When the soul communicates with God

Too busy to really get into the day’s news (more than scan a lot of headlines for a general view of what’s happening), I swept across this article in First Things, “How to Pray” and kept going…..until it registered that I’d just read that, and wanted to get back to it. Took all day, but I finally just read it. And was inspired.

It’s a review of “The Little Red Book of Wisdom,” by Mark DeMoss. Both the review and the book are very interesting.

DeMoss’ prayer or request of God has for years been for wisdom: “wisdom to handle relationships well, to manage a business and advise clients, to be a good husband and father.” In twenty-three short chapters, he draws on his own experience, in business and in his personal life, to offer principles for “the gaining of wisdom.” These concern truth-telling in building a corporate culture, the importance of writing letters and using technology wisely, and about finding focus and listening to older people. It is not so much a book of etiquette or a self-help primer as it is a meditation on the moral life, particularly the hard work necessary to achieve a good life while acting morally.

How utterly appealing, not only by contrast to the modern relativism, but as stand-alone noble inspiration. After that paragraph alone, I’m thinking ‘I love this book!’ It’s encouraging, hopeful, transcendent.

There’s another little book reviewed in this article, that approaches the exhortation to goodness….well, differently.

The saints suffered. Therese had tuberculosis, Teresa of Avila had cancer of the stomach. Padre Pio had perpetual diarrhea and asthma. Bernadette had asthma too. Mother Cabrini had high fever due to malaria she contracted during her travels. Holiness is not for wimps and the cross is not negotiable, sweetheart, it’s a requirement.

That’s the inimitable Mother Angelica (though Raymond Arroyo does a pretty good imitation…), Foundress of Eternal Word Television Network and the Missionaries of the Eternal Word. She shares plenty of wisdom from the spiritual life in her own ‘little book’, which Raymond put together and published this year. I need to add both to my stack of backed up volumes waiting here to be read…

But continuing on in this article, one encounters Goethe. And it all goes together in contemplating prayer, and what it actually means to talk to God.