Following Jesus: “The Way, the Truth and the Life”

Praying with the Bible: An Ignatian Guide, 

by Nikolas Sintobin

(Messenger Publications, €14.95  / £12.95)

This book, written in a very accessible style,  provides lessons in reading the scriptures from an Ignatian point of  view and should find a wide readership.

At the very start of the Spiritual Exercises Ignatius announces that the first step has to be “composition, seeing the place “.   I have always thought this  simple guiding phrase, “Viendo el lugar”, seeing the place, is paradoxically the very heart of the exercises , the imaginative realisation of the gospel scene as an initial step to insight.  It lays the emphasis on the “sight” of insight.

Guidance

Nikolas Sintobon, is a Flemish Jesuit, who has published three other books with Messenger Publications, drawing on his long experience as a teacher and councillor.

He opens with some fifty tips for praying with the Bible in a general way, expelling the essential structure of why, where and how to pray.  For those seeking to follow “the way” Sintobin is a patient, revealing and kindly guide.

He follows this with an exemplar: a section on guided prayer drawn from Matthew 14: 22-33.  All of this fills some 50 pages or so, a good half of the book.

The reader has a balanced approach of preparation and then performance”

The section prepares and primes the readers to literally follow Jesus through a series of texts that illustrate the individual relations, with God, his sense  of “evil and sin” in both the world and one’s self. He then turns, however,  to following the life of Jesus, through his public career, the days of the Passion, and the fulfilment of the Resurrection.

This takes some 60 pages, forming the second half of the book. So the reader has a balanced approach of preparation and then performance.

So, how does this book suggest the individual about the enterprise of using passages from the Bible as a frame? He does not propose reading the Bible from the beginning , a task that these days would daunt many. Instead he offers a series of some fifty passages largely from the gospels, but also from the prophets  and the psalms, sources which for centuries have informed the ideas of all Christians.