Journey of Love: Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, a Readers Guide
by Eugene McCaffrey OCD, with a foreword by Vincent O’Hara OCD (Teresian Press, £4.00; www.carmelitebooks.com).
The author is well known from his talks, retreats and his writings on St Teresa, largely at Avila in Dublin where he is based. This little book, written for the fifth centenary of the birth of the saint, is intended as a beginners guide to her great work, The Interior Castle.
That is a book which from its size and nature daunts many readers.
“The Interior Castle is essentially about prayer,” Fr Eugene explains, “as indeed are all Teresa’s writings. But it is about much more: it celebrates the great enterprise of the soul searching for its own deepest meaning, balanced between human longing and divine initiative.”
This is a book mercifully free from any kind of academic jargon. The author relates directly to the reader, his one aim being to communicate what he sees as the great message of St Teresa, that our journey too is an interior one, but one which aims to fulfil God’s dream for us.
Those starting out to encounter St Teresa, through their private reading, or through a group, will find this book a reassuring preliminary. It is possible to reach the destination which the saints say God intends for us.
Oxygen for the Soul: Prayers, Reflections and Inspiration for Teenagers
by Ailís Travers (Veritas, €12.99)
This little book, attractively produced, is aimed by its teacher compiler at a teenage audience. It includes many traditional prayers and reflections, but also other pieces intended for the age of TV, Facebook and what is trending on Twitter. It is organised so as to provide words and thoughts for all occasions, for everyday events in the lives young people at school and outside.
Many items are of necessity familiar. Others, especially those culled from poets and philosophers, and people of experience, are not. But one is very striking, a parable of the two pots, which might easily have come from some lost gospel.
A woman goes to the well with two pots, one perfect and the other cracked. When she returns home the perfect pot is full of water, and full of its own conceit. The cracked pot is half empty; it is unhappy and ashamed of itself. But the old woman points out that along the path back from the well on the cracked pot’s side there are always flowers. There are none on the other side.
This, she tells the cracked pot, is because she plants seeds there and the water that seemed to be lost has given life to them – and gaiety to the house when they are brought indoors. So the cracked pot’s task was just as important as the perfect pot’s.
Seeing as how we are all cracked pots, in one way or the other, this is a very acute notion.
All the author’s royalties are going to the Blue Ribbon Fund, which provides financial support for families of transplant patients. P.C.