Mother Teresa "…in my own words" by Jose Luis Gonzalez-Balado

Mother Teresa's work among the poor of Calcutta became the yardstick by which millions measured compassion and generosity. Her simple philosophy, inspiring words. short quotes, stories, and prayers, have been compiled in this beautiful book by Jose Luis Gonzalez-Balado, a Spanish journalist who knew Mother Teresa since 1969. Here are words to live by and spiritual wisdom for all people from all walks of life. I loved reading this gem of a book so much I gave a copy of it to my mother as a gift.

The Catholic Study Bible

The Catholic Study Bible is a unique, self-contained study system that brings you face to face with the Bible's force and beauty while opening up its historical, literary, and theological dimensions. Its unique features include over 650 pages of study materials written by today's top Catholic scholars. These Reading Guides are linked to the Bible text with a unique, page number-keyed cross-reference system. The Study Bible also contains reference articles on key issues of Bible study, a glossary of biblical terms, the complete Sunday and weekday lectionaries, full color maps, and the most current revision of The New American Bible, including the new Psalms.

If you are looking for something to help you with your Bible study, I would highly recommend this Study Bible. I found the extensive Reading Guides very helpful in understanding the context of scripture passages. In addition, there are many foot notes and cross references. As I continue my own formation I return again and again to this study Bible.

Life of the Beloved By H. J.M. Nouwen

Nouwen, a spiritual master, shows us how to live a life of spiritual assurance in the midst of difficult life situations. This book was born in response to personal requests asked many times by a variety of people for Nouwen to describe the way to live a spiritual life in a material world. Nouwen's answer is both a challenge and a promise that life works, has deep meaning, and is worth all the pain and struggle.

"All I want to say to you is, 'You are the Beloved,' and all I hope is that you can hear these words as spoken to you with all the tenderness and force that love can hold. My only desire is to make these words reverberate in every corner of your being - 'You are the Beloved.'" This personal witness to a God who calls us the Beloved is the fruit of a long friendship between Fred Bratman and Henri Nouwen. Henri is trying to respond to Fred's concern to live a spiritual life in the midst of a very secular world. A remarkable aspect of this book is that while Henri writes to a personal friend, he in fact found a language that speaks clearly and convincingly to all who search for the Spirit of God in the world. Here is a ringing affirmation that everyone is loved by God and can enjoy "the life of the beloved." It reveals the wonders of the spiritual journey and renews the fire of faith.

This is a very easy to read book that can have a profound impact on your spiritual life and in the life. Henri Nouwen unpacks the Parable of the Prodigal Son in a fresh way showing how the Images of the Father and the two Sons reflect different aspects of our spiritual lives. He has a gift for communicating Divine Truths in basic language that speaks directly into your heart.

Raw Faith By John Kirvan

Most spirituality is about the voice of God. John Kirvan writes about God's silence. Most spirituality is about the presence of God. John Kirvan writes about God's absence. In Raw Faith, a companion volume to his God Hunger he explores a centuries old spiritual tradition that is centered in the pursuit of an unknown and unknowable god. It stretches from the world of Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century, through The Cloud of Unknowing in the 14th to Simone Weil and Henri Nouwen in the 20th.

In fifty meditations and prayers that are rooted in the wisdom of the great mystics, you are given an opportunity to understand better and more deeply your own journey by reflecting on the faith experiences and insights of those who have traveled this way before. Raw Faith is one of my all-time favorites.

God Hunger By John Kirvan

John Kirvan understands the spiritual hunger of people forced to survive on scraps of childhood religion and greeting-card wisdom. He understands because he was hungry. His friends were hungry. Instead of starving to death, however, Kirvan created a spiritual feast in God Hunger, sharing what the great mystics sought and found -- a direct, love-driven way of knowing God.

Kirvan explores the lives and writings of ten great spiritual teachers from the 4th century to today, going far beyond the ephemeral religious fashions that flit in and out of modern popular culture, explaining the techniques they used to hear the movements of God within. With 50 meditations and prayers, God Hunger builds on the words and wisdom of the mystics -- from Gregory of Nyssa to Thomas Merton, and Kabbalah to C.S. Lewis -- sending us on our own personal quest toward God.

Combining the best of Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions, God Hunger keeps us honest, humble, focused on the search and joyful in the discovery of a nourishing spiritual life. This is a great way to learn from the wisdom of mystics.

