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Before the Living
God, by Ruth Burrows, OCD. HiddenSpring, 2008.
This is the autobiography of a nun who patterned
her life on the Little Flower of Jesus, knowing that God would turn the world upside down “to give his creature-child what she needs.” Hers is an account of a life not filled with extraordinary incidents, but a life rich with her own spiritual growth. This is a story of her relationship with God and with others, the story of her prayer, and how she tried to live the life of the Spirit. Burrows writes in intimately personal terms of her own struggles to live life to the fullest.
Burrows
describes her mother as a person of great tenderness, her father as the embodiment of safety. She was the third child in a family of eight, and Burrows united the two different temperaments of both her parents. As a brother was born a year after her birth, her cuddling days were short lived.
The story of Burrows’ life is written simply in the first person. She recorded her early school
days in detail, the sickness and deaths in her home, her reception of the sacraments, her struggles to get along with her siblings and classmates, her doubts about God’s existence, and eventually God’s efforts to get her attention to become a nun.
Burrows entered Carmel on September 1st, 1947, where she was placed under the guidance of a director ill-suited for the position. The
director was replaced by a nun with whom Burrows soon developed “a crush.” She experienced many highs and lows in her life as a cloistered religious, even at the age of forty encountering doubts about remaining a religious.
(Thanks to Sr. Irene Hartman OP for this review)
Paperback
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Consciousness, Conversion and
Grace by Carla Mae Streeter, OP Feb. 21, 28; March 7, 14,
21 6:30 - 8:00 Central Free-will
donation The Lenten season is a time for conversion, but we often wonder how to enter into our own transformation. The insights of Jesuit Bernard Lonergan can help us understand ourselves and how God heals us with our help. These five sessions will explore God's action and our intentional
response.
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Sts. Perpetua and Felicity: (d. 203). March 7
“When my father in his affection for me was trying to turn me from my purpose by arguments and thus weaken my faith, I said to him, ‘Do you see this vessel—waterpot or whatever it may be? Can it be called by any other name than what it is?’ ‘No,’ he replied. ‘So also I cannot call myself by any other name than what I am—a
Christian.’”
So writes Perpetua: young, beautiful, well-educated, a noblewoman of Carthage in North Africa, mother of an infant son and chronicler of the persecution of the Christians by Emperor Septimius Severus.
Perpetua’s mother was a Christian and her father a pagan. He continually pleaded with her to deny her faith. She refused and was imprisoned at 22.
In her
diary, Perpetua describes her period of captivity: “What a day of horror! Terrible heat, owing to the crowds! Rough treatment by the soldiers! To crown all, I was tormented with anxiety for my baby…. Such anxieties I suffered for many days, but I obtained leave for my baby to remain in the prison with me, and being relieved of my trouble and anxiety for him, I at once recovered my health, and my prison became a palace to me and I would rather have been there than anywhere
else.”
Despite threats of persecution and death, Perpetua, Felicity–a slavewoman and expectant mother–and three companions, Revocatus, Secundulus and Saturninus, refused to renounce their Christian faith. For their unwillingness, all were sent to the
public games in the amphitheater. There Perpetua and Felicity were beheaded, and the others killed by beasts. Felicity gave birth to a girl a few days before the games commenced.
Perpetua’s record of her trial and imprisonment ends the day before the games. “Of what was done in the games themselves, let him write who will.” The diary was finished by an eyewitness. Calendar of Saints
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