We find ourselves beginning the season of Great Lent. May I commend to you these titles for your spiritual reading and meditation (listed in no particular order):
Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent
St Gregory of Nazianzus, Festal Orations
Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence
Met. Hierotheos, A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain
Archimandrite Zacharias, The Hidden Man of the Heart
John Behr, Becoming Human
Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
Jean-Pierre de Caussade, The Sacrament of the Present Moment
Barsanuphius and John, Letters from the Desert
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
John McGuckin, The Book of Mystical Chapters
St Gregory Palamas, The Saving Work of Christ
St Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ
Frederica Mathewes-Green, The Illumined Heart
Martin Thornton, Christian Proficiency
Michael Ramsey, Be Still and Know
Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land
Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing
Aidan Hart, Beauty, Spirit, Matter
George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons
Which books would you recommend for Lent?
I’d perhaps add to this great list St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation (I believe it’s a great read leading to Holy Week), and Fr. John Behr’s The Mystery of Christ.
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These are recommendations I made last year.
https://theologicalrejuvenation.wordpress.com/2017/03/03/lenten-reading-recommendations/
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Saint Gregory of Narek
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The one that monks and nuns read regularly during Great Lent: The Ladder of saint John Climacus
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St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Two Homilies on Alms-Giving.
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Matthew the Poor’s Communion of Love. Anything by Theophan the Recluse.
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MacDonald’s The Miracles of Our Lord seems pleasantly read at LibroVox.org, with a link to an online text.
Charles Williams’s selections of (daily) readings, The Passion of Christ: Being the Gospel Narrative of the Passion with Short Passages Taken from the Saints and Doctors of the Church, which he prepared in 1939, and his New Christian Year (1941), for the relevant days. Tom Wills handily draws on both for an online diary (with additional index):
http://tomwills.typepad.com/thenewchristianyear/
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The Williams selections were one of my last year’s suggestions. Another was:
Richard Rolle and Richard Raynal: Loving Jesus in Late Mediaeval England and Now
The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary (1912) is a vivid historical novel of early Fifteenth-century England, about someone trying to live as close to Christ as he can, written by Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914). Various scans are available online in the Internet Archive, for example:
https://archive.org/details/historyofrichard00bens
It is also transcribed at Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/15808/pg15808-images.html
As, for example, J.R.R. Tolkien pretends to be translating an ancient work in his book, The Lord of the Rings, so Benson has an elaborate “Introduction” in which he pretends to be translating all that survives of an otherwise lost mediaeval book. Behind this fiction to a greater or lesser extent is a real Englishman who so tried to live, Richard Rolle, many of whose writings survive and have been published, also in modern English translation. In fact, in 1905 Benson had published a short life of Rolle, included in a book with translations of prayers he wrote, among various short medieval works, A Book of the Love of Jesus : A Collection of Ancient English Devotions, which is also scanned in the Internet Archive, for example:
https://archive.org/stream/abookoftheloveof00unknuoft#page/n7/mode/2up
The life of Richard Rolle is here on pages 217-27, while you can see from the “Notes” (pp. 205-15) which selections are from Rolle’s works. A contemporary encyclopedia article about Rolle by Edwin Burton (who also published modernized versions of some of his work) can be found here:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13119a.htm
Benson’s novel is set almost a century after the death of Rolle, during the reign of Henry VI. It includes a fascinating picture of what ‘sanctuary’ was probably like.
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