This is the month when many of our readers go on holiday – and it seems likely that, given the blistering temperatures predicted in Europe this month, at least some of it will be spent indoors. Even those who spend their summer at home can look forward to more time to read. We suggest that some of that reading be spiritual or religious – even in the loosest sense. For busy people, there is little chance except on holiday for spiritual reading, yet we can all be nourished by books of a spiritual character. It can turn a holiday into a small retreat. One very simple yet transform-ative little book is by the French monk known as Brother Laurence, called The Practice of the Presence of God. Try it.
A perennial favourite, which can change, temporarily, the way we look at the world, is CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, or letters from an old devil to his young demonic nephew. Unsettling but salutary. A suggestion in this issue’s Summer Reading supplement, by our columnist Gavin Ashenden, is Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Edmund Campion. That example of heroic virtue is worth reading, as is Waugh’s biography of the splendid convert Ronald Knox. But so is Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, less well known than Brideshead Revisited, and a tribute to the vanished world of pre-conciliar English Catholicism. And when it comes to the heroes of English Catholicism, Julian of Norwich is the subject of a new fictional autobiography by Claire Gilbert. I, Julian could usefully be read with Julian’s own account of her visions, Revelations of Divine Love.
Then there are old favourites. The Lord of the Rings was good enough for CS Lewis to have recommended Tolkien for a Nobel Prize for Literature – and a Catholic reader will enjoy noting the Christian elements (Tolkien was a devout Catholic) in the story …the Ring, for instance, was destroyed on March 25.
Those who are stimulated or otherwise exercised by the present Pope’s activism may enjoy an account of a very different, English, papacy – Frederick Rolfe’s Hadrian the Seventh. This was very much an exercise in fantastical wish-fulfilment on the part of a very odd man, and failed seminarian, but it is an astonishing read. And a novel by Rolfe’s former friend RH Benson never fails to challenge the reader: The Lord of the World deals with the coming of Anti-Christ. What better for a summer afternoon?
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