May 13, 2011

BOOK REVIEW: Open, alert minds needed to digest two new spiritual guidebooks

 

NATIONAL

Reviewed by Peggy Weber
Catholic News Service

Discovering Our Spiritual Identity: Practices for God’s Beloved by Trevor Hudson. InterVarsity Press (Downers Grove, Ill., 2010). 180 pp., $18. New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-first Century by Philip Shepherd. North Atlantic Books (Berkeley, Calif., 2010). 489 pp., $19.95.

An open mind and an alert mind are needed for two recent books.

Discovering Our Spiritual Identity: Practices for God’s Beloved is a spiritual guide for individuals or small groups. It offers 16 sessions of readings, reflections and actions.

It covers such topics as: hearing and speaking with God, growing in spiritual friendship, practicing stewardship of our work and play, learning discernment, approaching our death and the world beyond and living now in the kingdom.”

One might say, tongue-in-cheek, is that all? However, the author, Trevor Hudson, does a beautiful job of approaching heady topics with real-life examples and clear language. Hudson is a pastor in South Africa and a teaching fellow with the Renovare Spiritual Formation Institute. He brings an international flavor to this book.

It also is hard not to get caught up in the enthusiasm and genuine faith of this book. Hudson quotes St. Ireneaus in his introduction, that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

This book tries to wake up the reader or participant to truly embrace one’s faith. It calls for actions and thoughts and time. Hudson writes that it is “about waking up to the always available presence of the crucified and risen Christ, alive and at large throughout the world, who invites us to be his followers wherever we are.”

New Self, New World is definitely not a book for a lazy day at the beach. It requires concentration and openness to the 434 pages of text. The remaining 55 pages are endnotes and appendix.

Philip Shepherd’s book asks the reader to look at things differently. He writes: “Simply put, as long as we remain in our head, we will remain married to the values of the head.” He said his book attempts to “write about the lens by which we bring the world around us into focus — our head-centered consciousness; and … to explore the appealing alternative: deepening our experiences of the world by deepening our experience of the body.”

He creates a very well-documented argument about how, “by opening the consciousness of our bodies we can awaken our full intelligence and come home to our wholeness, bit by bit.” The book contains exercises that will help people achieve this goal.

This book contains lots of research to support Shepherd’s theory. It also reflects the diverse and interesting life of the author. As a teenager, he cycled alone through Europe, the Middle East, Iran and India. He was heading to Japan to study classical Noh theatre.

An actor and dancer, he is now a faculty member of the Institute for Sacred Activism in Chicago.

The book contains some great examples and witty parts, but reading it requires time and determination.

• Weber is a columnist and reporter with Catholic Communications in the Diocese of Springfield, Mass.