Novalis Books

Steve Georgiou's new book invites his readers to discover that they live not only at a certain postal address known to the postman but also, and more significantly, on Mystic Street -- a street that begins at one's front door and stretches to wherever you happen to be going on a given day, whether to the supermarket or a mountain top. Mystic Street is not a line on the map but a way of life in which the main project is to be fully present wherever you happen to be, and thus to be continually rescued from boredom and be snapped awake in a state of surprise. Steve presents his invitation autobiographically, recalling particular experiences he has had while traveling his own Mystic Street. Yet this is less a book about his own life than an invitation to the reader to be more attentive, to live a more contemplative life, to discover beauty in unexpected places. The book's many photos add another level to the text. The cover photo -- light shining on wet cobblestones -- might have been taken on one of the Greek islands, most likely Patmos, where parts of the book are located. Altogether a refreshing read!

While this is one man's book about grace in his everyday experiences, it could well be every man's or woman's. The invitation is to be awake to it.
His mentor Robert Lax had always told him to "go with the flow." Grace is the flow of our everyday life.
Grace is also the thread that Georgiou finds in his daily experiences and weaves into the tapestry of his life. There are 65 main chapters that teach by, for want of a better term, the "gentle awakening" method: Grace is there; you just need to open your senses to perceive it.
The book is not only a good, gentle read with short chapters making it easy to pause for reflection, but the chapters themselves help you develop the habit of wakefulness to grace. It does not set out to be a how-to book, but the desire to be aware of grace alive in the moment (aka, to take a sensuous stroll on Mystic Street) becomes rather overwhelming.
The chapters have plenty I-wish-I-could-have-been-there moments. For example, one for me was when three teenage girls boarded the midnight subway laughing and shouting, disturbing the tired, dozing, zombie passengers who just wanted to be left unbothered. After a while, the girls quieted and began singing a stirring Gospel tune in harmony, praising the Lord. The tired were restored, the dozing were awakened, the zombies were enlivened and the wanting-to-be-left-alone were connected! When two rough looking thugs boarded the car there was a momentary lapse into tension and fear, but the girls not only kept on singing, they sang louder. Soon other passengers joined in the refrain. The chapter meditation was on music's impact on our body and spirit, but what a marvelous sparking moment in time!
This is a book to read and read again, but is also a wonderful book to give.

I really enjoyed Georgiou's "The Way of the Dreamcatcher". The qualities of his luminous perspectives on the poet Robert Lax have carried over into his new effort, a personal memoir of an enlightened ordinary life. There's a deep "innocence" in the way the author turns over the every day happening to discover treasure where it's least expected. An easy read that's like taking a walk with a good friend.

In his latest book, "Mystic Street", Steve Georgiou has a turn of phrase that often strikes me as being true to the experience of so many of us: "we are travelers of the heart" (p.32). Consequently, I read Georgiou's book as an invitation to travel the uncharted territory of my own heart and life experiences. It's something of a travel book, one that describes a fabulous journey through inner and outer landscapes. One slowly and attentively responds to the beckoning of mystery; mystery woven like a fine, rich thread through the everyday and the ordinary. In this case the "everyday and the ordinary" is Steve working toward his doctoral degree in Religion and Art at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. "Mystic Street" carries on from where Georgiou's earlier book "The Way of the Dreamcatcher", left off.

And, I must say, the views from this continuing journey are of a type that make you stop, dead in your tracks. You stand still. You "wakeup" as if from a dream. You rub the sleep from you eyes and you look and you see the wonder of the holy and the sacred in all that you know you've seen, but somehow, not really noticed. It's enough to take your breath away!

To have read this book is to have unwrapped a gift of great value.

Mystic Street is a great book to take into a quiet place and meditate
on the
deeper things of life. As you read it you feel your spiritual quest
deepening,
chapter by chapter. It is a book that leaves you with a kind of
tranquil awe
and reverence for both creation and for the Creator who made it all
happen
in the first place.

