Briefly Reviewed: December 2022

The Mystery of Incomprehensible Love: The Eucharistic Message of Mother Mectilde of the Blessed Sacrament

By Mother Mectilde

Publisher: Angelico Press

Pages: 184

Price: $16.95

Review Author: Madison Zahaykevitz

Also reviewed:

The “Breviary of Fire”: Letters by Mother Mectilde of the Blessed Sacrament. By Mother Mectilde. Angelico Press. 342 pages. $19.95.

Vidi Speciosam: Meditations on the Most Holy Rosary. By Venerable Mother Mectilde of the Blessed Sacrament. The Cenacle Press at Silverstream Priory. 64 pages. €6.

For over 300 years the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration have treasured the writings of Mother Mectilde of the Blessed Sacrament (1614-1698), the foundress of their order. But Mother Mectilde’s writings have been largely forgotten outside her communities. Now, translated for the first time into English, her writings are ready to break open the heart of our complacency toward Christ. From Angelico Press and the Cenacle Press at Silverstream Priory come three volumes to assist in reviving eucharistic adoration today: The Mystery of Incomprehensible Love, The Breviary of Fire, and Vidi Speciosam: Meditations on the Most Holy Rosary.

The heart of The Mystery of Incomprehensible Love is Mectilde’s cry: “We do not know what the Eucharist is…. We are content to believe in the presence of Jesus Christ on the altar…without penetrating ourselves through with the wonders that He works there.” Though she was writing for a 17th-century cloister, Mother Mectilde addresses the frigidity of our modern hearts: we, too, hasten to forget that the God who empties Himself on the altar, though imperceptible to the senses, remains among us in His fullness. Yet Mother Mectilde does not merely rebuke; she also prays for the remedy: “May Jesus, ennothinged in the Blessed Sacrament, bring about in us the perfection of holy and complete ennothingment.” With this recasting of biblical kenosis, or “ennothingment,” Christ “draws [us] into his poverty and nakedness.” This volume also includes a biographical essay that reveals the dangerous adventure and political instability of Mother Mectilde’s life, which is in sharp contrast to the contemplative peace of her written voice. An afterword contextualizes her spirituality within the Benedictine and French traditions.

The next work, the aptly named Breviary of Fire, feels like a natural continuation of St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life. After the preliminary purgations of Salesian guidance comes this compilation of letters from Mother Mectilde to the Countess of Chateauvieux, her own searching Philothea. Meeting through God’s own “chance” during a routine charity visit, the countess found her life set aflame by the nun’s unremitting mercy. Breviary of Fire is the countess’s own arrangement of their correspondence as a spiritual guide for the Benedictine sisters. Eschewing overly particular references, it yet remains a personal and fiery record of a guiding friendship. With gentle harshness and unremitting charity reminiscent of St. John of the Cross, Mother Mectilde guides us through the disciplines of the spiritual life from baptism to death.

The final grace to this trio of treasures is a small volume, no more than a pocket vade-mecum, that may be the most beautiful Rosary book in print. Indeed, it is an objet d’art, with its sepia tones, heavy paper, and silver-gelatin photographs of a medieval Madonna. Collating Scripture texts with quotations from Mother Mectilde, Vidi Speciosam provides the wandering mind with substance during the daily Rosary, illuminating the mysteries with surprising insights. It describes Mother Mectilde as “a woman of the stature of St. Gertrude the Great or St. Teresa of Ávila.” She has been declared venerable.

Couples, Awaken Your Love!

By Robert Cardinal Sarah

Publisher: Ignatius

Pages: 138

Price: $15.95

Review Author: Christopher Beiting

From the indefatigable Robert Cardinal Sarah comes yet another book, this time on the subject of marriage. The book’s origin is a retreat the cardinal preached to couples in Lourdes, France, in May 2019; it is part marriage advice and part meditation on the precarious position of the family in the developed world. It addresses themes that readers of Sarah’s earlier books will find familiar: the power of silence, the importance of Scripture, the centrality of orthodoxy, and the call to personal holiness. Where Sarah breaks new ground is in considering the Sacrament of Matrimony within these themes.

Couples, Awaken Your Love! is divided into three parts. The first, “The Communion of Spouses in Christ,” is a meditation on the nature of marriage. As one might expect from a high churchman like Sarah, the imagery he uses is eucharistic in nature, with particular focus on the chalice as a symbol of marriage. One major reason he does this is to remind spouses that marriage, like the Eucharist, is a sacrament and needs to be treated as such. Sarah also presents many examples of marriage from Scripture, and it is telling that the examples he chooses are not always happy ones; he emphasizes the likes of Hosea and Gomer more than Tobias and Sarah. He also includes a meditation on the parable of the prodigal son. Why? The cardinal is savvy enough to realize that there are many troubled marriages out there, and before many couples can move forward, they need to undergo a time of mutual forgiveness. Cardinal Sarah is no starry-eyed romantic: He realizes that marriage is a lot of work in the best of times, and we are not living in the best of times. Many of us are broken, and our marriages are correspondingly broken and in need of healing. Christ, who suffered and yet brought healing to persons, can also bring healing to struggling marriages.

