BOLTON (UK): 26 July 2011 -- There are at least two
good reasons why a brief review of Fr Michael Cunningham's
latest book, Treasure within, Rediscovering the Mystics,
is appropriate at this point. One is that Don
Bosco Publications are always good enough to send
along a 'first off the press' version in the hope that
through our modest medium we might be able to 'spread good
books' as our Founder and Father put it on one occasion! Don
Bosco Publications is an outstanding example of doing just
that. The other is that we are still savouring a diet of
parables from Matthew in the Sunday and weekly readings - at
least for a day or two yet, and some of these deal directly
with the 'treasure within', the 'pearl of great price', as
Michael relates it to at one point of his reflections.
This is the fifth book stemming from the
long experience Michael Cunningham has a spiritual director,
retreat preacher, provincial no less, and several other
roles that see him engaged directly with an often frenetic,
sometimes very disturbing, but always 'yearning' world - and
it is the yearning he speaks to particularly this time.
Because of the image we have of mystics
and mysticism we might consider this book a potentially
difficult read. None of Michael's books are like that!
He addresses a broad readership and certainly not a
'confessional' one; Treasure Within will be read, I
am certain, by people of many persuasions or of just one -
that they yearn for their deepest selves but are neither
sure what they will find there, nor who will guide them. The
book will help them; they will be guided either by the
author's many personal reflections and real life experiences
as they find them described, or by the many guides he
suggests. There is someone for every taste: Merton, Julian,
Therese, Bede, and John O'Donohue who may be less known and
less expected by those who do know of him.
There is an insistent point made
throughout - away with the dualism of our past (and present)
and be open instead to wholeness, connection, oneness,
integration, a new consciousness. In practice Michael is
suggesting a more contemplative spirituality, and making the
point that mysticism is not something odd but, as Karl
Rahner reminded us, the vocation of every Christian. That
said, it has to be accepted that 'the mystics' (that group
from which he draws his examples) were liminal persons,
lived at odds with established norms, were a bit twixt and
between, as Victor Turner put it.
I have one, perhaps two small quibbles
with the book. Because I was doing something else at the
time (working on the question of spirituality of and for the
digital era), I could not help but note that every (and I
mean every) mention of technology, contemporary
communications, was negative. This may not have been
intentional. I mean 'negative' in the Bayesian sense that if
the word you are seeking is surrounded by any other word
(say, as distant/close as six either side) with negative
connotations, then you come away with certain feelings about
it. I found 'swamped', 'overload', 'endless', 'but', 'no',
'nothing', 'doesn't' and so on, each time. Let's put
it down to the same trap of dualism Michael wants us to
escape if possible. It stands in contrast to the
messages of Benedict XVI over the last three World
Communication Days where he is suggesting directly that we
can find "God's loving care for all people in Christ.... in
the digital world" or rather, that we must find it or
introduce it.
The other is just a little thing, really,
an editorial decision: the longer citations were all in a
larger font than the normal text. That had the effect of
over-emphasising them, for me, and broke the flow, a bit, of
Michael's very fluent, very engaging, personal style of
writing.
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