books:

	• Silent Fire: Bringing the Spirituality of Silence to Everyday Life James A. Connor Crown, 2002 - 209 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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This is a very, very good book. The story is told in a very clear, direct, well organized way. It treats a deeply serious subject with respect and sensitivity, but stays very down-to-earth and even manages to be quite funny at times. The writing itself is downright lovely. His descriptions of the natural scene around his retreat are gorgeous, and display a real understanding of the natural world. He relates these scenes metaphorically to his spiritual story with real grace. This is prose poetry as good as Annie Dillard wrote.

I highly, heartily recommend this book.

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Delightful and Enlightening

Connor's account of a retreat to the Canadian outback is delightful and enlightening. Called as a priest in rural British Columbia to comfort the parents of an infant crushed to death by a boulder falling upon the rear of their passing car, Connor finds himself as unsettled and nonplused by the pathos and inscrutabilty of the event as the gieving parents. Seeking to regain his spiritual and emotional bearings, he finds refuge in a remote lake cabin where his slowly (and often comically) reawakened communion with the landscape and its few inhabitants clarify the continuum of suffering and serenity, death and life, and the salvation of replacing agitating, rational self-consciousness with accepting, spiritual self-awareness--with a truly contemplative life.

Rendered in graceful prose, Connor's memoir ranges from exquisitely lyrical to warmly humorous to intellectually rigorous. The landscape and characters are vividly drawn, and the informing scholarship of contemplative literature and tradition is brought to bear in a natural, delightfully anecdotal way.

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Rendered in graceful prose, Connor's memoir ranges from exquisitely lyrical to warmly humorous to intellectually rigorous. The landscape and characters are vividly drawn, and the informing scholarship of contemplative literature and tradition is brought to bear in a natural, delightfully anecdotal way.

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Tenderness, Compassion, and Love

This is the profoundly spiritual memoir of a former Jesuit priest's interior journey. It is a hauntingly beautiful account filled with the pathos and gentle humor of a life fully realized -- a life that has come through the symbolic "fire" not irreparably burned but touched by its healing warmth. Graced by the author's intense awareness of holiness and human fraility, this book is filled with wisdom and grace. In prose that is accessible, lyrical, intelligent, and infinitely humane, Mr. Connor offers his readers the truths he has discovered: tenderness, compassion, and love. His use of poetry as epigrams that introduce each of his cycles of silence is brilliant. Edward Hirsch's poem "The Idea of the Holy," which precedes the prologue, and Adele Kenny's haiku, which introduces the first cycle, take the reader into the world of pure spirit: God's world, Connor's world, our world.

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?In meditation the journey of an entire life will be manifest as a state of relaxation and a state of activity, forever a balancing act between sleeping and waking. In life, meditation will form a daily practice that will permeate all your actions until one day you will feel unspeakable joy while standing in line at the bank.?
?From the Prologue

Twenty-five years ago, James Connor, a newly ordained Jesuit priest, was called in to console a couple whose baby had been killed in a freak accident. At a loss for words to explain this cruel blow and comfort the anguished parents, he began to question his faith, and eventually retreated to a lonely cabin in the interior of British Columbia, Canada, to try to reestablish his relationship to God.

In this luminous memoir, Connor has found the words to describe the indescribable: his circuitous, sometimes faltering, always passionate journey into the heart of humanity, its darkness and its light. With stubborn curiosity, touching humility, and raucous imagination, Connor gropes for meaning in percolating coffee and washing dishes as well as in the rising sun; in the arrhythmic companionship, sick sense of humor, eager gossip, or drunken belligerence of his eccentric neighbors; with the native bats, loons, bears, salmon, and stars; and in the encroaching fire that?s been burning for months in the hills, no less than the piles of books he?s stacked around himself and the ancient traditions of Eastern and Western spirituality. Ultimately, Connor searches silence and solitude for a way to rekindle his faith, feeding his spirit with simple breath and contemplation, to find that just as the flame jumps up and consumes his grief, anger, shame, and other unwelcome, all-too-human intruders upon Nirvana, it throws into light the blessedness of ordinary things.

The story of Connor?s lurching spiritual quest will resonate with anyone who has ever tried to climb to higher ground or been humbled by the challenges of meditation. The good-natured instruction woven seamlessly into his tale will introduce fellow seekers to the healing power of silence and encourage them to keep climbing.

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