The Phoenix Of Rennes: The Life And Poetry Of John Of St Samson 1571-1636 by Robert Stefanotti

Hardback: Long considered the French John of the Cross, John of St Samson, the blind Carmelite mystic of Rennes is virtually unknown to the English speaking world. 

And, more remarkable still, his extensive body of poetry has never been studied in any language. 

The Phoenix Of Rennes (1994) presents both the man and his work so that, phoenix-like, he rises up from the ashes of time.

About the author: Dr Robert Stefanotti, a Roman Catholic priest in the Carmelite Order, is the Executive Director of the North American Carmelite Institute (Washington, DC). He has published numerous articles and reviews both in historical theology and contemporary art and lectures annually at the Gregorian University (Rome) and at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Vowels In Order

I'm Better Than Everyone

Encountering God In The Abyss: Titus Brandsma's Spiritual Journey by Constant Dölle

Paperback: Born on a Frisian farm in the province of Holland, Titus Brandsma (1881-1942) entered the novitiate of the Carmelites in Boxmeer. On his journey, he cultivated the spiritual garden of his cell in order to dwell in the face of his Creator. Becoming a scholar of philosophy and mysticism, Titus Brandsma was concentrated on the depths of human existence, but his contemplation gave him a broad view of reality and made him discover ever new horizons. 

Although a university professor, he was a productive journalist, engaged in questions of culture and education. Prophet of peace and justice, Brandsma defended from the beginning the Jews against Nazi ideology. During the German occupation of Holland he took a strong stand in favour of the freedom of the press. For him the dignity of the human person could never be sacrificed for ideological and political reasons. 

As a result he became a martyr in the concentration camp in Dachau.

Encountering God in the Abyss (2002) is translated from the Dutch by John Vriend.

About the author: Fr Constant Dölle was also from Friesland. Titus Brandsma loved to stop by at the Dölles to talk with Constant's mother. Constant Dölle, seven years old at the time, saw a simple man who inspired confidence, who had an interest in the family and was good to have contact with. Looking back, he said:

    He is a person you can absolutely trust. That is possible only if that person believes in God. For then he can surrender himself, let himself go, and say: 'let things happen as You want them to.' With such a person, you can take your chances, because he does not give priority to his own interests. With a person like that you will never end up holding the bag.

He was ordained to the priesthood on 12 July 1942 and celebrated his first mass on the first Sunday in August of that year. On that Sunday they learned that Titus Brandsma had died in Dachau on 26 July. Although Dölle never became a Brandsma specialist, Titus did play a role throughout his entire life. Yet it is no accident that he learned to know Titus Brandsma in his youth and has now written a book about him. He himself calls this "a kind of divine dispensation by which things happen as they do."

    I marvel at the fact that I also became a Carmelite 'by accident.' In 1985, I 'accidentally' wrote my first book about Titus Brandsma. The person who had been assigned to do this for the beatification said: 'I dread this job and feel sick about the whole thing.' Then the authorities got me involved and the job had to be done in three months. Nor was it my idea to write a book about him now. Things regularly come my way from others.

In fact, a short time after he started writing the present book, Fr Constant Dölle slowly became almost completely blind. In that way, writing Titus Brandsma's biography became a process of reconciling himself to his own situation of aging and becoming blind, and a spiritual process which yielded insight.

The Power Of Being Alone

 

Writing Should Make You Money With The Labour You Have To Put In

Some Literary Collective Nouns

 

The Girl With The Louding Voice by Abi Daré

Paperback: See? I tell you Adunni, even if you marry my father and you think all your hope is finish, your mind is not finishing. Inside of your mind, you can be the teacher you want. You like to be reading books, so feed your mind with reading of any book you find, maybe in the dustbins of Idanra town or some cheap ones in the market. - Chapter 12, The Girl with the Louding Voice

The Girl with the Louding Voice (2020) is shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2020. It is an instant New York Times bestseller, an Observer Hottest Tipped Debut Novel 2020, a 'Read with Jenna' Today Show Book Club Pick, a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 by The New York Times, Marie Claire, BBC, Vogue, Essence, PopSugar, Daily Mail, Electric Literature, Red Magazine, Stylist, Daily Kos, Library Journal, The Every Girl and Read It Forward and the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize.

