At the edge of our longing: Unspoken hunger for sacredness and depth
James Conlon
Novalis
Prayers to Share: Responsive Prayers for each Sunday of the church year
David Sparks
Wood Lake Books
Is God Listening: Making Prayer a Part of Your Life
Andrew E. Steinmann
Concordia Publishing House
Walking with the Saint: Spiritual Practices & Insights to enhance your Journey through life
Mary Anne Ayer
Tenth Gate Publishing Corporation
I have recently read two great books: Nikos Kazantsakis' St. Francis, which offers us the heights of love with its costly demands upon life, and Peter Balakian's best selling, The Burning Tigris, which in focussing on the Armenian genocide at the beginning of the 20th century offers disturbing testimony of the intensity of human evil and affliction. Based on my experience of these books, I have derived four criteria for measuring the substance and authenticity of spiritual guidance:
Engage the truth of love: The first and foremost criterion of a work on spirituality is whether it can engage and incorporate the truth of love as Jesus embodies and represents it most poignantly on a cross.
Engage human evil: Secondly, can it engage and incorporate human evil and affliction as reality and possibility for any one of us? What good is spiritual guidance if it cannot take us to the ecstatic heights of love or the agonizing depths of human misery? Loving God has to include all the exhilarating and demanding possibilities of love, which include loss and pain, perpetrated and suffered by so many we meet as brothers and sisters.
State the image of God: Following upon these experiential criteria, we are also confronted by our image of God as the one to whom we pray and the one through whom we meditate and receive guidance. Is our image of God too soft and sentimental or too hard, moralistic and judgmental? Is our God one whose power is that of coercion and control, or a costly love that seeks to renew, empower and heal from within in freedom and trust? We may want the universe to be controlled and planned, but does this view do justice to the suffering and chaos that strikes so many of us at random without thought to our morality or innocence? If God exercises power, it is, as the apostle defines it, a power perfected in weakness (2 Corinthians 12). Let us meditate on that for some spiritual enlightenment!
Define the spiritual journey: Fourth and finally, is the spiritual journey depicted as something we do (works righteousness) or a place of openness we cultivate so that God can work in us (divine grace)? Is our journey about achieving something or emptying ourselves of clutter so that God can achieve something in and through us?
From my point of view, these four criteria are important, and they guided my reading of four books assigned to me for review. These books are quite diverse, representing different traditions and different concerns. But all of them are intended to inspire spiritual seekers on a journey toward fullness in God.
Prayers to Share is an excellent resource for worship preparation and prayer. However, on the basis of criteria one and two above, this resource could use the assistance of a writer like Ted Loder, a contemporary author of prayer books, to draw out the heights and depths of human ecstasy and anguish, grandeur and misery.
Walking with the Saint taught me a lot about the discipline of meditation, but it failed somewhat according to criteria three and four, offering a God too much in control, a life too clearly planned, and a tendency to work at being spiritual rather than recognizing it as a miracle of grace as it happens in surprising rather than predictable ways.
Is God Listening? is a good practical book on making prayer a regular part of your life, but it fails according to criteria one, two and three. Suffering and pain are too easily explained, God is depicted as too judgmental and vengeful, and consequently, the author’s view of love (as the image of God as well as a demand upon us) is lacklustre at best.
Finally, At the Edge of our Longing was by far the most satisfying reading and meditation experience for me, but if there was any criticism I could offer it would be based on criterion two. The author gives us wonderful poetry when it comes to love in all its ecstasy, organic relatedness to all living things, and as responsibility in the world, but he moves with a kind of optimism that shortchanges the agonies, abysses and dark nights of the soul, which are also part of any spiritual journey worth taking.
