Book love

My thrifting this past weekend yielded three new books(!):

Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning

Forgotten Among the Lilies by Ronald Rolheiser

The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel

I'm super excited to read all three, and have already started Rolheiser's Forgotten Among the Lilies.  So far I'm really enjoying it!  Lots of deep thoughts that I keep having to stop and ponder.  (Don't you love those sorts of books?)  He's talking about the martyrdom of obscurity, the domesticity of our lives, the realities inherent in celibacy and in marriage, the loss of dreaming and idealism, all sorts of good stuff that is actually quite relevant to this stay-at-home-mama's life.  I am even underlining things--and I NEVER do that.  Ever. 

Have you read any good books lately?  I have some more here that I want to read...The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, David Platt's Radical, and The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen.  Not enough hours in the day to get lost in a good book, that is for sure! 

I want to share the following gem from Forgotten Among the Lilies.  One of the many things I have oh-so-uncharacteristically underlined. 


{What an incredible and tragic loss of idealism!  Such a philosophy voices despair because the deepest demand of love, Christianity, and of life itself is precisely the challenge to specialness, to what is most ideal.  Love, Christianity and life demand that we take the road less taken, that we be in restless cogitation for a higher eros, that we be one in a thousand.}


I love that.  Love, love, love.  So true and inspiring and so, so timely.  Also incredibly challenging, which is why he closes that chapter with these words:


{May we have the courage to uphold our ideals, even when we cannot fully live them.}


Amen!!!!




***I feel the need to add that I know Ronald Rolheiser is considered to be a little unorthodox in Catholic circles (he's a priest).  Still I am finding his book to be quite thought-provoking, even if I don't agree with everything he writes.