usually about what I plan, but about what graces I allow God to work.
Each day of Lent has a task, with a reflection by the author from her own experience, and then an brief description of the task or practice for the day.
Throughout the book, you get to know Paula Huston as your guide, someone walking beside you and encouraging you, even as she doesn't settle for less than what you can at least try to do. She's gentle, but tough. She weaves humor in with what I can only call teaching: she makes the Desert Fathers and Mothers an accessible crew, even for a busy mom in the Midwest.
Not only will I be embracing this book to the best of my ability this Lent, but I encourage you to do the same. It's not too much, but the seed it will plant and tend during Lent, I believe, will grow into habits that make me a better Christian.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book for Lent..., February 15, 2012
This review is from: Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit (Ave Maria Press) (Paperback)
In the useful book on Lenten practice, where quiet and silence, even meditation is recommended and outlined as practice for the Season, author of "simplifying THE SOUL: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit." Paula Huston, again gives readers an excellent opportunity for the bettering and continuing their work of Church life.
Another in a series of well-done books, which include, "By Way of Grace," and Following Jesus into Radical Loving," as another in her few number of books in the religious realm, one of the works received a starred review from "Publishers Weekly." That was the one she authored titled "The Holy Way," which is recommended for reading, too, by this Religion Writer.
Published by Ava Maria Press in Notre Dame, Indiana, my review copy arrived in time for the 2012 year, and a pretty paperback for Lent/Spirituality it is-- besides the readable and attractive type and design, it is a good size for carrying around. City people can even bring it with them on a bus or transit of any kind, if you don't mind others seeing you are reading something religious. Should those others even notice, let alone care--though someone might get curious. It is good enough for curiosity, too; for looking through it at a bookstore, online, or even when catching someone at an involved reading of the work, the curious will find gems of practice and observance like:
Today, consciously avoid looking at or listening to any advertising, whether it is on the Internet, in magazines, on the radio, or on TV. The easiest way to do this is to keep all these devices turned off, but if you have to use one of them, pray first for the ability to recognize, then avoid, any ads that pop up. Pray also for insight into your own susceptibility to constant advertising. Are you ever overwhelmed by the urge to go shopping? Do you find it comforting to spend money, even money you don't have? Do you find yourself judging your own appearance on the basis of people you see in ads?
No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. . . . What is of human esteem is an abomination in the sight of God. (Lk 16:13, 15)
That makes good sense, and here the observant Christian is going to look at some practice for a week, as this example above tells us on page 24, both to give something up of our living and lives, and create something to do in the light of Christ and one's faith so as to come to better preparation for Easter and relationship with God. As a means of relationship with God, and we are alive for good reason to be in relationship with God, and to celebrate and prepare for the promise of Easter in this life as Christians, there is little doubt that with this kind of Lent anyone who uses "simplifying THE SOUL" by Paula Huston will come away a little more uplifted in their penitential and renewing work. High praise, but this book is just what the cover blurb by Phyllis Tickle, author of "The Great Emergence" declares it as being: "The most practical work I have ever seen on Lenten practices."
Allow this writer to stop a moment and say the author of the book writes well. Enough said there. She has organized the book into useful and somewhat thoughtful parts to lead and prepare the reader for the Season of reflection, which this Season is as well as other things. Does not this book renew us in its promise and offering to a new Lent? Some of us need this kind of thing.
Here are the few chapter headings in the book: beginnings: simplifying space; first week of lent: simplifying the use of money; second week of lent: simplifying the care of the body; third week of lent: simplifying the mind; fourth week of lent: simplifying the schedule; fifth week of lent: simplifying relationships.
I have always believed and liked the hymn, "Tis a Gift to be Simple," and here is an opportunity to turn, turn, turn.
The writer, Paula Huston, has given us a slice of her life as testimony and insight along the way, as this excerpt from page 25 demonstrates:
Here in the Chapter titled first week of lent: Simplifying the Use of Money, under the subhead, Wednesday: Today, Walk to the Store Instead of Driving, she writes...
