Spiritual Growth Resource
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A Prayer Journal (Illustrated), by Flannery O'Connor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
This little book illuminates the spiritual roots of O'Connor's vocation to write. It becomes clear immediately that she always understood her calling as a writer to be grounded in her Christian faith. Although this volume includes both a typeset transcript and a facsimile of
Flannery's handwritten pages, I find that reading her actual handwriting touched me in a way that the transcript didn't. Still, those who find her schoolgirlish handwriting difficult to read will be glad to have the typeset version as well.
Reading this prayer journal has been especially poignant for me, as I too was once a graduate student at the University of Iowa, after attending a tiny liberal arts college as an undergraduate--but nearly forty years after Flannery O'Connor studied writing there. She and I studied in the same classrooms and even attended the same local parish, St. Mary's. Like Flannery, I found my time at the U of I tested my faith,
so I appreciate her articulation of her trials and aspirations that, in many ways, echo my own.
I must say that I found the editor's introduction rather obtuse -- like so many people in the literary world, Sessions seems to have a blind spot when it comes to O'Connor's spirituality. But that just makes it all the more evident how remarkable Flannery O'Connor was, to be able to achieve what she did in an intellectual milieu that hardly knew what to make of her.
- by Lisa A. Nicholas, Amazon.com reviewer
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St. Peter Julian Eymard: August 3. 1811 - 1868.
Born in La Mure d’Isère in southeastern France, Peter Julian’s faith journey drew him from being a priest in the Diocese of Grenoble in 1834, to joining the Marists in 1839, to founding the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament in 1856.
In addition to those changes, Peter Julian coped with poverty, his father’s initial opposition to Peter’s vocation, serious illness, a Jansenistic overemphasis on sin, and the difficulties of getting diocesan and later papal approval for his new religious community.
His years as a Marist, including service as a provincial leader, saw the deepening of his Eucharistic devotion, especially through his preaching of Forty Hours in many parishes. Inspired at first by the idea of reparation for indifference to the Eucharist, Peter Julian was eventually attracted to a more positive spirituality of Christ-centered love. Members of the men’s community which Peter founded alternated between an active apostolic
life and contemplating Jesus in the Eucharist. He and Marguerite Guillot founded the women's Congregation of the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament.
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