The First Christmas by Rachel Billington, illustrated by Barbara Brown
Collins Fount paperbacks
ISBN 0-00-626656-8/Morehouse (£5.99) ISBN 081-921-4108)
Reviewed by: O Whiteside
For: 2 years to 92 years!
Quote from a young critic - "I really liked the pictures and the writer tells the story so well that you get a great idea of what is happening."
If you have young children, the hectic pace of the Advent period, with all its accompanying frantic pre-Christmas activities and preparation both at home and in school, can blur your vision of the true reason why we celebrate Christmas.
This beautiful and prayerful re-telling of the miracle of Christmas could help to restore your sense of awe in, and gratitude for, all that God does for us. Moreover, it should ensure the children gain some sense of the joy that Christmas proclaims. It could even provide a few moments of blissful peace, relaxation and family companionship! This is truly a magical rendition of the Christmas story. Enjoy a few pages each night or each Sunday during Advent, and by Christmas day I guarantee that you will have been moved by, and awakened to, God's great Gift to us.
Younger children will love to look at, and question you about, the absolutely stunning pictures. Each is a work of love and immense detail. Every face on each page has its own story to tell. Older children will become deeply involved in this stirring account, told with immense simplicity, skill and poetic sensitivity.
Teenagers and adults will gain fresh insight and reverence for the Christ Child and His family, and find spiritual renewal. Meditate on Mary's joyful prayer in response to the Angel Gabriel's visit and the magnificent picture that accompanies it. Indeed, Mary is at the centre of this account, and her courage, faith and practical 'no fuss' acceptance of God's will shine through the text. What a woman she was! The author's own Catholic faith has been inspirational here perhaps.
And if you are really exhausted with all the bustle and preparations, why not settle everyone down one evening near Christmas, dim the lights, close your eyes, and listen in prayerful quietude as one of your teenagers softly reads a few final pages to the younger children before bedtime and all the forthcoming excitement (an unrealistic dream maybe, but Christmas is surely a time - if any is - for unshakable faith and boundless hope!).
If the story brings you even a fraction of the wealth and joy it has afforded me you will think you have gained riches. Wishing you a blessed read and a very Happy Christmas.
Seize The Day: Tanni Grey-Thompson
(Coronet, paperback; £7.99)
Reviewed by: Tony Garrett
Tanni Grey-Thompson captured the heart of the nation during the summer of 2000 when she won four gold medals in the Sydney Paralympics. Performing at world class level for over a decade, Tanni has competed in four Paralympics, winning nine gold medals and winning the London Marathon on four occasions.
Tanni received the OBE last year, and amazingly after giving birth to a baby ... she was competing for GB at this year's Commonwealth Games in Manchester.
In her fascinating and frank autobiography aptly entitled Seize The Day, Tanni talks about her childhood and living with her disability (spina bifida), her continued conflict with the way society accepts disabled people and the realisation of her dream to become the top-class athletic she is today.
On reviewing the book, you clearly discover Tanni's strength of determination to reach her self-set goals. It's quite clear that, despite the difficulties of being born with spina bifda, Tanni was brought up like any other normal child, and this undoubtedly helped her to overcome her many challenges in the coming years. In order to achieve her ambitions, Tanni was faced with everyday problems, such as people's attitudes, female discrimination and lack of adequate facilities connected with her chosen sport. These facilities were often degrading, inaccessible and unsuitable for female athletes. Tanni's positive mental and physical strength enabled her to win her many medals over the years. She is respected and admired by others around her.
In the book Tanni describes all the highs and lows of competing in the four Paralympics in Korea, Spain, America and finally Sydney. Tanni outlines her great adventures in meeting many dignitaries and sporting personalities - and it's amazing that on her wedding day she decides to go training!!!! She also discusses at length the somewhat embarrassing moment on BBC Television, during the Sports Personality of the Year award held during the December after the Sydney Paralympics - when despite being voted third by the public, the Beeb forgot to put a ramp in place so that she could collect her award!! However, as she explains (and I fully understand) the boob turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
One of Tanni's main achievements as far as I am concerned is that she has ensured that disabled athletics at both grass roots and elite levels are now given the respect that they deserve. She has been accepted purely as an athlete rather than a victim who has fought against the odds, and if that inspires people then great.
