Our monastery library is excellent in quantity and
quality of books. In my younger years I had read lots of them but as I age I find
that I read less than formerly—mostly Scripture, short articles and books
sisters pass on to me. Three of my most recent blessings are:
The
Abbey by James Martin, SJ, a favorite contributor to America Magazine, I wrote about this book in my last blog of March 8, 2016.
Spirit
of Fire : Life and Vision of Teilhard de Chardin by Ursula King. It contains a
quotation that hangs in my room: Someday after mastering the winds, the wave,
the tides, the gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of LOVE and then,
for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
And
the one I have just finished and must read again is When the Church Was Young:
Voices of the Early Fathers by Marcellino D’Ambrosio.
As
I progressed through the pages of this last book, I realized how little I
really know about the very young Church, its history, its saints and how it
moved into later centuries. The book is very readable but for me its time frame
was difficult to follow as it included so many saints of similar names, and
their stories moved back and forth in dates. The time frame covered in the book
was mostly the second to third centuries. A listing of dates and events is
included in the front of the book and is very helpful, but the text moved back
and forth as the author presented various Doctors and Fathers of the Church.
I
found D’Ambrosio’s description of these early Fathers moving and very human,
especially n the lives they led and their influence on the times. I was
especially fascinated by Origin, Augustine, and John the Preacher with the
Golden Tongue. Only in the last sentence of the chapter on him is the John the
Preacher identified as John Chrysostom. I learned much from my first reading of
When the Church was Young, but as you can tell, I must read it again to gain
the wisdom it offers.
Sr.
Andrea Collopy, OSB
Sister Andrea, thank you so much for the suggested readings.I will add them to my reading list.
ReplyDeleteDear Sister, thank you for these good suggestions. So much of the early church writing is pure poetry -- poetry in the many conceptions of Christ and His Mother. They were fierce against one another, developing theories and calling one another heretics. In the very beginning the church was empowerment for Sister Mary, and then the fathers took power. Defend the church at all costs and goodbye to the Jews! Authority! In some ways we need to recover those days, and in other ways we need to be more simple -- only by love to defend the Church, love and thank the Jews always, and all of them, and those other ones as well, whom we never think about at all. Only by love for one another.
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