As the only daughter of a broke father, fourteen-year-old Adunni is a valuable commodity. Removed from school and sold as a third wife to an old man, Adunni's life amounts to this: four goats, two bags of rice, some chickens and a new TV. 

When unspeakable tragedy swiftly strikes in her new home, she is secretly sold as a domestic servant in the wealthy enclaves of Lagos, where no one will talk about the strange disappearance of her predecessor, Rebecca. No one but Adunni.

As a yielding daughter, a subservient wife, and a powerless servant, Adunni is repeatedly told that she is nothing. But Adunni would not be silenced. She is determined to find her voice - in a whisper, in song, in broken English - until she can speak for herself, for the girls like Rebecca who came before, and for all the girls who will follow. 

The Girl with the Louding Voice is a simultaneously heartbreaking and triumphant tale about the power of fighting for your dreams.

About the author: Abi Daré grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and has lived in the UK for eighteen years. She studied law at the University of Wolverhampton and has an MSc in International Project Management from Glasgow Caledonian University as well as an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University of London. The Girl with the Louding Voice won The Bath Novel Award for unpublished manuscripts in 2018 and was also selected as a finalist in 2018 The Literary Consultancy Pen Factor competition. Abi lives in Essex with her husband and two daughters, who inspired her to write her debut novel.

Rating: 5/5

The Way of Perfection by St Teresa of Ávila

Paperback: This classic of the interior life and Christian mysticism remains as fresh and inspiring today as it was 400 years ago. Written by a prominent sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and Carmelite nun, it forms a practical guide to prayer that embraces readers with its warmth and accessibility.

St Teresa of Ávila's detailed directions on the achievement of spiritual perfection designate three essentials - fraternal love, detachment from material things and true humility. 

She discusses a variety of maxims related to the practice of prayer and concludes with a thought-provoking commentary on the Lord's Prayer (Paternoster).

A work of sublime mystical beauty, The Way of Perfection is above all a treatise of utter simplicity that offers lucid instruction to all seekers of a more meaningful way of life.

The Way of Perfection is edited and translated by E Allison Peers. This Dover edition, first published in 2012, is an unabridged republication of The Way of Perfection from The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, Volume II, originally published in 1946 by Sheed and Ward, New York and London.

About the author/saint: Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), also called St Teresa of Jesus, was a Spanish nun and one of the great mystics and religious women of the Roman Catholic Church. She was the leader of the Carmelite Reform, which restored and emphasized the austerity and contemplative character of this religious order. Canonized in 1622, she was elevated to Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970, the first woman to be so honoured.

Guidance To Heaven: On The Catholic View Of Life by Cardinal Giovanni Bona

Paperback: It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment. - Hebrews 9:27

Never in any other book, perhaps, has an author held up a mirror to human life so well as Cardinal Bona has done in the 17th-century classic Guidance to Heaven (1658).

If the reader derived no other value from this book than the realisation we are each one going to die - we know not when - and pass to our real life which will last for all eternity, and that our every waking hour of this one should be a preparation for that one, then a reading of this book would have been for him of ultimate value - the best thing he ever did.

Starting with a stark analysis of just what human life is and of our completely tenuous grasp on it, the author then proceeds to analyze each of the major vices we must conquer and the virtues we must acquire if we are to save our souls.

The unique contribution of Cardinal Bona in Guidance to Heaven is that he outlines starkly the Catholic attitude of philosophy about the nature and purpose of human life - which ultimately determines a person's whole course of action during his time on earth.

Though recreation has its place in our lives, as he acknowledges - and is even essential for successful living - nonetheless, we are basically not here on earth just to play and enjoy ourselves, as many people do, but to prepare ourselves for our real life in eternity. And that eternity for us can begin at any time - we know not when. Our only guarantee is that begin it shall, one day, and maybe for us very soon.

The Cardinal's great message is: "Do not live your life in fear of death because you are not prepared to die. Rather, live your life in anticipation of death - which will be your grand entrance into true life, true happiness - because you are ready for it, because you are prepared, because you have so lived that you are ready to go and be with God!"