About the Author:

Born in 1932, John Kirvan grew up in near poverty in a small Canadian town where his father earned six dollars a week as a truck driver. Flying through eight grades in six years, Kirvan spent his teenage years writing newspaper columns about Big Bands and the birth of jazz -- all the while working in a barbershop frequently raided as a bookie joint.

Never graduating from high school, Kirvan entered the seminary and managed to get an M.A. in religious studies and an M.S. in Library Science at the Catholic University of America. While at the University, he started a publishing agency -- the Paulist Writers Bureau.

Ordained in 1958, Kirvan became a seminary professor and began to write about theology and the arts in his spare time. That hobby led to regular appearances on NBC's Catholic Hour, and a program called Religion and the Arts.

A chaplain at Wayne State University in Detroit from 1963-1968, Kirvan was a leader for students who added religious restlessness to their political concerns. In between entertaining the FBI, who raided his campus facility every time he changed the locks, Kirvan wrote about his experience with his students in the best-selling book Restless Believers.

In 1974 Kirvan left the priesthood to devote his energies to all aspects of publishing, working with his own company and later with Winston Press and C.R. Gibson.

In the 1980s, Kirvan took a break from the publishing business to run a California art gallery specializing in glass and ceramics. Calling this period "the most important in my life," Kirvan was finally able to separate the spiritual needs of ordinary folks from institutional agendas. Growing intensely aware of the enormous spiritual hunger that had become part of a generation that knew much about pain and suffering, death and dying, Kirvan developed a dozen books on the mystics in the series 30 Days With a Great Spiritual Teacher.

Currently, Kirvan is the director of product development for Sorin Books. He lives in southern California.

The Cost of Discipleship By Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This is a good book. Based on the Sermon on the Mount, this work by the German Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred by the Nazis challenges the notion of "cheap grace"

What can the call to discipleship, the adherence to the word of Jesus, mean today to the businessman, the soldier, the laborer, or the aristocrat? What did Jesus mean to say to us? What is his will for us today? Drawing on the Sermon on the Mount, Dietrich Bonhoeffer answers these timeless questions by providing a seminal reading of the dichotomy between "cheap grace" and "costly grace." "Cheap grace," Bonhoeffer wrote, "is the grace we bestow on ourselves...grace without discipleship ... Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must know... It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life."

The Cost of Discipleship is a compelling statement of the demands of sacrifice and ethical consistency from a man whose life and thought were exemplary articulations of a new type of leadership inspired by the Gospel, and imbued with the spirit of Christian humanism and a creative sense of civic duty.

The Cost of Discipleship should be standard reading and is an excellent addition to your continued formation.

God Instinct By Tom Stella

In this simple, elegant, and literate book, Tom Stella shows what can happen when we move from certitude to doubt, from stability to searching; when cherished beliefs are cast adrift; when life experiences seem to tell us that the "right" answers no longer seem so "right." Such a time is an enriching time, he tells us, a time when life is no longer a matter of going from "question to answer, but from question to question." And like the many, many people he has encountered in his work, he concludes that "life in all its messiness is a sacred affair." Tom Stella believes, when we become seekers, seekers of truth and spiritual maturity, focused on the fundamental themes of the spiritual life, The God Instinct successfully bridges the spiritual and the practical. What I enjoyed most was Stella’s ability to ground his insights in the realities of daily living with the wisdom gleaned from his own journey.

Awareness By Anthony de Mello

Mixing Christian spirituality, Buddhist parables, Islamic sayings, Hindu breathing exercises, and psychological insight, spiritualist and Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello challenges readers to identify our most submerged, darkest feeling, accept them, not let them rule us, and allow this new awareness of ourselves to change us.

Using humor, compassion, and insight, Anthony de Mello teaches us to welcome the challenge of knowing ourselves and living the "aware" life. Anthony de Mello challenges his readers to WAKE-UP!

In this book de Mello reveals a straight-forward practical explanation of Eastern Philosophy by explaining the inherent paradoxes in clear Western Christian language. This is without doubt one of the best books I've read.

SADHANA – A WAY TO GOD By Anthony de Mello

One of the world's foremost spiritual guides responds to the modern hunger for self-awareness and holistic living with a series of spiritual exercises blending psychology, spiritual therapy, and practices drawn from both Eastern and Western traditions of meditation.