Jean Vanier's meditation on the Gospel of St. John is almost as moving as the Gospel itself. Jean Vanier's life and work for Christ are interwoven into his excellent commentary. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who, like me, has had a life-long interest in and curiosity about this mystical Gospel.

Vanier's lyrical commentary on the soaring, poetic, sometimes cryptic gospel by Christ's beloved disciple does exactly what its title claims -- it draws you into the MYSTERY of Jesus! The Son of God IS a mystery -- loving, gentle, compassionate, intense, demanding, radical -- both completely human and completely divine at all times! To the extent that it is possible, St. John and Jean Vanier make Christ's ministry accessible and understandable on a profoundly spiritual level.

Unlike the other gospels, St. John begins with Christ's baptism by John the Baptiser and moves in a direct line to the cross and resurection. Every step of the way, Jean Vanier ties the gospel to the Old Testament, provides 1st century cultural and religious context, expounds on the multi-faceted meanings of the original Greek, and ties the message to our life and our culture -- to my life and my culture! And he does it with some of the most beautiful, heart-stopping, illuminating language I have ever read.

My copy is dog-eared and highlighted through and through. The language is beautiful and the message amazing in its simplicity and glory. I have many favorite quotes, but the one that may best encapsulate the message of the gospel is: "This journey, our pilgrimage of love, begins and deepens as we hear God murmur within our hearts: 'I love you just as you are. I so love you that I come to heal you and to give you life. Do not be afraid. Open your hearts. It is all right to be yourself. You do not have to be perfect or clever. You are loved just as you are. As you become more conscious that you are loved, you will want to respond to that love with love, and grow in love.'"

If you want an inspiring, challenging, enlightening commentary on the treasure at the heart of Christianity -- God's unconditional love and His gift of grace through Christ's sacrifice -- look no further.

Originally a television script, this meditative commentary on the fourth gospel once again demonstrates that Jean Vanier is one of the most readable spiritual authors writing today.

The founder of the worldwide L'Arche communities has a rhetorical style that is simple and lyrical. But don't mistake this simplicity for superficiality. Vanier is proficient in Greek and has done his critical homework. Perhaps more importantly, his contemplative spirit deeply resonates with the Johannine text.

Section by section, he explores the rich symbolism and spirituality of the gospel, focusing on major themes such as human vulnerability, the compassion of Jesus, and the importance of service.

But the central message he finds is a universal call to communion in Jesus Christ. For Vanier, John's gospel invites everyone to fall more deeply in love with the Trinitarian God who loves them.

In addition to the praise offered in the previous reviews, I wish to add that Jean Vanier's book on the Gospel of John has been the best material that I have come across in the last 20 years for use in an ecumenical bible study setting. We are using this book along with the DVD series entitled "The Knowing Eternity Collection" that is available through Title House e-Distribution or through Vision Video who sells the "Knowing Eternity" DVDs that cover the same material in Chapters 1 -10 in the book. Because Jean Vanier is a man of such deep integrity and visibly reflects in himself such a profound love for the Jesus revealed in the Gospel of John, our group finds that watching him on the DVD is just like having him in the room with us! We then spend the week in private reflection on the same chapter of the book that was presented on the DVD.

Even though Jean Vanier's insights are very accessible and relevant to 'ordinary' daily living I still find myself only reading a little each day because my whole being engages in what he says and it takes me time to digest it into my life. If I could, I would give this book to every single person in my life whether they are a 'practicing' Christian or not because I deeply trust that anyone engaged in the adventure of growing in an understanding of what it means to be fully human would be well served by encountering the 'earthy' wisdom contained in this book.

I love this simple book, It is beautifully mystical, it fully understands the power of divine love to transform lives including our own, and if we applied it to ourselves and to all people in the world, our world would be transformed into paradise. Would that we could think this way undistorted by our human inclination to worship power, image, control, and wealth. Where is it getting us? The elite and the select few are fighting each other leaving a worldwide path of destruction and are ignoring the poverty and suffering of the rest of the world.

