ABC Publishing (Anglican Book Centre)

A unique and valuable resource for families in crisis and those who seek to support them

January 9, 2009 – 3:30 pm

Healing Families: Courage and Faith in Challenging Times
Diane Marshall
soft cover, 128 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Rachel Workman

The Catalyst, Citizens for Public Justice

In Healing Families: Courage and Faith in Challenging Times, Diane Marshall provides a unique and valuable resource for families in crisis and those who seek to support them. By integrating information regarding current cultural and social issues with specific examples of how these issues impact family functioning, Marshall helps the reader understand both the context and complexity of the various challenges that accompany post-modern family life.

The introduction provides a framework for understanding and responding to these challenges as “Christians … called to love justice and to show mercy, especially to the vulnerable, the wounded, [and] the marginalized.” In the chapters that follow, a wide variety of topics are addressed, including: work and leisure, justice issues and family life, conflict resolution and mediated breakup, challenges related to children and adolescents, addiction and recovery issues, and healing from trauma.

Marshall emphasizes that understanding and addressing these issues within the current social context requires attention to a broad range of factors, including poverty and structural inequalities based on ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status and sexual orientation. She also calls attention to the pervasive cultural values of individualism and consumerism that constantly threaten to undermine our Christian calling to pursue and promote the “family values” of justice, mercy, and love.

Essential qualities that characterize healthy families (such as connectedness, acceptance, appreciation, trust, truthfulness, commitment, flexibility, and safety) are presented in a way that offers hope and encouragement for family members in various stages of their own faith journey. “From a Christian point of view,” Marshall points out, “the family is more than a basic social unit. It is a sphere where God is at work in us, shaping and moulding us so that we may share Christ’s life of love.”

Throughout the book, Marshall draws from her extensive experience as a family therapist (currently with the Institute for Family Living in Toronto) to provide practical coping strategies, helpful suggestions for family members and friends, inspirational quotes, and lists of resources for further study on each topic addressed. In addition, attention is given to the crucial role of the faith community in supporting families through times of deep pain. The final chapter provides an inspirational call to spirituality and healing that will sustain families through each passage of life, through joy and sorrow.

Healing Families is a comprehensive and engaging book that can easily be read in one sitting and referred to frequently as a source of “encouragement in the complex journey of growing—as members of families—in the love of Christ.”

 

Rich in detail, down to earth in style, and thought-provoking

January 9, 2009 – 3:19 pm

Christ Wisdom
Spiritual Practice in the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer
Christopher Page
ISBN 978-1-55126-420-2
soft cover, 140 pages, soft cover, $18.95

Review from Montreal Anglican

Christ Wisdom is designed as a handbook. Written in accessible language, the work presents the two passages in sections for the purpose of analysis. Each unit is followed by two questions that encourage readers to apply the biblical texts to their own lives and an exercise to promote further insights. Page attests to the significance of his chosen texts—“The Beatitudes set out for us the attitudes and practices of the Christian life. The Lord’s Prayer builds upon those principles and guides us in living in communion with God” [page 11].

The commentaries are an admixture of traditional teaching and creative thinking. Page uses words well in developing his points. For example, in the section on “blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3), he comments, “Christianity is not a self-help program; it is a self-surrender program. The stronger, more powerful, more talented, and more in control we are, the more difficult it is for us to surrender. The more we have to let go of, the more difficult it is to let go” [pages 20–21.] He adds, “For Matthew the proverb Jesus speaks about is a spiritual condition, not a function of socio-economic status” [page 20]. Poverty is a step on the path to God. “Jesus is not calling us to get stuck in our poverty or to make a new identity out of it. The gift of our poverty is to move beyond poverty into a new spiritual realm in which we find that God alone can satisfy our lives” [page 22].

At the end of the cogent section on blessed are the peacemakers,” Page asks the reader: “(1) What are the most common peacemaking strategies that the world uses? How have these worked in bringing about lasting and secure peace? What might be the problem with these strategies?; (2) Where might a different version of peacemaking begin? What might a different vision of peacemaking look like? What might we do to contribute to bringing about a new vision of peacemaking?” [pages 57–58]. These typify the kinds of question used to stimulate further thought.

