Peter Costello
The Bethany We Know: Exploring Relationship in the Company of Jesus
by Penny Roker RSM
(Veritas, £12.99)
The Gospels, dealing as they largely do with the public ministry of Jesus in the last few years of his life, give a vivid impression of a prophet on the move all the time: “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
But there were places where he could rest and feel at home, even for a little while, enjoying the normal round of family life, in a way he must have been able to do in Nazareth in the hidden years.
Being fully human he too needed a place where quiet affection was assured.
One of the places, perhaps the most important was the home at Bethany of Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus (who has given his name to the Arab village that is Bethany today).
Familiar
It is the thought of this familiar environment that has inspired this new book by Penny Roker. The subtitle “exploring relationship in the company of Jesus” points to the direction her reflections took.
She believes that what we can learn about the home at Bethany can be a model for our own small communities, for our own lives living with others.
“This village near Jerusalem was a home away from home for Jesus, a community like any other with its sufferings and petty conflicts, as well as its great loves and friendships.”
She points out that things at and around Bethany were far from perfect. Indeed, I would note, that though some say Bethany means “House of Dates”, it more probably means “House of Misery”.
Penny Roker is a Sister of Mercy of the Institute of Our Lady of Mercy Great Britain. A previous book of hers was entitled At Home with God. This one might well have been called At Home with Jesus.
This notion of domesticity gives the book an immediate context, which Roker explores in a very accessible way. The Mercy formation community in London of which she is a member is one kind of community, and indeed she says the book was inspired directly by conversations among her own sisters.
But she also worked as a prison chaplain and as spiritual director, so she has experience of others kinds as well.
She intends that the book be read over a course of group meetings chapter by chapter. But I suspect it will be as valuable to those who read her chapters by themselves. The chapters are wide ranging in their application and allusion.
Concern
From the very first one she is concerned with the types of people that any community or organisation has in its midst, often a very mixed bunch, as we all know, some kind and compassionate, others aggressive in their attitude to the people around them.
This is a thoughtful book, filled with the author’s own insightful ideas, but also capable on every pages of a remark or a notion that can be carried over into our daily lives.
It can happily be recommended to a wide readership, indeed the wider the better.
“It is in Bethany as much as anywhere,” she writes, “that we come to love as Jesus loved.” For many reader her book will enlarge their ideas about what it means to welcome Jesus into one’s own home.