Reviews for Catholics Can Come Home Again: A Guide for the Journey of Reconciliation with Inactive Catholics

The average rating for Catholics Can Come Home Again: A Guide for the Journey of Reconciliation with Inactive Catholics based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-23 00:00:00 William Jones This short book was written in the form of a dialog between the author, Aelred (1110-1167), who was the abbot of the monastery at Rievaulx in Yorkshire, and a few of his monks. Aelred answers their questions about the nature of friendship--its benefits and pitfalls and how it is to be cultivated. The work is divided into three short "books", the first of which was written ca. 1140 and the latter two in the few years before Aelred's death. Douglass Roby provides a splendid introduction to Aelred's Spiritual Friendship, providing details of Aelred's life and placing this work in the context of its time. He provides a thorough yet succinct summary of Aelred's philosophy of friendship, as it relates to his more general philosophy of love, which is expounded in Mirror of Charity, written earlier in Aelred's life. For Aelred, friendship is a specific case of the more general phenomenon of love. Christians are commanded to love all people, but friendship is a special form of love in which we naturally enjoy someone's company. According to Aelred, "the fountain and source of friendship is love. There can be love without friendship, but friendship without love is impossible" (Book 3:2). Love may proceed from reason alone (as when we love our enemies) or from affection alone, and sometimes from both simultaneously, "when he, whom reason urges should be loved because of the excellence of his virtue, steals into the soul of another by the mildness of his character and the charm of a praiseworthy life. In this way, reason unites with affection so that love is pure because of reason and sweet because of affection." The 6th C. monastic Rule of St. Benedict had a rather cool view toward particular friendships because of their potential to introduce favoritism, jealousies and divisiveness into the community of monks. Aelred, while cognizant of the need to be watchful for and vigilant against the potential dangers, nonetheless maintained that true friendship is a virtue that is not only worth pursuing but is positively necessary for one to be truly human: "Scarcely any happiness whatever can exist among mankind without friendship, and a man is to be compared to a beast if he has no one to rejoice with him in adversity, no one to whom to unburden his mind if any annoyance crosses his path or with whom to share some unusually sublime or illuminating inspiration. ... But what happiness, what security, what joy to have someone to whom you dare to speak on terms of equality as to another self; one to whom you need have no fear to confess your failings; one to whom you can unblushingly make known what progress you have made in the spiritual life; one to whom you can entrust all the secrets of your heart and before whom you can place all your plans! What therefore is more pleasant than to unite oneself to the spirit of another and the two to form one ... 'A friend' says the wise man (Sirach 6:16)'is the medicine of life.' ... as the apostle says 'shoulder to shoulder they bear one another's burdens' (Galatians 6:2)" (Book 2:10-13). Cicero's De Amicitia clearly had a major impact on Aelred's thinking about friendship, and he quotes Cicero liberally in Spiritual Friendship. However, he also differs from Cicero on some points, and a distinctly Christian perspective permeates Aelred's philosophy of friendship. He insists that friendship springs directly from God, allowing one of Aelred's interlocutors in the dialog to propose the formula "God is friendship." Whereas Cicero saw friendship as amoral--neither good nor bad--Aelred treats friendship as a virtue. Cicero struggled with the limits of friendship--how far should one go for the sake of friend? Should one commit sin for the benefit of a friend? For Aelred there is no limit to friendship. We are called by Christ to lay down our life for our friends. The decision of whether or not to do wrong for the sake of a friend is almost a non-issue for Aelred: "For that love is shameful and unworthy of the name of friendship where anything foul is demanded of a friend" (Book 2:39), and "any action should be denied a friend which brings about the death of the soul, that is sin" (Book 2:69). As Douglass Roby summarizes: "It is thus impossible to prefer a friend to morality; as soon as morality is damaged, friendship vanishes." This leads to Aelred's assertion that true friendship is possible only between those who share a desire for good: "For as long as anyone delights in an evil thing from desire of evil, as long as sensuality is more gratifying than purity, indiscretion than moderation, flattery than correction, how can it be right for such a one to even aspire to friendship, when it springs from an esteem for virtue?" (Book 2:38). Aelred notes that we use the term "friendship" for all sorts of relationships that do not meet the demands of true friendship. He takes Cicero's definition of friendship as "agreement on matters human and divine with charity and goodwill", and makes a distinction between true friendships, which are based on true love--a combination of both charity and goodwill--versus false friendships, which are based on imperfect or corrupt love--love that is lacking in the combination of both charity and goodwill. As Roby points out, Aelred (perhaps differently than Cicero intended) uses the term "good will" for "a rational and voluntary choice to benefit someone", and he uses the term "charity" to mean "the enjoyment of our natural affection toward someone." Aelred thus distinguishes two types of false friendships: (1) those for carnal pleasure, which exhibit the charity of natural affection but offend against "good will" and (2) those for material gain, which exhibit the rational choice necessary for good will but offend against charity "by simulating an affection towards a person which is really felt only towards his goods." In true friendship "there is nothing