Never Alone: A Personal Way to God.

Girzone gives a more direct statement of his views in Never Alone: A Personal Way to God (Doubleday, 1994). Here he defines spirituality as a "mystical friendship with Jesus" requiring that "we open ourselves to God, and show a willingness to follow his grace in our lives." Girzone depicts God as so unconditionally loving and forgiving that he comes close to promoting what the late Anglican J.B. Phillips called "the God of the Heavenly Bosom," a God who is all comfort and no challenge, certainly not the God preached by Jesus. I was somewhat relieved, therefore, to see late in the book the inclusion of some balancing images, such as Jesus casting off those who refused to feed and clothe him as well as a final chapter on the importance of the Cross. But the sweetness and gentleness are still spread too thick for Girzone to capture anything like what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the cost of discipleship.

Girzone contrasts the barrenness of church services "so antiseptic and sterile that people gathering for worship relate to others only on the most superficial level" with the power of AA meetings in which people express their hopes and pains. Although there is more than a hint of truth in what Girzone is saying, the comparison is heavy handed. For Catholics, it misses both the purpose of the Mass and the deep experience that millions of Catholics actually have of the Eucharist. Also, programs like Renew have spawned many support-style, faith-sharing groups without turning the liturgy into a massive therapy session. I recommend as an antidote Henri Nouwen's With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life (Orbis, 1994), which attempts "to weave a network of connections between the daily celebration of the Eucharist and our daily human experience."

So what is the tremendous appeal of these books? Each is easy to read and each is endearing in its own way. Each attempts to reach that deepest part of our psyche from which we make our most fundamental decisions - whether we choose fear or trust, resentment or love, selfishness or God. But taken collectively, these works also reflect a larger cultural phenomenon. A social critic might argue that our consumerist culture has produced a literature that on the surface appears to challenge people, but that really reinforces the status quo by training individuals and small groups to conform to and benefit from the system without raising any deeper questions. These books redirect rather than confront society's individualist obsession with personal growth and fulfillment.

Such ideas are worth pondering. Today there is a great hunger for a spiritual dimension to life, as well as for a practical, accessible way to attaining it. In a culture where different religions and denominations seem to divide more than unite us, we search for that spiritual lingua franca that will enable us to communicate across fences about these most important of human concerns.

These advice books try to provide such a language. They do it by linking spirituality with what Carl Jung called "individuation," the process of becoming a differentiated individual who relies more upon one's own self to make decisions and less upon one's unexamined social conditioning.

There are various moments in the process of individuation. Early on, it can appear regressive. Narcissism can seem to heighten rather than slacken. Corresponding cultural fads in the '70s and '80s valued self-esteem, autonomy, unconditional love, and getting one's needs met. People bought books that told them to know their erogenous zones.

The current best sellers represent a more developed moment in this process. They both build upon and challenge the self-esteem movement. They're saying that there's more to life than subjective feelings; that personal fulfillment requires community; that the flip side of autonomy is responsibility; that when we run out of self we find God. From a Catholic perspective, these works might be read as a pre-evangelization for a more liturgically rooted, socially conscious, and biblically grounded presentation of the gospel message.

Many wares are for sale these days upon the supposedly less-traveled road of spirituality. For Catholics who avail themselves of such wares I have two suggestions. First, read also other works, such as those suggested above, that assume less of a dichotomy between spirituality and incarnational religion. Second, caveat emptor. Enjoy and learn from these best sellers, but read them the way their authors would have us view our church and traditions: critically, very critically.