Lenten Reading

In years passed, I’ve generally adopted a reading program as part of my Lenten observance.

For several years, I read the Desert Fathers. This year, despite a friend bequeathing me a copy of the Philokalia, I’m looking for something else.

I’ve started a thin little volume by Bishop Athanasius Schneider called Dominus Est -– It is the Lord! I’m about halfway through, and it’s a both delightful and deep meditation on the Eucharist.

But as I said, it’s short. I was noodling with reading some Merton, and perhaps I still am, but I was looking for something more, I don’t know, robust. Immersive, maybe.

Fiction perhaps? Chesterton? Lewis? O’Connor? Waugh?

And then I read a review of Kristin Lavransdatter on the Catholic Gentleman.

As men, we are called to live lives of self-oblation, prayer, and cruciform ministry. Sigrid Undset’s tale is a rebuke and a summons. …. Do not fail to battle sin and Satan and sabotage. Do not fail to bring glory to God in the ordinary.

Nordic, Catholic, gothic—the men in Kristin Lavransdatter are characterized by pointed arches, rib vaults, gargoyles, and flying buttresses. It’s the kind of world that reminds a man of his own beating Catholic heart. It’s as terrible as it is beautiful. Like the setting sun, Undset’s tale throws the snow-covered peaks of a man’s heart into relief.

Yep. That was exactly what I was looking for.

There’s a discussion in the comments about the two translations available, which led me to a captivating article by David Warren on the same books.

The failures of men, and at the most painful, the failure of men to be men, is presented in light that is often excoriating. Indeed, the manner of a woman’s judgement must come as a revelation to men: not only the grown women but the girl children. Through that prism of motherhood, things are seen that men might not want to see, including centrally the scandal of being loved not for our virtues but in spite of our appalling weaknesses. And in this sense, women are stand-ins for God.

He favours the earlier translation, untouched as it is by post-modernism.

Oddly enough, I actually have a copy of the book, which I purchased in a used bookstore sometime in the dim and misty past.

Some Books for Lent, 2015

Perhaps when I finish these, I’ll be ready for Merton or the Desert Fathers!