My Life With the Saints by James Martin Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of My Life With the Saints
Book Review: A relationship between a few Saints and a Jesuit Priest.
Summary: 5 Stars
James Martin is a Jesuit priest and in this book he takes the reader through his relationship with a few saints. He explains how he looks to them for inspiration and guidance. The book is well written and it is an excellent cursory work on the life of a handful of saints. Because of this book, I already see myself ordering other books on the life of a couple of saints that appeal to me for their significant contributions to this world. If you are looking for a detailed biography of any particular saint, this is not the right book. If, however, you are seeking a better understanding of the useful examples of saints this is a good start. Book Review: Highly recommended
Summary: 5 Stars
Very interesting, informative and inspiring read. I read it in 15 or 20 minute increments each day. Book Review: My Life With The Saints
Summary: 5 Stars
I have found it very inspiring and find it a book worth re-reading many times. I have given it as a gift to many friends.Book Review: my life with the saints
Summary: 4 Stars
a very interesting and thought-provoking book of essays ... I found the modern saints most intriguing Book Review: Grace building upon nature: 17 case studies, plus the author's life!
Summary: 4 Stars
This quote from Psalm 137 appears twice in James Martin's "My Life with the Saints." Grace builds upon nature, he says, paraphrasing Aquinas. All of us find our vocations in following what "God awakens primarily through our desires." (383) We do what we do best when it is that and only that which we can do best, to be our best, for ourselves and those around us.
Reading Fr. Martin's book, I was taken for a few hours into a series of encounters that he uses to link his own spiritual journey with that of various holy people, canonized or not, but all deserve to be, if not from the jittery perspective of the Vatican when it comes to Dorothy Day or Thomas Merton. Perhaps appropriately for this book, however, it's these two twentieth-century converts who may speak most powerfully to many who will read these pages. Fr. Martin grew up outside Philly, went to Wharton (the famed business college at Penn) and then worked a few years for GE in some corporate drone coveted position he soon found did not meet his dreams of whatever vague ideas he thought Wall Street would bring his twenty-something life to fulfill. He started thinking about a change, happened upon the last few minutes of a PBS documentary on Thomas Merton one night while sitting on a dreary beige couch, and two years later entered the Jesuits. A sign of how rare this is nowadays when he was one of two novices that year in his province.
His straightforward account articulated well for me what I had noticed but never really comprehended during my college years among the few Jesuits that once in a while I met or had for teachers. Their practicality, matter-of-fact levelheadedness, and simple committment to as some redneck comedian's slogan goes, 'get it done.' No dramatic piety, no papist skulduggery, no flowing cassocks or overwrought flair. Fr. Martin tells of 17 different men and women whose lives inspired him, not in some saccharine moment of divine inspiration or even Joycean epiphany, but through hard-won truths eked out in a prison ministry, a Nairobi assignment, a Kingston ghetto, the Cabrini-Green projects, a philosophy class, a wish to find a better toy than Sea Monkeys or a swimming Tony the Tiger, or-- I found this particularly poignant-- his own frustration at not being able to go for a PhD and become a full-time biblical scholar due to a physical limitation he developed during his studies that prevents him from typing more than half an hour daily.
The chapters are admittedly uneven. Those on more familiar saints such as Francis, Joan of Arc, Joseph, Mary, Peter, and Bernadette are all fine, but lack the charge of fresh insights that fill the pages of Fr. Martin's thoughts on Merton, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Aloysius Gonzaga, or the Ugandan Martyrs. In explaining the appeal of more contemporary or lesser known holy men and women, the energy of the narrative rises and the comparisons gain intensity and insights proliferate. There is a helpful suggested reading list for each "saint" after the main narrative, and book clubs or reading circles will find a few questions at the end also to spark discussion and reflection.
Secular critics often employ the term hagiography today as a perjorative. But Martin reminds me in his carefully composed thoughts the reason we need to read about those holier than us. Martin cites Johannes Baptist Metz, a German theologian. "All too easily we live alienated from the truth of our being. The threatening nothingness of our poor infinity and infinite poverty drives us here and there among the distractions of everyday cares." (246-7) Like any of us, this Jesuit has his moments of what Ignatius of Loyola defined as "dryness," and one of the best chapters here explores how the first Jesuit himself learned to distinguish what led the heart away from peace and what drew the spirit towards consolation. The "discernment" at the core of the Jesuit form of contemplation within action, of the Spiritual Exercises' "composition of place" that stimulates the imagination so the seeker can more fully experience the whole sensory array of encountering the holy beyond intellectual comprehension or affective appreciation is conveyed well.
Martin, near the end, paraphrases Merton. The "false self" is what we present to the world, what we think will please others. The "true self" is who we are before God. How to be a saint? Sanctity is discovering our reality within, what we are called to be-- the derivation of "vocation," after all. Merton: "For me to be a saint means to be myself." (387)
Which is no easier for Mother Teresa than me, I found to some surprise. Apparently after a "locution," hearing the voice of God on a train in 1946 that moved her to leave the convent walls for a life in Calcutta's slums, she suffered fifty years of darkness, estrangment from God, unsure that there was even such a source. Which makes her determination all the more admirable, hidden as her own "dark night of the soul" apparently has been until a recent biographer unveiled it.
The cover of this book I found particularly well chosen to illustrate the humanity and everyday weaknesses of people we easily place on pedestals and lacquer as icons. John Nava's tapestries of the "Communion of the Saints" decorate the newly constructed walls of Los Angeles' downtown Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. These enormous fabrics, like no other iconography, conveyed to me as I walked past them in the vast sanctuary what saints look like. Hard as it is to conceive, they are familiar, without nimbus. Poised, their gaze fixed on the center altar and a Presence that we cannot verify, nonetheless they in their composed peace show us where to look. And, Martin and Nava remind us, they who contemplate the beatific vision look just like us.