The Prologue of St. Benedict's Rule outlines a spiritual journey toward heaven, establishing a framework for communal life focused on seeking God. Key themes such as obedience, humility, prayer, reverence for the Lord, and the pursuit of eternal life are introduced, emphasizing the importance of these principles in guiding the community's spiritual practice.
Daily reflections draw from the homilies of Cistercian monk Michael Casey, crafted over his fifty years of priesthood. Utilizing a collection of index cards, Casey has transformed these homilies into concise reflections for each day of the year. The topics are diverse, with each reflection offering a unique perspective, often infused with Casey's whimsical and humorous style, making for an engaging and thoughtful daily reading experience.
Transforming prayer into a way of life is the central theme, emphasizing personal techniques and practicalities. The author uses clear and engaging prose to convey that spiritual communion with God should be experienced authentically, rather than approached as a mere activity or ritual. The book invites readers to embrace a more meaningful and lived-out relationship with prayer.
After sixty years of living in a Cistercian community, Michael Casey combines his down-to-earth observations about the joys and challenges of living in community with an appreciation of the deeper meanings of cenobitic life, taking into account the changes in both theory and practice that have occurred in his lifetime. He invites his readers, especially monks and nuns, to reflect on their own experiences of community as a means of seeing a path forward into the future.Many of the key components of monastic community have kept the same names for more than a millennium. In an age of paradigm shift, Michael Casey invites readers to examine these essential practices of community life and to ask how they might be envisioned in a way that speaks to our contemporaries.
Publisher description: This book shows us how humility brings a basic happiness that is able to cope with difficulties and sorrows. Casey brings the ancient wisdom of Saint Benedict into the modern arena of success-oriented competition. He demonstrates how people must overcome the tendency to regard others as rivals and be content with what we have because it is a waste of time to envy those who possess qualities different than our own.
Another classic from the foremost Trappist scholar writing today. Fr. Michael Casey, in his usual compelling style, covers many aspects of spirituality, including discernment, spiritual direction, pastoral care, and living in community-- applicable to religious and lay people alike. His reflections on Benedictine spirituality are vividly presented and filled with remarkable insights and advice.
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In 1972, Michael Casey won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Obscenities, a collection of poems drawn from his military experience during the Vietnam War. In his forward to the book, judge Stanley Kunitz called the work a kind of anti-poetry that befits a kind of war empty of any kind of glory and the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam. Its raw depictions of war s mundanity and obscenity resonated with a broad audience, andObscenities went into a mass market paperback edition, and was stocked in drugstores as well as bookstores. In the decades since, Casey s poetry has continued to document the places of his work and life. Then and now, his poems foreground the voices around him over that of a single author; they are the words of young American conscripts and their Vietnamese counterparts, coworkers and bosses, neighbors and strangers. His compressed sketches and unadorned monologues have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. There It Is: New and Selected Poems presents, for the first time, a full tour through Casey s work, from his 1972 debut to 2011 s Check Points, together with new and uncollected work from the late 60s on. Here are all the locations of Casey s life and work Lowell to Landing Zone, dye house to desk and an ensemble cast with a lot to say. -- Provided by publisher