Spirituality Books
from Frederick Borsch

For thanksgiving, longing, lamentation, pleas for justice see Psalms 23, 32, 33, 34,62, 63, 69, 102, 103, 104,116 and more, perhaps with Walter Brueggemann’s Spirituality of the Psalms: "The Book of Psalms provides the most reliable, pastoral, and liturgical resource given us in the biblical tradition.". . . "profoundly subversive of the dominant culture, which wants to deny and cover over the darkness we are called to enter."

A classic meditation by a master pastor and theologian. "God has laid bare to us his very heart."

A companionable 14^th Century exploration of growth in the life of the spirit. "For it is not what you are or have been that God looks upon with the all-merciful eyes, but what you would be." "Only to our intellect is God incomprehensible, not to our love."

> Preferring Christ: A Devotional Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict
by Norvene Vest.

"Nothing is more important for human beings than learning to live in harmony with God’s will, which is to say God’s love." In the Foreword Robert Hale OSB Cam. writes, "Many people are yearning for an interior life deeply rooted in God, humanly balanced, and substantially founded in the Christian heritage."

Affliction (1), The Collar, Love (III), Deniall, Prayer, Artillerie, Agonie and more. R.S. Thomas wrote of Herbert: "Yeats saw that out of his quarrel with others man makes rhetoric, but out of his quarrel with himself poetry . . . what Herbert had was an argument, not with others, nor with himself primarily, but with God; and God always won."

The record of the spiritual longings and ups and downs of a worldly, lonely and, at times, mystical man. "Conscious of the reality of evil and the tragedy of the individual life, and conscious, too, of the demand that life be lived with decency." "In the faith which is ‘God’s marriage to the soul’ you are one in God and God is wholly in you, just as for you, He is wholly in all you meet. With this faith in prayer you descend into yourself to meet the Other."

Gentle encouragement in the patient practice of contemplative prayer. "It is becoming clearer and clearer to me over the years that at the deepest level, we cannot change ourselves; but we can be changed."

Forgiveness and forgiving are God’s best gifts to us. "Forgiveness is the most generous of loves" "By forgiving and being forgiven we bring that life (of the age to come) with us into the midst of the world."

The parable with Rembrandt’s painting, and the painful honesty and humility of Henri Nouwen’s coming home: "As I look on my own aging hands, I know that they have been given to me to stretch out toward all who suffer, to rest upon the shoulders of all who come, and to offer the blessing that emerges from the immensity of God’s love."

> Coming Together in the Spirit: A New Approach to Christian Community – with a Study Guide

Although it is long out-of-print, my book offers guidance for a diverse, shared and ecumenical spirituality: "However difficult it is to find words or images to describe the sense of God’s presence, one cannot help but remark on the similarities . . . . While these mystics and persons of prayers speak in different tongues, their voices have an echoing timbre."