dishonorable, nothing deceptive, nothing feigned; whatever there is, is holy, voluntary and true" (Book 2:18). Yet Aelred allows that even false friendships have a certain value and may have the potential to develop into true friendships: "True friendship advances by perfecting itself, and the fruit is derived from feeling the sweetness of that perfection" (Book 1:46). According to Aelred, even a true, spiritual friendship requires careful tending to weed out seeds of corruption that might degrade the goodness of love into mere cupidity. It is cupidity that can breed jealousies, factions and divisiveness, whereas "true love builds up the community and can only serve to unify, not to tear apart" (Roby, p. 21). In terms cultivating true friendship, Aelred advises "the beginnings of spiritual friendship ought to possess, first of all, purity of intention, the direction of reason and the restraint of moderation" (Book 2:59). Despite all challenges, the rewards of true friendship are worth the effort. "Even though the affections are difficult to control, this virtue, like all Christian virtues, is available to anyone who humbly seeks it. To renounce friendship as too difficult is not only to renounce virtue, but even true humanity" (Roby, p. 25). Aelred's Spiritual Friendship continues with advice for testing potential friends and gradually admitting them into one's trust, and with reflections on the things that can injure friendship. It concludes with an autobiographical description of the two deepest friendships of Aelred's life. All in all, I think this work is a gift to humanity. In our day, or at least in my life, true friendship seems to be rare and undervalued. I recall a number of years ago being asked to be a guest speaker at a conference for 6th grade girls about women in science. During the lunch break, the facilitator instructed the girls that now was the time for "networking". She winked at the girls, smiling at the clever way in which ordinary socializing could be made to seem more valuable and important by calling it networking. This almost made me gag. What have we come to if friendship (or even mere socializing) is not considered valuable in and of itself? Do we really imagine that networking can replace friendship? Networking seems like the perfect example of Aelred's second type of false friendship'friendship for material gain or other form of advancement. I suppose that at least we are being honest to not even pretend that networking is a form of friendship, but I worry about promulgating the perception that true friendship is not a necessary ingredient of a happy life. Until fairly recently, the only true friends I had were those relationships that I formed in graduate school. The demands of life as a new faculty member left little time for friendship, and the fact that the decision about my tenure would be largely in the hands of my peers, made it difficult for me to really open up to my colleagues. At the same time, I felt I had little in common with the Christians that I met at church. I had only colleagues whom I needed to please in order to gain their approval, and acquaintances whom I tried to love, but without much natural affection or connection. It took me a long time to realize that my heart longed for something more'for that true friendship that Aelred describes. Without it, we risk the danger of becoming mere automatons, networking our way through life in order to accomplish the tasks on our "to do" lists.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-12-26 00:00:00 Louis Ludwig This book, and the experience of reading it, is one for which the star system of Goodreads is ill-suited; these four stars designate that I found the book of limited and great value. Aelred defines spiritual friendship (only one of many possible good Christian relationships, though the best) as a friendship that unites reason and affection. A spiritual friend is at once someone who is objectively very good for us and someone toward whom our heart greatly warms. Other kinds of relationships do not feature those two characteristics in deep and equal proportion. Aelred says that, as long as the spiritual friendship disobeys no laws (those limits set down by reason), there is no limit to its possible affection, and consequently to its payoff in this world and the next, whereby the intimacy with a person here foreshadows and leads to intimacy with God. The intimacy is something like union into one soul; it is eternal. As a monk writing to and about monks, his model of friendship depends on sameness, not difference. You look for a spiritual friend who shares as many of your best qualities as possible, you know how to love your friend because you are discerning enough to love that which is best about yourself, and you two gradually become more like one person (even acting alike). The emotional fervour he describes is often relegated by our culture into eroticism, but he never takes that path, nor ever apparently considers it. He does pick up the "one person" (though not "one flesh") stuff from the Bible, as if friendship is kind of like heart marriage, but one gets the impression that erotic expression of the affective part of this friendship would be beside the point, would slow it down on its headlong rush toward spirit. I find Aelred's concept of spiritual friendship inspiring and plausible. I do get the feeling that spiritual friendship comes naturally to Aelred. He's very good at definition and description because he's experienced what he's talking about and wants us to know that it is A Thing. And so it is. But because it comes so naturally to him, he's a bit less effective in discussing the practical intricacies of what just comes to him on instinct. He talks a lot about picking and developing the right friend, and about what to do if your friend flakes off, but not as much about handling your own failures and limitations, because it doesn't seem like the sort-of-sainted "Bernard of the North" had many of those to struggle with. Someone needs to write a sequel about how to pop the hood on a spiritual friendship and tune up the mechanism. "Spiritual Friendship: Best Practices," something like that.