MEDITATION: Some years after we got married, I was awarded a writer's travel grant that allowed us to take the family to Europe. But even a very generous grant could not cover six people traveling in style. So we compromised; we'd rent a small van, we'd haul tents, we'd sleep in campgrounds every night, and we'd do all our own cooking. This way, we could stretch a week's worth of wandering into five. By the time we landed in Amsterdam, we'd added our former Dutch exchange student and my recently widowed mom to the passenger list, so every seat in our eight-passenger van was filled. Since the majority of the crew were teenagers, pulling together our daily food supplies was a top priority. Each morning after breakfast, we'd hike from the campground to a bakery, a farmer's market, and a grocery store and buy everything we needed for the next twenty four hours. Though our menus were simple--baguettes, cheese, fruit, milk, couscous, and veggies, plus an evening chocolate bar, split between us--it took some effort to find all the ingredients, and we soon learned to stick with the essentials.
One evening we set up camp in the shadow of a great ruined castle on a hill, a perfect spot for sunset watching, though everybody was too footsore to appreciate it. I also seemed to be the only one who cared about dinner: my teenaged helpers had melted away to their tents, Mike was studying the map, and my mom was writing in her journal. I couldn't really blame them; I knew they were all famished, but even I wasn't particularly thrilled by yet another one-pot meal. Then my head went up, and my nose began to quiver. Before I could even think about it, I was grabbing my backpack and heading back down the hill to town, a good half mile at least. But if I were right . . . I was! Golden brown, running with juices, a plump hen, squeezed in among her many sisters, was just making a final turn on the street-side rotisserie when I arrived. I handed over some money, the proprietor plucked the bird from the spit and wrapped her up in layers of paper, and back I went up that long hill with a succulent roasted fowl cradled in my arms. The moment my exhausted family caught the scent, they came back to life; that meal, consumed with fervent gratitude, was unanimously voted the best of the trip. People who are otherwise impressed by the holiness of the Desert Fathers and Mothers are often put off by their rigorous, sometimes extreme, lifestyle. Why would anyone choose to live in such a harsh environment where water was almost nonexistent and it was nearly impossible to grow food? Why put their bodies through such unnecessary hardship?
Though the answer is complicated, here is at least one good reason: they understood that those of us who live in a society of plenty often miss out on an important experience: the visceral sense of what our easy pleasures cost in actual human terms. What is so readily available more often than not gets taken for granted. When we always have more than enough to eat, the capacity for gratitude at mealtime is thus diminished. In a beautifully ironic way, the power of ascetical disciplines, meant to loosen the stranglehold of our desires, is not limited to showing us where we are weak and prone to sin. It does not even end at teaching us self-control. By giving us the opportunity to genuinely value what we would
otherwise take for granted, asceticism also has the power to enliven authentic gratitude and wonder.
We are all ready to receive some wisdom, and in this case Paul Huston who is a long-time Oblate of Immaculate Heart Hermitage (New Camaldoli) in Big Sur, California, Benedictines, offers us some monastic insight for Lent. "simplifying THE SOUL: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit," One of those books in that tradition of taking time out from the world without losing sight of the world, so as to enable us to keep we who are Christians following the wise and chaste Christ in the Liturgical season of the Church year, these pages offer solace and even a respite from sin. No doubt the author has mentioned sin in the book, for what is Lent without an admission or recognition of sin in one's life. This is a way to cleanse and repent in a novel and even expressively creative and active way--the imaginative Paula Huston brings the reader along.
Of course, the work is published by a House founded in 1865 and located in the United States as owned and run by monastics of the Congregation of the Holy Cross. As a ministry in a monastic and Religious tradition, this Catholic publishing company that "...serves the spiritual and formative needs of the Church..." of which it is a part, fortunately speaks in this particular case to various denominations and for my way of thinking Christians in many walks of life. The House has fulfilled its purpose and role in helping "...others seeking spiritual nourishment."
==Peter Menkin, Mill Valley, California
February 13, 2012
ADDENDUM
INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR PAULA HUSTON
1. The necessary first question is not that Lent makes such a good subject, but the way you as writer conceived the concept for the book. Will you tell us a little how you thought of it, and if you had trouble setting an organizational form? What is the form the book follows?
I did not actually think of this idea on my own. Instead, a longtime friend and publisher, Tom Grady of Ave Maria Press, suggested it to me. But as soon as he did, I knew that I wanted to work on a book like this because I had long been feeling like we've lost touch with the...
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