Guidance to Heaven is translated from the Italian by Fr Andrew Byrne. The present edition of Guidance to Heaven is a careful adaptation for modern usage of Fr Andrew Byrne's 1852 translation of Cardinal Giovanni Bona's Manuductio ad coelum (1658), published by James Duffy and Sons, London in 1881 (third edition) under the title, The Hand That Leads To Heaven.

About the author: Cardinal Giovanni Bona, Italian Cistercian, cardinal, liturgist and devotional author, was born in 1609 to an old French family at Piedmont, Italy. Though his father wanted him to pursue a military career, Giovanni became a Cistercian instead and worked for fifteen years at Turin. He later became a superior general in Rome and modestly refused the Bishopric of Asti. He was eventually made a cardinal in 1669 by Pope Clement IX. Giovanni's literary works include An Easy War to God, Principia et Documenta Vitae Christianae, and Manuductio ad Caelum, the latter often compared to Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ on account of simplicity of the style in which the solid doctrine is taught. He died in Rome in 1674.

Letters From The Desert (Anniversary Edition) by Carlo Carretto

Paperback: Why? Why is the All-Powerful silent? Why doesn't he kill Herod? But this is the point: it is necessary to live by faith. Flee into Egypt, become exiles and refugees, let cruelty and injustice triumph. And so it will be until the end of time. - Carlo Carretto

In December 1954, at the age of 44, after a prominent career as a schoolteacher and Catholic activist working at national level in his native Italy, Carlo Carretto was summoned by a voice that said: "Leave everything, come with me into the desert. I don't want your action any longer, I want your prayer, your love."

Carretto responded by leaving for the deserts of North Africa, where he joined the Little Brothers of Jesus (founded in the 1930s) and embraced the example of Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916). He spent the next ten years as a desert hermit. 

Among the fruits of Brother Carlo's response was Letters from the Desert (1964), the first and most popular of his many books. Its affirmative message has inspired countless readers in a dozen languages. Simply, it reminds us that in the evening of our lives, we will be judged by love.

Letters from the Desert was first translated and published in English in 1972. This new edition, thirty years after their original English publication, is testimony to the staying power of this profoundly powerful spiritual master who has known both national fame and religious obscurity.

About the author: Born and raised in northern Italy, as a youth, Carretto joined the lay movement Catholic Action.  For twenty years he worked to spread the religious and social justice message of the Gospels in and around Fascist Italy.

In 1954, he felt the desert call and set out for the Sahara.  In El Abiodh, a remote Algerian outpost, he entered the novitiate of the Little Brothers of Jesus, a community of desert contemplatives based on the spirituality of Saint Francis of Assisi that had been founded by de Foucauld in the 1930s. Monastic austerity and silent adoration were to be combined with a life of humble labor, friendship, and solidarity with one's immediate neighbours.

A decisive moment - a "cut" - occurred when Carretto burned the address book containing the contact information for thousands of his friends back in Italy. He stayed for ten years as a hermit: translating the Bible into Bedouin, sitting for hours before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer.

At last he left the Sahara, returned to his hometown, and went to visit his beloved mother, who, for more than thirty years, had been living an active life, crowded with family, social, and parish responsibilities. Perhaps the surest sign of Carretto's sanctity is this: he recognized that, for all his time in the desert, his mother was at least the contemplative that he was.

The letters he had sent back were published as Letters from the Desert, his first book, in 1964 in Italy. A bestseller, the book was translated and published in English in 1972. In it, he observed, "Jesus is the 'Holy One of God.' But the Holy One of God realized his sanctity not in extraordinary life, but one impregnated with ordinary things: work, family and social life, obscure human activities, simple things shared by all men. The perfection of God is cast in a material which men almost despise, which they don't consider worth searching for because of its simplicity, its lack of interest, because it is common to all men."

Soon after returning to Italy, Carretto was asked to oversee a group of hermitages the Little Brothers had established near Assisi.  He stayed for the rest of his life, welcoming the flocks of pilgrims who came to learn about prayer and reflection, and writing a dozen or so more books. It was there, in 1988, after a long illness, that he died at the age of 78.

My Passport

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), French Writer, Intellectual, Existentialist Philosopher, Political Activist, Feminist and Social Theorist

No Lockdown Regrets