Peter Costello
Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting
by Laura Kelly Fanucci (Veritas, €12.99)
Author Laura Fanucci, a hardworking American mother and theologian, places as an epigraph to her little book a saying of St Francis of Assisi: “It was easy to love God in all that was beautiful. The lessons of deeper knowledge, though, instructed me to embrace God in all things.”
For Laura, these “all things” include messy breakfasts and splashy bath times, and all the other chores that go with raising a modern family today.
Theme
This, however, is a very different book about family life than any you may have read before or heard about. Its theme is really the nature of the sacraments, baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, reconciliation, anointing the sick, matrimony and holy orders.
She writes about these, not in the usual theological or spiritual framework that religious authors usually use. She makes good use though of what she really knows, which is family life. In this way she manages to be at once homely about things familiar to us all, and uses them to provide spiritual insights which are immediately relevant.
In one of the chapters, for instance, she amusingly discusses the efforts she and her husband made to pick names for their children. They wanted names that could provide quick nicknames, never having had themselves names like that. But it all went awry somehow.
This leads very naturally into the nature of what you are called by name, and what you are called to do in life and how the calling to the priesthood follows a person. As vocations seem these days not to arise quite so naturally out of family life as they once did (or rather that what was once seen as a ‘vocation’ now has many dimensions which are fulfilled in other ways than being as priest). She too has a feeling for this.
All her chapters are like this in using familiar experiences of daily life. She uses them to provide a way of theology that seems arises naturally out of life rather than, as is so often the case, being imposed on life.
This is a book warmly recommended to new parents, to grandparents, and perhaps even to older children – I suspect it might arouse interesting thoughts in many young heads.