****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This is the most religious book I have ever read! I ordered it some time ago for two reasons, one is that the author is a close relation with a woman who I know from an internet listserv devoted to the works of our favorite YA author, Lenora Mattingly Weber. As it happens, many of us in the grouo are writers too, and when this member wrote in bragging about her son or brother or whatever he was, many of us ran to Amazon to pick up on this book. I think it must have been her son. I don't think it was her husband or father, because apparently as I read closer on the back cover, the author is a Jesuit!I hadn't expected that, I just thought it was a book about walking humbly. See, here at my office, the management has intsituted a program where, instead of going on a break, they have contests to motivate all of us workers into getting out into the sunshine and walking for fifteen minutes in the morning, 15 minutes each afternoon. This book was going to be my ace in the hole, but as I read it more closely, it is not really about walking at all, despite that lovely color photo of someone walking away from the camera in a putty-colored parka. The weather is a lot like the weather here in San Francisco but as I say, it didn't take me long to open the book and look through it and it was all about first there is a brief Bible passage, then a poem written by Thomas Flowers, then some questions--questions which you could walk a ways to, trying to think of the answers.He isn't a bad poet, and his verse seems equally inflected by the short American breath of Emily Dickinson and Robinson Jeffers, and the jam-packed assonance and verbal fireworks of Manley Hopkins, the priest whom Flowers is said to be studying. DSometimes the sheer exhilaration of the poem makes the questions that follow it seem more stern than they have to be, as though the young man were having too much fun and his superego is chastising him to be more serious. But that gives the book an entertaining tension. And his questions are super good, not at all the sort of thing I would ever ask myself if not for a helpful guide like this one. Vamos Paulist Press!