The Journey is my Home - An autobiography by Lavinia Byrne
(Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2001; ISBN 0 340 75695 0)
Reviewed by: Kim Insley
The back cover of the edition I read (2001) describes the book as '…the powerful story of one woman's struggle to keep her integrity in a Church still using techniques reminiscent of the Inquisition.' It goes on to pose a number of questions about Lavinia Byrne, but not the one I want to ask - Why, after leaving her community, did she stay a practising Catholic? To me this is the difference between Lavinia Byrne and others who have challenged the Catholic Church - she stayed a Catholic.
The Journey is my Home (to explain the title is too difficult here - it comes from the writings of one of St Ignatius' followers - but is clearly explained in text and realised in reading the story of her life) outlines her life from her childhood in Edgbaston, Birmingham and Somerset to her entering the community of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM), to training to become a teacher, becoming involved with broadcasting and communications, to writing a variety of texts and books, and finally to leaving the IBVM following calls for her to ratify the Pope's statements on Human Life and Women in ordained roles. It finishes with an 'Afterword' written a year after the events described in the book. This reveals information concerning the many copies of her book Women at the Altar which were not destroyed or burnt, but still remain in a large warehouse in Collegeville, Massachusetts.
I found the book fascinating. I couldn't put it down once I had started and kept annoying my husband by wanting to read him bits of it (annoying because he wanted to read his book, not because of the content!) It fascinated me because so much was familiar: the wish to become a nun (which is probably part of every Catholic girl's dream) and even some of the reasons behind her vocation; the role as a teacher; the enjoyment of, and commitment to, the liturgy; and above all the frustration with some of the 'rules' of the Catholic Church, and the people (usually, but not always, men) who impose them.
Some aspects I found myself questioning or disagreeing with. I do believe there are already roles for women in Church liturgies. We can be extra-ordinary ministers of the Eucharist, altar servers, readers and catechists. We can enter holy orders as religious or nuns. We can marry and have children. What we cannot do is be ordained. As a result, even though most of the ministries of an ordained Deacon can be carried out by a woman in the 'extra-ordinary' role, women at the altar in the ordained sense is not an acceptable concept. At this time I accept the Church's ruling, but I think it might have to change in later years. And that is probably why Lavinia Byrne is still a practising Catholic. She accepts the rules, but it doesn't mean she cannot look forward to change. After all, those who came to Vatican II must have 'stood on the shoulders' of those who looked forward to change. The Church is dynamic, that is why it has existed these 2000 years.
In conclusion, this book should be read by everyone who is part of the Catholic Church, as minister, priest, or lay person. There will be something in it for you all. If you are angered by it or take it on board fully, it doesn't matter - it will make you think.
Secrets of the Vine - Breaking Through to Abundance Bruce Wilkinson
Multnomah Publishers - Amazon.co.uk2002; £3.50);
my copy available to anyone wishing to borrow it.
Reviewed by: Andrew Jones
No apology is made for fact that this is an American book, written by an American non-conformist minister. Statistics may not mean everything, but the fact that about 71% of the US population is in regular worship compared with an estimated 10-11% in the UK is sufficient to encourage inquiries.
In the USA last year I noticed the book among some Christian publications and, as a wine journalist, was attracted by the title. I was further encouraged by reading on the back cover that Dr Wilkinson was 'the author of the No 1 bestseller The Prayer of Jabez. The idea that, in this day and age, any Christian book (the Bible apart) could be a best-seller was exciting news. So, a quick glimpse and I paid $9.99 for the small, well-presented hardback.
The basic approach of the book is to ask readers to examine whether they are merely nominal or abundant Christians, by using the life of the vine as its frame of reference. The preface was written simply and succinctly - even its first paragraph gave a straightforward message. 'Abundance - that beautiful overflow of true worth in a person's life - is exactly what you and I were born for. No wonder we so deeply desire it! Yet millions of Christians settle for less because they misunderstand and resist God's ways of bringing 72 to vineyards, 57 to vines and many more associated items. It may be helpful to have a New Testament to hand, particularly John 15, beginning at verse 1.