Jean Vanier was long one of our most respected and admired spiritual speakers, activists and scholars who put the Word into Action.

In the twilight of his years this great soul and heart of peace and of compassion died, ironically, violently, in an act of Love for God.

Let us embrace if not his Spirit, then his books, those writings and speeches and sermons and exhortations to selfless compassion for others, for God, for the rejected, the disabled, the poor. Let us weep with his community once more and feel his loving embrace healing our hurt and bringing us to God's love.

Here in this book Jean Vanier teaches us to Befriend the Stranger. As ever with his books, it originally began as sermons or talks or speeches, here not at Harvard Divinity School invited by Henri Nouwen as in From Brokenness to Community (Harold M. Wit Lectures), but to members of his Arche community stationed in the Dominican Republic. As ever it discusses those friends and community members.

Originally published as La source des larmes (The source or spring of tears) in 2001, this English translation was published in 2005 by the remarkable Eerdmann Publishing House.

In his introduction Vanier explores that briefest of Biblical verses which reports Jesus wept. and the significance of that theological phenomenom for us. Read it without weeping and you must read it once more, slowly, meditatively, until the path to your own heart is opened to you, the path to God's Spirit, the path to service of humanity and God's Creation, the path to which Our Holy Father recently exhorted us in Sacramento de La Caridad: Sacramentum Caritatis, the path to repentance, to reconciliation and to pardon, free of rejection but of compassion and community and solidarity.

This substantial work proceeds through the six days plus conclusion of these talks, basing each day upon a biblical verse. We first explore the mysterious words of Jesus in Luke 19 "I want to stay in your house today" as GOd calls us into the world of Love. We then hear that we are "precious in my eyes and honoured and I love you" as in Isaiah 43 verse 4, that we are loved by God, as are the weak and marginalized whom we befriend as we go down to meet Jesus.

Day three challenges us with the words of John chapt. 4 "If you but knew the gift of God" touching our words, the wounds of our rejections, opening to us the deep rejections others have known and overcome in community of Love, discovering the source of the living waters, teaching us to welcome that person within us who is weak and poor.

Day Four draws us to "Love one another as I have loved you" as Jesus commanded us in John Chapter 15. We learn here to live together, to get along, to stay with Jesus, to forgive and to be forgiven.

Day five brings us through the mystery of Calvary, suffered even by Jesus Christ, who cried "O God, my God, why have you forsaken me" We learn to enter into that pain, the mystery of the cross. We learn to be compassionate as Mary was comparssionate.

Upon Day Six we hear "Blessed are the gentle of heart . . ." and learn to wait in hope, to grow in trust, to open up to gentleness.

The conclusion calls us all to be one who answers the cry.

We have lost the material and physical presence and guidance of this great man. We no longer have audible his living and loving voice. But we have his record, his written works, his books. Let us meditate upon these gentle and glorious writings which still call us to God's Love and point out the path with courage and with Faith.

A valuable addition to any Library. A Spirit of peace, community, compassion, mercy and Love, of just getting along, much needed today in which we must once again conscientiously learn to befriend, not reject, not to bomb, the stranger, who thus, freed of fear of rejection and hurt, becomes our brother and sister in God's everlasting Love, forever.

A beautifully written book about how to apply and live the Gospels in our daily lives. A fresh, modern-day look at the Parable of the Good Samaritan. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to become more sensitive to the needs of our brothers and sisters in Christ who suffer for no reason of their own.

Russian Symbolism seems to be a peculiar literary movement at first glance. But Russian Symbolists inherited very much from German romantics. I'm also a student of Russian Symbolism, especially of Ivanov's heritage, like the author. I was captivated by this book. This fascinating book has become for me a model of my research (especially the chapter 10 is splendid!): a "mirror" of what I think about Ivanov. An excellent book both for specialists and for simple literature lovers.

A trenchant investigation of an essential subject. Rarely have I encountered such a profound treatment of this highly intriguing subject. The book is a must for anyone interested in German-Russian literary relations.