In “two wills or one,” the commentary on “Your will be done” (Matthew 6:10) stresses the teaching that humankind has two wills. “This is the fundamental human dilemma. We are divided people, often facing in two different directions at the same time” [page 93]. The exercise at the end counsels, “Pay attention to those moments when you become conscious that a conflict of two wills is present. Notice what will is coming from the smaller self-will of the ego and which will seems to come from a larger more open place. Try to let go of that smaller will and embrace the larger will” [page 97].

These single examples of analysis, questions, and exercises provide a taste of the book. Christ Wisdom is rich in detail, down to earth in style, and thought-provoking. The material is ideally suited to be utilized as a study guide for a workshop, a series of sermons on either or both of the scriptural texts, or simply an opportunity to turn prose into praxis.

 

Refreshing and very helpful for today’s Christian

October 1, 2008 – 12:02 pm

Prayer Among Friends
Herbert O’Driscoll
ISBN 978-1-55126-501-8
soft cover, 94 pages, $16.95

Reviewed by Paul Dumbrille
Anglican Fellowship of Prayer newsletter

As the title suggests this is a book about prayer. The author sets about to “show that prayer is far more than what we usually assume,” and he succeeds marvellously.

Published by Path Books and available from the Anglican Book Centre, the book is made up of 21 short (3 to 4 pages) chapters, each of which is a personal reflection by Herbert O’Driscoll on the role of prayer in everyday life.

As we read this book we appreciate that everything exists within God. When we grasp this reality, prayer ceases to be something formal and institutional, and becomes something everyday and wondrously ordinary. There is no part of life that cannot be offered to God.

Herbert O’Driscoll’s gentle and illuminating insights, and personal memories and reflections, together with suggestions by Patricia Bays for personal exploration, make this a special book for reading, reflection, or group study any time. His reflections demonstrate a simplicity and honesty about himself and about his relationship with God that is refreshing and very helpful for today’s Christian living in our hurried world….

I highly recommend this book for all to read.

 

An honest account of life in community and with illness

October 1, 2008 – 11:59 am

In Age Reborn, By Grace Sustained
One Woman’s Journey through Aging and Illness
Thelma-Anne McLeod, SSJD
ISBN 978-1-55126-498-1
soft cover, 142 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Neville Cheeseman
The New Brunswick Anglican

Had I not been asked to review this book, I probably would not have read it, even though I have known Sister Thelma-Anne for more than forty years.

That would have been my great loss.

This account of Sister Thelma-Anne’s aging with Parkinson’s disease begins with a look at her pre-diagnosis life. As a young woman she considered herself an agnostic, like her father. She was a good student and assumed she would pursue an academic career. In her final year at Queen’s University, however, she [experienced] “an unmistakable, self-validating presence of the Divine.” It was the turning-point in her life. She left university, took a business course and became a secretary in a law office. Later she embarked on an active and energetic vocation as a Sister of St. John the Divine (SSJD), an Anglican monastic community.

Monasticism is misunderstood in our secular culture and virtually unknown within many parts of Canadian Anglicanism, so Sister Thelma-Anne introduces us to life in her community early on in the book.

With that background, she goes on to record her journey through aging and Parkinson’s. It is an honest account. She shares her frustrations, anxieties, and the dry periods in her prayer life. It is a validation of the feelings of other Christians in the same kind of situation. It also shatters the myth that clergy, monks, and nuns are not vulnerable to the same doubts and difficulties we encounter and endure.

Sister Thelma-Anne always took pride in her self-sufficiency and independence. As she grew older and weaker she came to realize the importance of the support of her sisters in SSJD, as well as her other friends and associates. She even came to the realization that she was allowed, that it was even necessary, to take time for herself. “I needed to give myself permission to enjoy life; to build-in times of leisure and enjoyment, to nurture friendships, and have fun, rather than feeling that I must fill every second with something I could justify as useful. Though I could spend a whole day happily in my room, I needed the social dimension for a balanced life.” (p. 92)

The “Suggestions for Reflection/Discussion” … at the end of each chapter are an important component of the book. The questions provide an opportunity for all of us-individuals, care partners, families and small groups-to wrestle with the increasingly pervasive social and spiritual issues raised in her book. It offers valuable insight, and I recommend it highly to clergy, parish visitors, parish nurses, and anyone else involved in pastoral care.