This book came alive for me at p13. After the Last Supper, Jesus and the Apostles were passing through the Kidron Valley towards the Garden of Gethsemane. 'Along the terraces, they pass through ancient vineyards. ... Jesus .... begins to teach: "I am the true vine, My Father is the vinedresser"'. This is the theme of the book : 'Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. I am the vine and you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit. By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit.' We are challenged to ask how we are developing as branches.
The author explains that 'fruit' means good works as well as winning souls, using an obscure verse in Titus that few of us would ever have stumbled across. The author refers to each of us as a branch, producing a clearly defined level of abundance, which he represents by baskets: Basket 1 - No fruit; Basket 2 - Fruit; Basket 3 - More fruit; Basket 4 - Much fruit.
Three 'Secrets of the Vine' are identified. Here's one to whet your appetite: the difference between letting vines mature naturally and pruning them. In the first instance the wood grows haphazardly and the foliage becomes excessive, resulting in the vines' strength being sapped. In the second instance (the one all grape growers follow) the pruner intervenes, cutting away excess new wood and foliage. This encourages larger, more flavoursome bunches of grapes. In other words God must first trim away those parts of our lives that drain precious time and energy from what is truly important, then we will come closer to him and bear abundant fruit.
The morning after completing the book, I found myself unsure exactly where I stood in the vineyard. Then a strange thing happened. Walking to my hotel my attention was attracted to a small garden. An elderly man was pruning a fruit tree. We exchanged greetings and as I passed, he smiled at me. Something else was noticeable. His tree was only part pruned. That's me, Basket 2 category - some fruit but more pruning needed.
Conversations with God: Book 1: Neale Donald Walsch
(Hodder Mobius; £8.99)
Reviewed by: Derryn Coetzee
I received this book as a Christmas present, and was intrigued by the title. The book is about how Neil Donald Walsch chronicles his extraordinary experience of conversing with God.
Walsch's fascinating three-year conversation with God about every aspect of life and living began in 1992, Walsch says, when he was struggling financially and his health and relationships were suffering. Out of frustration, he composed an angry, passionate letter to God demanding to know why his life was in such turmoil. To his amazement, when he was finished, he was moved to continue writing as God answered back. The book that grew from that first experience addresses the real life issues we all face at work, at home, and out in the world, as well as the larger questions of the nature of God and his relationship to man.
Initially the style of Walsch having direct conversations with God was somewhat off-putting, but one soon starts to become intrigued with the various conservations that Walsch has with God.
The puzzling questions that we all have about existence or questions about love and faith, life and death, good and evil are clear answered by the author through his conversations with God.
Walsch claims that God speaks to everyone all the time, that we're just not listening. "Have you ever been struck by a song lyric or the cover story of a magazine you suddenly pass on a newsstand that seems to answer a question you've had? Have you ever met someone for the first time and had that person mention something out of the blue that's been on your mind? Have you ever gone to church and thought the priest can read your mind, because he seems to be talking directly to you? We often write things off to coincidence that we should give God credit for."
You will not agree with all the comments and opinions that Walsch discusses, but it will definitely make you think and challenge your current views about numerous aspects of your life.
The Book of God - The Bible As A Novel by Walter Wangerin
(Zondervan; £20.99)
Reviewed by: Barbara Davies
A person unused to reading a Bible could pick up this book and be deeply into it before he knew. It flows so easily - drawing us on from one event to another. Pick it up - any time, any page - you are back there. Often it is difficult to put down.
When we read our own Bible we are comforted by the familiar words; linger on the poetry and recall in times of troubles and joys; but still there is a place for this fast-flowing story.
Sacred Heart: Gateway to God
Wendy M. Wright DLT
(Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd; £12.95)
Reviewed by: Judy Strong
This expansive, richly allusive and readable book is a treasure in itself as well as a source of them. Wendy Wright, one of the world's foremost authorities on Catholic spiritual traditions, explores the origins, development and many manifestations of that most beloved of Catholic devotions, to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The devotion is considered through many avenues, through art and poetry, through hymns and extracts from devotional writers, through Scripture and in recollections of the writer's own past. One of its beauties is the use of a number of paintings by Br Michael McGrath OSFS. Judging by the glorious colours of the stunning example gracing the front cover, these are vibrant representations; it is a pity they are reproduced in black and white within the text. This is, however, a slight criticism.
