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Dolan's Lessons From Peter
A review of Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s book To Whom Shall We Go? by John Burger, the Register’s news editor.
BY JOHN BURGER
May 3-9, 2009 Issue |
Posted 4/24/09 at 7:05 AM
To Whom Shall We Go?
Lessons From the Apostle Peter
By Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Our Sunday Visitor, 2008
152 pages, $13.95
To order: (800) 348-2440
osv.com
Lessons
From Peter
St. Peter is
often held up as an example of how God can do wonderful things with even the
weakest and most cowardly of us. Peter is the one who ran away — but also the
one who ran to the empty tomb.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan finds a lot
to like in the fisherman who went on to become the first pope. The archbishop’s
book To Whom Shall We Go?, which came out just
before the announcement that he would become archbishop of New York, finds
lessons for the rest of us in several of Peter’s encounters with Christ.
They are lessons, the archbishop
points out at the start, in how to follow the Lord. He confides that he has
thought much about what Peter has to teach us, and he counsels us that
scriptural passages involving Peter are “potent prayer starters,” valuable
passages that are ripe for personal contemplation. Archbishop Dolan helps bring
forth the wisdom we can gain if we let our lives be reflected in Peter’s.
To help the reader benefit from
this, the archbishop advises that we take a cue from another saint — Ignatius
of Loyola. As anyone who’s ever been on an Ignatian retreat knows, a rich
experience in contemplation can come about by following Ignatius’ counsel: Take
a Scripture passage; pretend to be a part of the scene; pay attention to what
happens; ask yourself what conversation you are having with Jesus and others
present; and ask what they are saying to you.
Thus, Archbishop Dolan sees our
lives as Christians summed up in the scene on Lake Tiberias, when Christ calls
St. Peter to come to him across the water. Peter starts to sink only when he
notices the turmoil around him. Likewise, the archbishop says, we begin to sink
when we allow ourselves to be distracted away from what truly matters. The essential
question in living the spiritual life is: “How can we keep looking at Jesus,
beckoning us to walk on the water of life toward him?”
The archbishop offers two ways. One
is the “practice of the presence of God,” a time-honored spiritual technique
that can be accomplished, he says, by always being conscious of “the life of
God within my soul.”
As a historian, Archbishop Dolan
draws upon an example from World War I, when the Belgians were in danger of
being overrun.
Cardinal Desire Mercier appealed to
his people to daily “close your eyes and enter the sanctuary of your baptized
soul, and there realize that God himself dwells.”
That, to Cardinal Mercier, was the
most important thing Belgians could do to survive.
This book is full of similar
anecdotes from history, but also from Archbishop Dolan’s experience as a
priest, bishop, seminary rector and family man — he relates a touching story of
his 9-year-old niece’s battle with cancer and details his brother’s courtship
and eventual marriage.
Evidently a transcription of talks
he gave, the pages have a feel, at times, of being mere transcripts rather than
carefully crafted articles for a book.
As such, the book makes no effort to
hide Archbishop Dolan’s very breezy, casual speaking style, which is fine for
the most part, but grates a bit when he refers to the Prince of the Apostles as
“this guy.” Later, he talks about a heartfelt prayer he made when he just
couldn’t figure out why his niece was suffering from cancer: “I’d just talk
turkey to the Lord.”
But, as he says regarding the
theology that’s in his book, “I am a meat-and-potato guy; there’s nothing
really complicated, nothing really exotic about any of this stuff.”
It is theology, true, but Archbishop
Dolan presents it in ways anyone can understand.
It’s a style that will play well in
New York, and a general readership will derive rich insights into lessons
Christ wanted to impart to St. Peter — and to us.
John Burger is the
Register’s
news editor.
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