Peter Costello
Forgiveness Remembers: A Journey into the heart of God
by Paul Farren & Robert Miller, forewords by Bishop Richard Chartres and the late Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor (Instant Apostle, £6.99)
This is a small book with a big – and important – message. Paul Farren is Administrator of St Eugene’s Cathedral in Derry, and his friend Robert Miller is Rector of the united parishes of Christ Church, Culmore, Muff and St Peter.
Here they are bridging the divide with a book based on their experiences of the situation in Northern Ireland. There is message that “true forgiveness lies the other side of grace-filled remembering. The past cannot be denied; it must be come to terms with.”
This they have to admit calls for patience and the growth of understanding to achieve these; we have all to break out of the repetitive cycles of fear, hate and violence. They are filled with hope for the future, which is reassuring.
Readers will find this short but well expressed book illuminating, far more so than many a larger text, though this book reinforces much of what is discussed by David Rieff’s In Praise of Forgetting (Yale, £10.99).
Let Advent be Advent
by Vincent Sherlock (Messenger Publications, €3.95)
Fr Sherlock’s earlier publications will be familiar to many readers. In this pamphlet (which easily fits pocket or purse) he provides a small but effective resource for those with busy lives. In the sections he covers the three weeks of Advent as well as the eight days leading to the Nativity.
His reflections are drawn not only from scriptural passages, but also passages in his life. They are brief and very much to the point, simple yet expressive. There is also a surprising end piece, a lovely poem which I take to be his own called ‘They Walk to the Back of their Home’ which somehow serves to bring it all together and to summarise the spirit of Christmas. The booklet is worth purchasing for the poem alone!
Knowing God Through the Year
by J. I. Packer (Hodder, £5.99)
J. I. Packer has been theologian emeritus of the Anglican Church in North America since its inception in 2009. The essence of this book is drawn from his earlier book Knowing God (1973). It provides reading for six days of the weeks of the year, arranged in a simple order of weeks, rather than by the more familiar canonical calendar.
There is no reading for Sundays as he assumes his readers will be at the services of their own churches on the Sunday. It does have to start in the New Year, the buyer can begin on the Monday of the week after they purchase it. Being based on quotations from the Old and New Testaments it provides a series of reflections which will be found of service to many Christians in other traditions.
Among the writers who profoundly influenced his ecumenical spirit was C. S. Lewis.