The book’s second part goes off in a completely different direction, as it considers “Christian Spouses Facing the Challenges of Our Era.” Here Cardinal Sarah considers the variety of threats against marriage in contemporary society, and it is easy to imagine that the people who participated in the 2019 Lourdes retreat that prompted this book were surprised by the inclusion of this material and not exactly cheered by it. The cardinal does not mince words, and those readers who are not married will probably find this part most interesting (indeed, it ought to be read by pastors, so they can give good advice to their flocks). In Sarah’s estimation, contemporary threats to marriage and the family are of apocalyptic proportions, and he cites favorably the 2008 words of Carlo Cardinal Caffarra, who shared the comments of Sr. Lucia of Fatima that “the final [sometimes translated as decisive] battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will concern marriage and the family.” Adultery, infidelity, contraception, abortion, human embryo experimentation, pornography, polygamy, divorce, homosexuality, trivialization of the Mass and the Eucharist, and the omnipresence of a duplicitous media — all come under the cardinal’s stinging critique. The ongoing gender revolution, he says, “turns the individual into a zombie.” The Church is proving to be the last bulwark against barbarism. It’s not a pretty prospect, and there’s a temptation to despair. What can we do?

Cardinal Sarah’s solution is a program of radical orthodoxy. First, it is important for Christians not to compromise with the degenerate standards of the world. He reminds us that the earliest followers of Christ likewise faced an anti-family culture. What did they do? They accepted no compromise and remained faithful to the Gospel. In doing so, they provided leaven to a pagan world that gradually turned into a Christian one with respect for marriage and the dignity of women. The example is not flip or trivial for Sarah, as his own parents were converts from paganism, and pagans populated the village in which he grew up. Few highly placed churchmen have direct experience of the ugliness the first Christians faced, but Sarah is one of them. In the modern world as in the era of St. Paul, Christians are in a spiritual combat and need to behave accordingly.

What are our weapons? Cardinal Sarah points to a number of things we have that the first Christians didn’t, despite their incredible faith. First, we have the Rosary, one of the most powerful forms of prayer available, and one which married couples should avail themselves daily. Along with the Rosary goes devotion to Mary, our model of motherhood, who crushes the head of Satan. We also have the power of sacred silence, to improve our prayer and take us out of the din of the modern world. And at this critical time, faithful Christian spouses play a central role in the great call to personal holiness. Their contra mundum example of faith and fidelity is an important element in the new evangelization for which the Church has been calling. Such efforts can, of course, be a struggle, and the cardinal acknowledges that they can often constitute a form of martyrdom.

Overall, Couples, Awaken Your Love! is something of a mixed bag. Speaking as someone who has helped run parish marriage-enrichment programs over the years, it is not the first work to which I would turn. On the other hand, the book’s conjugal prayer plan (offered in an appendix) is quite good and is something I might use in a future marriage program. In any case, it is vital to heed the words of Cardinal Sarah. He writes, “St. John Paul II said repeatedly that ‘the future of humanity passes through the family.’” Further, “if the final battle between God and the kingdom of Satan concerns marriage and the family, it is urgent for us to realize that we are already in the center of this spiritual battle.”

Steeped in Stories: Timeless Children’s Novels to Refresh Our Tired Souls

By Mitali Perkins

Publisher: Broadleaf Books

Pages: 237

Price: $24.99

Review Author: Thomas Banks

In his essay collection The Lost Childhood (1952) Graham Greene observes that the reading that leaves the most indelible mark on our minds consists of those books we complete before our teenage years. From personal experience, I believe this is true. I was fortunate to receive my secondary education at a school in which we read Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Ovid and Catullus, as well as Shakespeare and Milton. But the place my mind turns to when I hear or read the word Greece is the richly illustrated pages of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, a favorite storybook of my elementary years. As for Shakespeare, I recall that on my first reading of Julius Caesar in fifth grade (or thereabouts), my reaction was that it wasn’t quite as good as Charles and Mary Lamb’s retelling in Tales from Shakespeare and was unforgivably devoid of pictures. Even now when I pick up Julius Caesar, the image that recurs upon reading Antony’s great speech is the accompanying illustration from the Lambs’ book, which I have not opened in a very long time.