Russian Symbolism seems to be a peculiar literary movement at first glance. But Russian Symbolists inherited very much from German romantics. I'm also a student of Russian Symbolism, especially of Ivanov's heritage, like the author. I was captivated by this book. This fascinating book has become for me a model of my research (especially the chapter 10 is splendid!): a "mirror" of what I think about Ivanov. An excellent book both for specialists and for simple literature lovers.

The unbelievable photographs in this book chronicle the life of Saint Therese. It is a veritable scrapbook of authentic photos, relics, handwritten documents, and personal items that any devotee of Saint Therese will treasure. For those who are familiar with her autobiography and the story of her life, it is the next best thing to a pilgrimage to Lisieux.

I ordered this book from alldirect via amazon. Wow. It is wonderful. The details, this book is fabulous. This book brings the saint, family and friends to life. The author put a variety of interesting photographs of things, places and people into a beautiful, attractive format. The book has appeal for those passing by the garden of Carmel, and provides reflection points to those who have studied Carmelite spirituality and in particular St. Therese. After reading Poetry of St. Threse, Correspondence Vol 1 and in the middle of Vol 2, it is for me a capstone bringing all aspects of her life and faith together. It would make a beautiful coffee-table gift book for your Catholic friends or for yourself.

"Therese and Lisieux" is an iconography of Therese which has delighted her friends. A marvel of precision and incomparable photographic work, combining scholarly detail with popular appeal, it shows the friends of Therese pictures of many scenes, objects, and documents never previously available. The English text explains the significance of all the photos and places them in context. You can follow Therese month by month in this powerful visual pilgrimage through her life. Don't miss this work of art, which opens the Lisieux Carmel to all of us.

This volume looks at the certainty of death, and a life after death, yet it does so with a view of hope and faith. This book is almost a summary of Zaleski's thought.

So Glad That steven reccommended this book, both here and his blog. These books by Zaleski are amazing. I Highly Reccommend them also.

The interview and essays of Fr.Radcliffe's book convey a healthy Catholicism that is deeply rooted in our tradition and convinced that Christian love really is powerful and effective in the real world. Radcliffe's broad view is shaped by his study of Catholic Tradition, sustained encounter with Christ throught prayer and Scripture, and experience with the world wide Church---from his role as leader of the Dominicans. That view helps the reader see a way to be a Church member with a sense of perspective. We have be through much before our particular time and will go through much after us. It also puts being loving ahead of being right---not replacing it, but making it the priority. His book models a good balanve of intellectual curiosity and faith. I recommend the book highly.

Timothy Radcliffe, former Master General of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) presents some insightful remarks via an interview that took place in the late 90s. Unlike much of his other work, the interview section of the book provides a window into his personal life and history illuminating shadow questions of his personal experience and take on his own vocation, the vocation of the Order and his worldview.

The second half of the book is a hodgepodge of articles and presentations given by Radcliffe and is well done, but less interesting than the interview. Over all, it is an interesting book with much wisdom. I would recommend it.

This book is divided into three equal sections:
Part I: The Mystery of God
Part II: The Vision of Faith
Part III: Conversion of the Heart
This volume pared with Who am I? forms a diptych, like a painting in two parts these two parts so support each other that they almost have to be read as a pair. In learning to know who God is we can understand our relationship with him and through that to help us understand ourselves.

So Glad That steven reccommended this book, both here and his blog. These books by Zaleski are amazing. I Highly Reccommend them also.

The title of this book grabbed me right from the start, and it did so for many reasons. I was raised Catholic but born post Vatican II. As such, throughout public school, high school and even university careers, I have often heard my elders speak of the days before the council and what the church was like.

This book is an offering from a man who saw many changed in his church and in his own life. As a former Catholic priest, who left the priesthood but maintained his love for his church, he eventually married a former nun named Shirley Flynn.

