Centuries of Holiness

Book excerpt: Richard Valantasis brings us a guide to the spiritual life for the smart seeker who wants to be fully attuned to God, interactive with other believers, connected to the wider world in which humans live, engaged with the physical universe, committed to service to the poor and disenfranchised, and, finally, postmodern. Adopting a literary device first used in the fourth century by the Desert Father Evagrios Pontikos, Richard Valantasis offers a "century" of spiritual texts—a hundred short essays from 800 to 900 words—on a hundred spiritual themes. Believing that "tradition is the action of the Holy Spirit making available the wisdom of the past in a new idiom and a time," Valantasis moves from the premodern spiritual world of the Christian tradition to the postmodern realities of our current world, and back again. Sample entries - Conversion - Sanctification - Incarnate Living - Discernment - Divine Indwelling - Union with God - Ennui - Progress - Holy Dying - Habitual Prayer - Thorns and Impediments - Praying the Bodies - Spiritual Direction - Emotional Ecology - Seeing Double - The Body Transparent - Temptation - Consolations - The Devil - Visions of Deification - Humility>