Why this should be is not certain. Perhaps the egoism of adolescence and adulthood, when we become more prone to seeing ourselves as the main character of our own developing story, tends to dull our responsiveness to others. This is a sad price to pay for greater prudence, increased patience, and all the other gifts of growing up. Because of this, when I find in an interview or memoir a reflection on a writer’s influences, I am interested chiefly to learn what books formed the preoccupations of his childhood. Such an exploration appears in Mitali Perkins’s Steeped in Stories, wherein the award-winning author of several children’s books takes the reader into the world of her imagination’s beginnings — into the works that made her want to write stories of her own.

Perkins has, it appears, at least one formative advantage over other creative writers: She has lived in more worlds than one, having been born in West Bengal and settling in the United States, between which she spent much of her early life in places as diverse as Cameroon and Mexico. She begins the story of her youthful literary interests in the children’s section of the Queens Public Library, where she was “no longer trapped in chronological time nor in geographical space. I was visiting Jo and her sisters in nineteenth-century Concord…entering Narnia with Lucy and meeting Mr. Tumnus, sitting in Matthew’s buggy as Anne made her way to Green Gables.” The opening pages and those other parts in which Perkins describes (all too briefly) her travels and first fascinations with the world of stories are the most interesting and best written in the book. She has obviously lived more than a paper-and-ink existence, something that cannot be said of many writers today. I hope she might someday write, at greater length, the tale of her own life; I would much rather read that autobiography than my own.

Perkins’s purpose in Steeped in Stories is of a different order. Summarized briefly, it might be called “childhood inspirations recollected in maturity.” She has written an account not only of what Narnia, Middle Earth, and the March sisters meant to her when she first discovered them, but what they have come to mean to her nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita (“Midway in our life’s journey”). We should grant, in the interest of critical justice, that this is not necessarily an easy task. It is difficult for an adult to write about any childhood preoccupation without coming across as something of a snob, and Perkins avoids the temptation to look down her nose at her young self in the days of past enchantments.

Perkins’s examinations — interrogations, rather — of C.S. Lewis, Louisa May Alcott, J.R.R. Tolkien, et al. are less successful. In a chapter on Lewis’s Narnia series, Perkins imagines herself cross-examining “Uncle Jack” with the purpose of discovering why he chose to introduce a fictional group of dark-skinned people as villains in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. At the end of this fictitious interview, the ghost of Lewis is made to acknowledge his literary offenses, and he departs with the gift of the author’s absolution — a gift, it hardly needs saying, that is enormously condescending.

For a writer so keenly excited by the ethical nature of fiction, Perkins suffers from occasional moments of myopia. In the same section on Lewis, she wonders if his wife, Joy Davidman, ever “challenged him in the same way” Perkins herself attempts. Davidman, Perkins suggests, as someone who “had once been a communist and [who] was a thoughtful intellectual,” might have offered him a valuable lesson on the presentation of marginalized peoples. Davidman was a poet and an Old Testament scholar whose surviving writings give solid evidence of a formidable mind. Why her status as a one-time member of the CPUSA should be taken as a credit to her (or to anyone’s) moral intelligence is a mystery to me.

Perkins also explains Lewis’s alleged prejudice against non-white people in the following passage, which she puts in the mouth of Uncle Jack himself: “You must remember that I was born in 1898 and grew up in the British Raj. I also fought in a war, which was devastating. The Ottoman Empire was a brutal enemy.” As a piece of creative psychoanalysis, this is remarkably flat. The notion that Lewis, an Irishman whose service during the First World War took him nowhere near the Ottoman Empire, and whose published works contain little or no personal opinion on the British Empire in India, might be taken to have held the common racial attitudes of the pukka sahib immortalized in A Passage to India and Burmese Days is, quite honestly, contemptible at best.

Perkins’s oddly inquisitorial attitude toward not only Lewis but writers generally is not incidental to this chapter but is shot through the book as a whole. “Just as we’re called to do with our elders in real life, we might want to try and forgive the authors who penned [old stories]. That’s what we’ll do in the conclusion of this book,” she advises the reader. I would like to think that death might be counted on to have saved Lewis and the several other authors who appear in this work from the posthumous re-education Perkins sees fit to inflict upon them. But of the Last Things I know nothing more than any other layman, and I may well be mistaken on this score.

The sentence that reveals the animating idea behind this book informs us that “all stories are didactic by nature.” Yes, but they aren’t. We may learn any number of things from works as different as The Pilgrim’s Progress and Alice in Wonderland, but it needs an especially obtuse interpreter not to see that the author of the first wrote with an earnestly instructive religious purpose in nearly every sentence, while the mind behind the second had no intention but the fanciful (and perfectly honorable) wish to amuse his reader. Any kind of criticism that overlooks this has blindfolded itself from the outset.

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