The Word of the Street

This brief little book is a simply presented book with one simple aim, to make the word of God accessible and meaningful in the daily lives of his readers.

A Dominican since 1959, he has served in many roles abroad and in Ireland, but is currently at the Biblical Institute in Limerick, where he is concentrating on spreading the use of lectio divina, literarily holy reading. He was deeply influenced by a Holy Ghost father, Michael De Verteuil, and in these few pages he quotes him often.

The main aim is to relate what we read about in the New and Old Testaments to our own lives. He relates how in his family the family Bible, which had come as a gift from America 50 years before, was kept wrapped up and put away. It was referenced but not for everyday use.

He wants to change that completely. He suggests how in a series of steps moving through reading, mediation and prayer how those words which are indeed “the Word” can be put to work. He shows how in the Bible itself we can see the use of lectio divina where the prophets and the apostles and Jesus himself makes use of passages from Scriptures to illustrate there these.

Though he discusses the methods in relation to the homily and to the Eucharist, in the end he suggests that what comes from a very different culture can be given so to speak “an Irish accent.”

This little book will help very many people as a first test to a very absorbing practice, whose eventual aim is not just interior change, but a change too in how people live.  It involves taking the word out into the world to be “the word on the street”.

Clare of Assisi is another little book from John O’Brien, the Athlone-based Franciscan, whose publications have been noted in these columns from time to time. He opens with an evocation of the theme of Fellini’s moving film La Strada, a masterpiece of the post-war Italian neo-realism.

This is not inappropriate, for in discussing the lives St Francis and St Clare we move also in an Italian atmosphere. But it is as he explains and discusses one permeated by a sense of love. But unlike the love in La Strada this is a love which can be fully fulfilled. He quotes many passage from the saints and his hope is their words and experiences will provide for his reader some inspiration in their own daily struggle with the world. 

Between them these two books evoke and pass on a great deal of wisdom, not to be hoarded in private, but shared out there, ‘on the street’.