Does God Need the Church?, On the Lord's Appearing: An Essay on Prayer and Tradition, In the School of Love: An Anthology of Early Cistercian Texts, The Poetic Imagination: An Anglican Spiritual Tradition, and Solanus Casey.

Does God Need the Church?
By Gerhard Lohfink
Liturgical Press (Michael Glazier Book),
$39.95, 341 pp.

On the Lord's Appearing: An Essay on Prayer and Tradition
By Jonathan Robinson
Catholic University of America Press,
$26.95, 280 pp.

In the School of Love: An Anthology of Early Cistercian Texts
Edited by Edith Scholl, O.C.S.O.
Cistercian Publications, $29.95, 180 pp.

The Poetic Imagination: An Anglican Spiritual Tradition
By William Countryman
Orbis, $15, 214 pp.

Solanus Casey
Edited by Michael Crosby
Crossroad, $19.95, 275 pp.

In 1986 Gerhard Lohfink resigned his professorship in New Testament at the University of Tubingen, moved to Munich, and put his theological expertise at the service of the Catholic Integrated Community. The community was founded by a group of young German lay Catholics who, at the end of World War II, met to discuss the meaning of Christian community and to grapple with their country's embrace of National Socialism. Members of the community were determined to rediscover, in the Jewish origins of the Christian faith, the authentic roots of what it means to be Catholic. From the beginning, the Integrated Community invited theologians and other intellectuals to join them. They strongly opposed the German cultural practice of identifying Catholics or Protestants simply by their birth heritage and enrollment in the government census. In short, the community wanted to discern their communal identity as Christians as opposed to their membership in what Germans called the Volkskirche.

Lohfink's Does God Need the Church? is a work of biblical ecclesiology that advances four arguments. First, God did call a special people even though (and paradoxically) God's call is universal. Second, there are characteristic signs of Israel that perdure (gathering, faith, the Exodus experience, etc.). Third, Jesus and the Twelve are inexplicable unless seen in the context of the people of Israel. Last, the characteristic signs of the church should include the continuation of the Exodus and the gathering, a function of remembering and articulating faith, and a struggle for wholeness, against which disunity is a scandal.

Lohfink repeatedly insists that the "newness" of the New Testament does not, and cannot, mean a repudiation of the "Old" Testament. Lohfink puts the issue bluntly: "It is usually forgotten that what happened in Galilee and afterward in Jerusalem was not something strange and alien to Israel; it was Jewish history." He firmly grounds his ecclesiology in the reality of the two testaments that constitute, for Christians, one sacred Scripture. Although that unity is evident in every Catholic liturgy, we need reminding; and so Lohfink dwells on Saint Paul's assertion that Christians dare not brag that they are branches since "it is the root that supports you" (Rom. 11:18).

The passion that fills this book comes from Lohfink's conviction that the church will not survive (indeed, in much of Western Europe it is dying) by feeding on a cultural memory of its past place in society. What it means to be a member of the Christian community must be seen free from pious nostalgia and fear of the world. Bible-based repudiation of Judaism and anti-Jewish violence are twined in European history. In a postscript Lohfink thinks back on his own childhood: "I saw men and women who were forced to sew a yellow star of David on their garments; then one day I didn't see them any more." That haunting memory has brought about this reconsideration of his faith.

Excellent close readings of Scripture secure the arguments of Does God Need the Church? Deep faith moves them forward. The question asked in the title gets an affirmative answer but one that is unsentimental and compellingly fresh. One would do well to read this book with a Bible close at hand as the fine insights Lohfink offers can be further considered thanks to a good scriptural and subject index.

These days, books on prayer seem to sprout like mushrooms after a spring rain. Rare, however, is the book that attempts to understand prayer from a theological perspective. Jonathan Robinson's On the Lord's Appearing is such a book. As is fitting for an Oratorian, Father Robinson turns to Philip Neri to find the organizing principle for his discussion of prayer in the Catholic tradition. He notes that Philip loved to read the lauds of Jacopone of Todi, a thirteenth-century Franciscan poet. Robinson takes a Jacopone laud titled "The Five Ways in Which God Reveals Himself" as the template for discussing the ways of prayer. Those five ways can be roughly understood as liberation from the bonds of sin; healing through the agency of the sacraments and ascetical practice; developing friendship with God; entering into the dark mystery of God; and, finally, achieving union with God in love.

Anyone who juxtaposes prayer and tradition will end up with a traditional vision of prayer. There is nothing wrong with such an approach but, given the direction of much writing today in spirituality (some of it, admittedly, odd and even risible), Robinson's volume does seem open to criticism. Let me advance some reservations. First, there is almost nothing in this work that sets the prayer life of an individual within a communal context. It is easy to forget that John of the Cross was not a solitary mystic but one who celebrated Mass, sang the office each day, and lived in a community. Robinson's only use of the sacramental life of the church to advance his theory of prayer is to invoke the sacraments under the rubric of "healing" while grumbling sotto voce about liturgical deformations after Vatican II. Nor is there any sense that the life of prayer should spill over into a transformed life for the sake of others. After all, when Teresa of Avila finishes The Interior Castle she says that the test of those who have entered the deepest level of prayer is rather simple: Do they love their neighbor?

If I found this work somewhat deficient in the context within which the author writes, I also confess that he has some very penetrating observations to make about the life of prayer. The book would have even been better had the author been more expansive in putting his doctrine of prayer into the context of the nexus between prayer and the larger world within which the one who prays lives.