Wendy Wright ranges widely across time and the place, offering glimpses of revolutionary France, the Caribbean and Latin America as contexts for her commentary. She is formidably well-informed about those spiritual writers who have been drawn to the Sacred Heart, but there is nothing formidable in her approachable, accessible style which (despite a few Americanisms) moves fluidly from source material, to discussion, to the personal revelation of "a world drenched with grace".
In fact she introduced me to a range of remarkable insights offered by some of the foremost Christian spiritual writers the world has known. She cites Bernard of Clairvaux describing Jesus on the cross whose "feet are nailed to stay with us". She traces the origin of the idea of the sacred heart to the wound in His side, and of the belief in devotional tradition that He died not from the lance's wound nor from the weight of His dangling body, but from a broken heart. At the other end of the second millennium she incorporates the ideas of Karl Rahner for whom "love of neighbour becomes a contemporary Sacred Heart devotion".
Most engaging of all is the inclusion of the ideas of so many women who have been devoted to the Sacred Heart. From Mother Julian of Norwich to Mother Cabrini, from the Salesian Jane de Chantal to the Visitation sister Margaret Mary Alocoque, among many others, Wendy Wright explores their writings and experiences and demonstrates that
"We are called to encounter God in the specific, embodied persons and events with which we come into contact. The extended contemplation of the Sacred Heart makes this abundantly clear. In much of that tradition, the distinctive, the bodily heart of Jesus is the focus."
This focus forms the foundation of Wright's interesting, profoundly feminist and poignant Sacred Heart theology which concludes the book. However, for myself I found more moving, meaningful and reassuring the vision of Francis de Sales she recounts in taking up the motif of inscribing the name of Jesus on the heart. Francis imagined the encounter with Jesus. "Is it possible, dear Saviour,' we will say, 'that you have loved me so much that you have engraved my name in Your Heart?' It is indeed true. The Prophet speaking in the name of the Lord, says to us: 'Even though a mother forget the child she carried in her womb, I will never forget you, for I have engraved your name on the palms of my hands' (Is.49: 15-16). But Jesus Christ enlarging on these words, will say, 'Even if it were possible for a woman to forget her child, yet I will never forget you, since I wear your name engraved on my Heart.'
The Cross and the Switchblade - David Wilkerson
(Zondervan Publishing House, £6.99)
Reviewed by: Kate Plowman
This is not a book newly hot off the press - in fact it was first published in December 1962, and the events it describes began in February 1958. Yet those events are extraordinary, and represent a life lived with quite unusual spiritual guiuance from the Holy Spirit.
It is the autobiography of an ordinary American Pentecostal Minister, with a quiet parish in the mountains of Pennsylvania, who receives guidance from God to help seven teenage gang members who had murdered a polio victim in New York - and ends up setting up a ministry to drug addicts, gang members and prostitutes, firstly in New York, then all over America, ultimately spreading to Europe and Britain.
There were many months of getting to know New York on days off from his ministry in Pennsylvania - where poverty, ignorance and racial hatred ensured many, many teenagers were ripe for criminality:
The enemy lurked in the social conditions that make up the slums of New York, ready to grab lonesome and love-starved boys. He held out easy promises of security and freedom, of happiness and of retribution. He called his promises by innocent names: Clubs (not murderous gangs); Pot (not narcotics); Fish-Jumps (not an anger-filled, unsatisfying sex simulation); and Jitter-bugging (not a desperate fight to death). He built in his victims personalities that were almost impossible to reach. He threw around these boys a wall of thick, protective hardness; he made them proud of being hard.
It was these boys (and girls, too) whom the Holy Spirit was able to reach: Wilkerson was led to preach on the streets to them, and those who were baptised in the Holy Spirit were enabled to come off drugs 'cold turkey' - and stay off. Houses were opened up where those most dependent on drugs could be surrounded night and day by prayer and nursing care. It was very soon afterwards that former addicts who had been healed in this way were able to go back to the streets, but this time to preach to those who continued to be lost, in the most effective way possible: by displaying the change and healing in their own lives.