This book contains some of my favorite exercises for preparing yourself for prayer and contemplation. The author has thoughtfully blended insights and techniques from sources such as Scripture, Christian teachings, modern psychology, and the traditions of Eastern and Western spiritual masters to guide us on our way to God.

SONG OF THE BIRD By Anthony de Mello

Anthony de Mello shares 124 stories from a variety of traditions, both ancient and modern, using the age-old medium of parable to illustrate profound contemporary realities about our everyday concerns and our common spiritual quest.

Everyone loves stories and in this book Anthony de Mello presents each story as a single lesson in life teaching us inescapable truths about ourselves and our world. The author’s aim is for the reader to develop the art of tasting and feeling the message of each story to the point that they are transformed. Anthony de Mello directs the reader to "…let the story speak to your heart, not to your brain. This may make something of a mystic out of you."

THOUGHTS IN SOLITUDE By Thomas Merton

The necessity of solitude and silence in every life is the subject of this treasury of insights and meditations by Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk whose life and writings have had wide influence. A treasure of wisdom for people from all traditions who seek to understand the meaning of solitude.

Thoughtful and eloquent, as timely (or timeless) now as when it was originally published in 1956, Thoughts in Solitude addresses the pleasure of a solitary life, as well as the necessity for quiet reflection in an age when so little is private. Thomas Merton writes: "When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate." Thoughts in Solitude stands alongside The Seven Storey Mountain as one of Merton's most enduring and popular works.

If you are beginning or wishing to augment your spiritual journey, this book is a must for that sojourn. Merton candidly explains his own spiritual life and hopefully will clarify any that the reader may have. Certain topics like humility, prayer and the adjustment to a life of solitude are explained in a logical manner, and only in the way that Thomas Merton could explain.

THE WAY TO LOVE By Anthony de Mello

The Way to Love contains the final flowering of Anthony de Mello's thought. Here, he grapples with the ultimate question of love. In thirty-one meditations, each several pages long and each preceded by a Gospel quotation, he implores his readers with his usual pithiness to break through illusion, the great obstacle to love. "Love springs from awareness," de Mello insists, saying that it is only when we see the other as he or she really is that we begin to love. The second act of love, he says, is seeing ourselves without illusion - without the coercive nature of our needs, desires, memories, prejudices, and projections. If these steps are taken, then love will steal upon a person or into a relationship. But the task is not easy. "The most painful act the human can perform," de Mello says, "is the act of seeing. It is in that act of seeing that love is born." These are meditations to be savored and shared.

Anthony de Mello captures in short chapters the essence of what it means to shed one's 'programming' and to learn HOW to LIVE one's life. The book emphasizes how we must shed ourselves of our physical, emotional, and intellectual attachments to be able to grow, live, and learn.

CAN YOU DRINK THE CUP? By Henri Nouwen

This question, the one that Jesus asked his friends James and John, "…has the power to crack open the hardened heart and lay bare the tendons of the spiritual life," explains Nouwen.

Using the cup as a metaphor, Nouwen reflects on three images, - Holding, Lifting, and Drinking to articulate the basics of the spiritual life. Nouwen also draws stories from his own life and ministry to illustrate his main themes.

WITH OPEN HANDS By Henri Nouwen

For nearly 25 years, this classic work has spoken profoundly to people searching for God as well as those who are veterans in the joy and struggle of prayer. With gentle simplicity and challenging insight, Nouwen invites readers to embark on a prayerful journey, confront their fears of silence, to let go of false securities, and enter the stillness of God's presence.

Nouwen provides a series of reflections on life to help your prayers become a joy — a spontaneous reaction to the world and the people around you. I loved this book and treasured the author’s "prayer of the heart."

EVERYTHING BELONGS By Richard Rohr

Using parables, and personal experiences, Richard Rohr leads us beyond the techniques of prayer to a place where we can receive the gift of contemplation: the place where (if only for a moment) we see the world in God clearly, and know that everything belongs. Richard Rohr has written this book to help us pray better and see life differently. He teaches us that there are not two worlds - a sacred and a profane. There are two ways of seeing the same world. If we can let go of who we think we are, we can see who we really are. And when we do, we will see the sacred for ourselves. Rohr encourages us to take on a "beginner's mind," to unlearn old habits and learn to stand reality on its head. The benefit is the gift of contemplation: "a way of living in awareness of the Presence, even enjoying the Presence. We trust, allow, and delight in it. We see how everything fits, and know that everything belongs."