This book is a unique perspective, because of Baum's life. He examines the changes that he has observed and forecasts where he believes some of these changes will continue to go. He examines the change in focus and interpretation of scripture and the life of the church in regards to many different categories. The areas he examines are:

1. The Conversion to Human Rights

2. God's Redemptive Presence in History

3. The Culture of Peace

4. Rejoicing in Religious Pluralism

5. The New Teaching

Baum's easy-to-read style and enthralling personal insights, stories and anecdotes, will keep almost any reader entrapped in the little volume.

Baum engages liberation theology with a zeal: "We stand with the victims of society and support their struggle to change the conditions of their lives; only in doing so will we be able to embrace in solidarity the whole society." P. 74. He Examines Catholic - Christian, and Catholic - Non-Christian (Jewish, Muslim, Hindu) dialogues. He studies the preferential option for the poor, and the new culture of peace. This section on the culture of peace was amazing in how it shows the official church's teachings on war, and being against all war in this day and age. Baum states: "Respect for difference is an essential ingredient of the culture of peace. Can Catholics honour Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists for their differences, or must Catholics look upon them as potential converts to the Christian Faith?" p.90

Who is Henri Novalis, the author of the Aristeia? I have it on good authority that the book, and its anti-hero Aristide, are not entirely fictional creations. Dr D.G.F. of Clark Street, Chicago writes:

"Yes, _________ was a patient in my care. I can only reveal about him that until his recent breakdown, he was, as you suspected, a lawyer at a major white shoe law firm. Until his escape from my clinic, I believed I could cure him of his desire to write, which I regard merely as a chemical imbalance. I prescribed Lethion(tm) (in which, I must disclose, I have a financial interest). But I see now, from the publication of his Aristeia, that these existentialist and Sturm und Drang obsessions have reached full flower and I have ceased my efforts to find and to cure him as I originally believed I could. The disease is just too far advanced. I have no idea of his present whereabouts."

My subsequent efforts to identify Novalis (itself a pseudonym for Friedrich von Hardenberg, German Romantic poet of love and death) led me deep into the texture of the Aristeia in search of clues. As the novel begins, Aristide is a newly minted law professor, returning to Chicago from New York. On the train he meets Gustav and Sergei, a Russian writer, and begins a three cornered existentialist diatribe on the meaning of human existence, a dense thicket of words and parrying strokes. But this is only the beginning. As Aristide returns to Chicago, he is drawn back into the orb of his imperious Father, a world famous sculptor, and the other members of his eccentric family: Augustine (an aloof intellectual), Leon (a tortured musician), Berenice (the long suffering mother), and Rachel (an artist who denies her gift and instead marries the vulgar Jonathan Lynch, an investment banker). There, the family members participate in a Classical Greek agon, a competition for the Father's estate. And indeed, as in Greek tragedy, there is no attempt at realism in the portrayal of the characters. Instead, Novalis is aiming for a revival of a mythical level of dialogue, where everyone, even a stranger on a train, uses bizarre antique locutions and is conversant with Heidegger, Nietzsche and Plato. Words like Dasein, the last man, Seinsfrage are sprinkled throughout the story, as are references to music and to the chilling neo-classical paintings of Hubert Robert. The Ur-Father himself demands that each of his children cite The Thinker, Nietzsche, at least once, as they compete for his love. The message is clearly: let no reader ignorant of Being and Time and Beyond Good and Evil enter here. Even the bourgeoise Rachel seems to have attended an Institute for Heidegger studies. As the agon develops, the mythical completely annihilates the real, especially in this stunning passage that ends the first Book as the Father finally makes his entrance:

Now Gustav's gaze turned to Aristide. Had his black hair grown long and curly, with two short horns piercing through it? Were his feet transformed to hooves and did a tail protrude through his pants?...In the corner of the room, he believed he saw a man emerge from the shadows...But what was this? His hair was not hair but green grape leaves interspersed with brown grapes, which hung over his temples and down over His purple robes...The family began to dance again, this time with even more ecstasy and orgiastic energy, Aristide moving into the ring...gyrating madly as the others swayed around him in a circle. Sergei moving his pen to the violent rhythms, wrote like he would be beheaded the next day, Gustav, losing his reason, fell to the floor...the Baron and Lynch ran from the house into the lonely cold night, the Baron screaming: Dionysus! Dionysus has returned!