This book is a gripping read, accessible to all and also a 'seminal work' - by which I mean that it influenced the way that succeeding generations viewed 'the life in the Spirit' - and immediately became a publishing sensation, going through eight editions to September 1966 and no fewer than 63 between March 1964 and January 1985. It seems to have been published by a second publisher during much of this period, going through another 13 editions from March 1967 to November 1983. It describes a very heartening way in which Christianity is reaching and helping unchurched, excluded and very wounded people. Thoroughly recommended.
The Eagle and the Dove - Vita Sackville-West
(Michael Joseph; 1943; Second-hand copies available via www.addall.com/Used)
Reviewed by: Kate Plowman
This very well-written book contrasts two saints of vastly different temperament and upbringing, living at very different periods during the last 500 years of the Roman Catholic Church's history: St Teresa of Avila (1515-82), who reformed the Carmelite Order, and St Therese of Lisieux (1873-97), who constructed her 'Little Way' as a direct route for the ordinary man (lay as well as religious) to the love and service of God.
The author has chosen her saints well - they differ from and complement each other, throwing light on the nature of sanctity. Both were Carmelites, but whereas Teresa of Avila initially found the idea of religious life distasteful but chose it because it seemed to offer the surest way to heaven, Therese of Lisieux desired convent life from her earliest years. Therese of Lisieux's background is relentlessly bourgeois; 'Teresa enjoyed the double aristocracy of birth and intellect'. Teresa of Avila asked of a would-be postulant, 'But has she brains? We can teach her to be devout, but we cannot give her brains'. Therese of Lisieux's Little Way, however, brought the life of Christ within the reach of all (it was based on St Paul's famous passage on love in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13, and Sackville-West describes it as: 'Never to fail in the smallest particular; never the slightest relaxation of vigilance … to act not dutifully but joyfully; to train the character by incessant practice until the eclipsing of self becomes second nature; it sounds obvious …'). Therese of Lisieux lived a life 'of complete obscurity'; Teresa was described as a 'restless gadabout', founding and reviving 16 convents and consorting with Kings and Cardinals.
Therese of Lisieux emerges from this book as a surprisingly determined character; the wholeheartedness of her love for God and of her conviction that her destiny lay in becoming a great saint, that her greatest ministry would take place after death, dispel the offputtingly saccharine image that she has today. Even entering Carmel required boldness, especially at the early age of 15; permission came only after bearding Pope Leo XIII in Rome: 'O! Most Holy Father, if only you would say yes, everyone would be willing …' After describing her short life in the convent (she died at the age of 24), the book concludes with a moving description of the torments of her last days. Therese's convent experienced unprecedented demand for her obituary (her Story of a Soul). This work, which spread all over Europe and North and South America, sparked an extraordinary and immediate public devotion to her: her 'ministry from heaven' had begun, and canonisation, which seems to have occurred more or less by popular demand, followed very swiftly indeed - less than thirty years after her death. It is extraordinary, in this context, to read in these pages of her praying for the canonisation of Joan of Arc, being during Therese's lifetime merely a 'Venerable'!
This book contains much information, lightly given but very readable, which is of interest regarding saints in general: the route that canonisation took at the time of writing (1943, and I am sure still valid today); there is a discussion of that famous, terrible phrase 'dark night of the soul', especially in relation to Therese of Lisieux; it begins by exploring what the Roman Catholic Church's saints meant to the author's Protestant, English-speaking readership, and the spirit that animated those saints, and ends with an all-too-brief description of the lives and mysterious phenomena in the lives of other saints.
In short, it is thoroughly recommended.
A Time to Keep Silence - Patrick Leigh Fermor
(John Murray, £7.99, 96pp)
Reviewed by: Kate Plowman
This is an account, first published in 1957, of journeys made to three monasteries, one Benedictine, one Trappist and one - deserted for centuries - which is all that remained of the eastern monastic community of Urgub in Cappadocia (Turkey).