Saint Benedict called the monastic life a "school of the Lord's service" and some centuries later Bernard of Clairvaux refined that description, calling his community a "school of charity." Indeed, the emphasis on the affective love of God has been a leitmotif of Cistercian spirituality. Sister Edith Scholl, herself a Cistercian nun, has had the good idea of assembling an anthology of texts from the early Cistercian fathers and mothers. These works on the love of God are designed to be used as a meditation manual, book of prayers, or resource for lectio.

Scholl divides her selections into twelve brief chapters beginning with considerations of Cistercian anthropology and ending with the "perfection of love." There is an especially rich chapter on the blessedness of love that cites a number of texts on the beatitudes as well as another excellent chapter linking love of God with love of neighbor. All of these writers (Sister Edith gives us selections from ten early Cistercians) come across well in English. Their writings are unencumbered by scholastic neologisms, replete with scriptural allusions, and affective in tone. Brief biographical notes and a select bibliography close the book.

With very rare exceptions no selection runs more than a paragraph or two. The merit of such brevity is that one can take small doses, preferably reading them aloud slowly as an exercise of prayerful consideration (which brings us very close to what lectio should be, as Basil Pennington points out in his brief introduction to the book). This is a fine anthology that would be a welcome addition to anyone's personal library. It deserves room on the shelf of any retreat house or other place where prayer is taken seriously.

William Countryman's The Poetic Imagination is part of a series edited by Philip Sheldrake under the general title "Traditions of Christian Spirituality." Countryman does not intend to provide a global view of writers and movements that have flourished under the aegis of the Anglican communion. His sharply delineated focus is on the Christian life as seen in the tradition of English lyric poetry extending from post-Elizabethean writers to the twentieth-century poets W. H. Auden and Welsh priest R. S. Thomas. Rather than devote chapters to individual writers Countryman identifies four themes in four central chapters: the resources of image and language; the dialectic of presence and absence (of God); life under grace; and a living tradition.

The author wants to show that the poets he discusses have something classically Anglican about them, and to demonstrate to what degree the English lyric tradition addresses the present reality of Anglicanism, which is hardly defined by church life in the British Isles. His strategy is to admit the protean nature of Anglicanism (he says that what is unique about Anglicanism is its lack of uniqueness!) while insisting that the Anglican biblical tradition, mediated by the Book of Common Prayer, provides a common ground.

Such a case is obviously easier to make for figures like Herbert, Vaughan, Donne, Traherne, and moderns like Eliot and Thomas. It is less clear in a poet like Blake where other factors enter in (for example, Swedenborg). Be that as it may, the importance of this volume is Countryman's emphasis on the little-explored topic of poetry as a locus for shaping a vision of the Christian life. He falters when he attempts to wring out something specifically Anglican from poets (such as the Romantics) whose connection to church tradition was nominal and whose wellsprings of imagination derived from other sources. Coleridge would be the textbook case and nobody, I think, would wish to make a case for the late work of Wordsworth (for example, the ecclesiastical sonnets) when the poet was pretty much running on empty. Furthermore, Countryman's decision to focus on the lyric allows him only passing comments on Eliot whose "Four Quartets" is easily the greatest religious poem of the past century, though hardly a lyric poem.

Given the task Countryman has set himself, he has done a credible job. It was wonderful to reread some of the great poetry of the seventeenth century handled so sensitively. At the same time, I wish he had included prose writers, since that tradition within Anglicanism is so rich and too little studied. Having just reread Boswell's Life of Johnson, I wonder if anyone (other than the writers of the collects of the Book of Common Prayer) has ever written more moving and deeply felt prayers and meditations.

Kenneth Woodward's Making Saints (1990) provides an authoritative and highly readable account of the process of canonization in the Catholic church. Michael Crosby's book on the American Capuchin friar Solanus Casey (1870-1957) gives those interested in saints and the saint-making process an inside look at the kind of dossier compiled for the canonization process.

Solanus Casey is a textbook example of the traditional candidate for beatification and canonization. A model Franciscan religious whose academic deficiencies were such that he was ordained to the priesthood but was not given faculties for solemn preaching or hearing confessions--a so-called sacerdos simplex--Casey exercised his ministry as a doorkeeper at various religious houses in Detroit. He never requested that his status be changed even though he was obviously average in intelligence, and his deficiencies were largely because of the bad academic training he got in a seminary where the texts were in Latin and the lectures in German. He had an extraordinary reputation for his spiritual counseling, the power of his prayer, his generosity to the poor, and his work as a healer. Thousands attended his funeral and, after his death, his reputation grew as many people invoked his aid in their prayers.

As these pages make clear, Casey derived his spirituality from the traditional sources set forth for every consecrated religious in his day: the Mass, the Office, devotional practices of the rosary, and visits to the Blessed Sacrament. The only peculiar side to his spiritual life was his lifelong devotion to the four-volume The Mystical City of God by the seventeenth-century Poor Clare, Mary of Agreda--a work which for a time rested on the Index. How Casey came across this strange work and why he read it all his life "on his knees" and encouraged others to read it is not clear although, in that period, there was a rather widespread taste for other rococo spiritual writers like Grignion de Montfort. There is no evidence in Casey's writings--consisting of his spiritual notebooks and his many letters--that he was in any way heterodox.

How the process of Solanus Casey fares (and every indication is that he was a person of great prayer and extraordinary self-giving) is not for us to say. What is interesting in this volume is the rhetorical tone that is adopted to make its case. The editor, Michael Crosby, has also written a good biography of Casey titled Thank God Ahead of Time (1998) that knits together more cohesively the story told here.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.