Aristotle famously observed in his Poetics that crimes done in the family, and in the greatest families, have the most dramatic intensity, a doctrine that the Aristeia embraces to the full. But in the midst of the developing catastrophe that consumes them all, we find humor too. There is an existentialist saying that a fully rational human being, seeing the futility of life in all its clarity, would commit suicide, if he only could stop laughing long enough to do it. Dark laughter haunts the Aristeia, not only during the impossibly convoluted passages on the meaning of being, the absurdly stilted language of the interlocutors, but also in the variety of characters Novalis brings in for comic relief: the practical Mrs. Pappas who advises, Zorbalike, "Too many books, doctor, too many books make a man crazy!" or Aristide's later exchange with Dr. Nikolopoulos: ""Are you an artist like your father?" "Only an artist of the soul" The doctor's eyes narrowed: "Your work does not seem to be progressing well." "Only from a medical perspective."" The passages late in the book, in which we find Aristide among the criminally ill mental patients of Two North, are remarkably funny and realistic and feature some of Novalis' best writing.

As a dramatic plot, even top heavy with Heidegger-ballast, the story moves along with hallucinatory speed, topping itself with one tragic event consequentially following from another, as in its model, the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Our friend is quite a dramatist. But there are some constant intellectual themes, too, such as Aristide's anti-modern credo: "Never touch anything that is not at least one hundred and fifty years old!"as well as this:

He envisioned a new society: one composed of radical actors who overcame the degeneration of the past. A society ruled by the highest types, culture-creators that annihilated liberal democracy and founded a new spiritual synthesis. Aristide saw a new aristocratia--a rule of the best, the most excellent.

Will this play in Peoria?

As a professional philosopher, I have less to say about the intellectual elements of the book. Aristide encounters in his travels a variety of characters, all of whom he manages to worst, or at least frustrate, in debate, from the Russian writer Sergei who pounds the table in anger, to his legal-positivist friend Bazarov, a surprisingly sentimental nihilist, to Korngold, the mouthpiece of the absurd Law and Economics movement currently ascendant in American legal academia. The model for Aristide's dialectical odyssey seems to be Heraclitus' deceptively simple fragment: "I went in search of myself." And what does he find? Apparently the following, if I may paraphrase: How do we become Übermenschen, how does a man become God? By grasping the meaning of Being. What is the meaning of Being? An action, not a thought. What action? Love, the highest action. But then there is still a higher action. Which? The action of killing what we love. What? Thus is Aristide inexorably led to will One Thing: an overwhelming All-Affirming, All-Destroying Act, that places him beyond good and evil, a brooding figure in a mental institution for the criminally insane.

But I digress. My efforts to find Novalis and understand his reasons for writing the Aristeia must ultimately be considered a failure. The family he writes about, while hardly made up of supernatural beings, seems based on a real family of some accomplishment in the arts, as indeed I can testify as a member. The events of violence, of which there are many, especially an ending worthy of Oedipus Tyrannos, are of course completely fictional, as is Aristide's imprisonment. But as for Novalis himself, as his book finds its inevitable cult following and attracts its pilgrims and seekers, I think he will become all the more invisible. Perhaps he fears the charge of corrupting the young and being forced to drink hemlock. Even after great efforts to locate him, I only saw him once, in Chicago. He was bundled to the neck in a long Cassock-like coat, a cigarette burning in his slit-like mouth. He walked to a local park where he spent the next hour staring blankly into Nothingness. Then he returned to his underground apartment and shut the wrought iron gate behind him. Through the windows, I could see full bookcases topped with busts of Plato and Socrates, and an encyclopedic collection of classical music. Then I heard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde booming in the cavernous rooms below.

I returned a week later and the apartment was vacated.