The author is better known for his account of his adolescent journeying across pre-war Europe, recounted in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, and also for having spent his war behind the lines on Crete, in 1944 capturing and evacuating the German General Kreipe. He is candid about his reason for wanting to visit the first monastery he describes: he wanted 'somewhere quiet and cheap' to stay while working on a book; the opportunity to observe the monastery routine in a Benedictine Abbey, to sample the delights of its large and well-stocked library and to listen to its Abbot slipping unconsciously into the Latin of the old Church were unlooked-for bonuses. He brings the Abbey's history to life - its founder, St Wandrille, was canonised, as were no fewer than 17 of his successors; and its story reflects more widely the traumas of French history, religious and political, making its very survival seem miraculous. The basic philosophy of the monastic life in general is also sympathetically told.
The Trappist monastery described in this book, La Grande Trappe at Solesmes, is treated in much the same way. Not for nothing is the proper name for the Trappist Order 'The Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance'; and its history and philosophy - both Gothic in the grand manner - are described, together with the daunting Trappist routine. At the time this book was written, flagellation was still practised daily - 'for the length of two Misereres'. The ideals motivating the Trappist monk - to save souls, to bring down a flood of atonement onto mankind and to lighten its burden of sin, by means of fierce and unremitting asceticism - are also described, with sympathy and without any kind of prurience.
The third and final monastery in Cappadocia remains the most mysterious to modern eyes: 'cones and pyramids and monoliths' rise out of a hot and dusty valley in Anatolia, which house dozens of underground wonderful Byzantine churches. The lives of those monks who worshipped here, however, remain a mystery, and the most scholarly investigator of the monasteries - a Jesuit - can find no evidence to suggest one way or another whether they arrived there fleeing the Turks, at this time beginning to invade Western Europe, or Byzantine edicts they disagreed with. The human interest that one finds in the descriptions of the visits to the first two monasteries is, of course, absent; as is any kind of definitive statement on who the monks were (beyond the fact that they were Christian) and the routine of their daily lives. However, their physical surroundings, and any clues about their religious practices, are of inestimable value to the historian of early Christianity, since it was from these Levantine monks that all subsequent monastic practice derived.
All in all, this is a hauntingly beautiful book, rich in detail about a way of life that has probably changed immeasurably since the sixties and Vatican II. Highly recommended.
Crack in The Wall
Jackie Pullinger; photographs, Nick Danziger (1989); available from Amazon.co.uk(Hodder & Stoughton Religious (1997); Second-hand copies available via www.addall.com/Used)
Reviewed by: Kate Plowman
Jackie Pullinger is a remarkable woman, who in 1966 (aged 19) left the prospect of a comfortable life in Britain because she felt called to go to Hong Kong, and has spent the intervening time ministering to its drug addicts and prostitutes. This ministry has been described in her earlier book Chasing the Dragon; in The Crack in the Wall, which is in the format of a book-length photographic essay, the reader gets to meet some of Jackie's 'parishioners' in Hong Kong's Walled City, and also to see the horrific living conditions which pertained there, resulting from the Walled City's anomalous legal status.
Originally a Chinese garrison, it was agreed that while the Walled City presented no threat to the British presence in Hong Kong, it should remain under Chinese jurisdiction, but within a year resistance to British rule in Hong Kong resulted in local uprising. The British promptly occupied the Walled City, evicting the Chinese, who never recognised this unilateral act, and neither side took responsibility for such things as law and order, sanitation or the safe provision of an electrical supply in the City. To what extent such conditions still exist there I am not sure - the Walled City itself has been demolished since being handed back to China - but Jackie herself and the church she founded are still there.
Some of the people whose stories are featured in the book are professionals, like Ah Li, a barrister who chooses to be with drug addicts and finds it an immense privilege to be with the outcasts of society as they begin to experience the love of God for themselves; and Stephen, an addict and ex-member of one of Hong Kong's Triad Gangs. It is sobering to read Stephen's words that if God had not brought Jackie to Hong Kong, 'Many would be dead who are alive today. I for one', and to reflect on the physical danger and hardship that those who are addicted are placed in.
This is one of my favourite types of book - lots of human interest, lots of pictures, and a sense of real hope for the most disadvantaged in Hong Kong's society - or in any country's society, for that matter.
(See also Jackie Pullinger's autobiography, Chasing the Dragon - which is still in print.)
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