Catholic Diocese of Arlington
Encourage and teach with patience

Stephen Mitchell

There are three Scripture lines worth holding in heart when reading Job.  One is from Jeremiah 29:11, where the Lord promises He will hear us when we call from our exile and abject aloneness, He will listen, and He will lead us back to the happiness from where we have been exiled.  It has heartened me.  Another is Isaiah 30:15-18, where He comforts us, promising us our strength can lie in quiet even in the presence of evil, and that He is waiting to be gracious to us; it is a meditation on the meditative and quiet ways of God in the face of suffering.  It has taught me.  Last, in Job itself, Job surrenders to the reality of Isaiah 55, that His thoughts are not our thoughts, His ways are not our ways, and that is the order of life to which we surrender before life can be revived from suffering and death.  It has oriented me.  Job can have little to do with forgiveness toward evil or even understanding of God until through our surrender to what is real leads us to pray for friends who could not help us in our suffering.  This is a key freedom.

Alice Miller

Alice Miller has many best selling books, interestingly because she is a psychiatrist and specialist in treating children who have survived trauma.  Reading scholarship about “us” is odd, always, I am not comfortable feeling like the fly pinned to the corkboard while scientists stare with cocked heads.  Yet, I manage by reading other schools, like Masterson and about The Meadows ideas, so I can take some of Miller’s ideas/approaches.  That creates balance, and keeps any one writer offering ideas that eclipse my unique path.   Nonetheless Miller is a pathfinder and does have a cult following in the incest survivor reading circles.

My favorite insight is how Miller shows the glory, the amazing part, the unseen beauty of the child who survives, and then is able to explain the plight with such respect and compassion well the reader actually can “catch” it, and that’s good.  She also can be said to be slightly guilty, in part, for introducing into lay people’s read of survivor issues a lot of diagnostic jargon that can bog down the spirit, even obscure the mystery Christ has revealed, but that also is probably why sometimes priests, good priests, might struggle with some of this literature.  They have surrendered their entire lives, the very way they engage and know and serve the world, to the mystery of individual persons, yet much of this literature focuses on commonalities, and the commonalities are suffering.  There would be a natural collision – at first.  Much is to be gained by understanding what is common in suffering this childhood wound – and the adult wounds it can help attract – without losing sight of the deeper mysteries.  Survivors, as we heal, need both the insights into our common suffering and the grounding truth of redemption.   

Miller’s first work, written when she was not trained to write for lay people at all, is The Drama of the Gifted Child, and is worth a read if all this other material proves too easy.  It is cornerstone, all the survivor groups know it.   It is densely written with snarled logic, alas, for it was originally a work intended only for her colleagues but found its way into the mainstream of self help, is often used in ACOA and incest groups, as well as in artist groups and even groups related to 12 step programs. 

This book, however, followed that first best seller.  It cuts to the core issue about why some kids who are traumatized by care takers turn into artists and resilient survivors – and others into destructive or dark forces.  What I think everyone should read is how being abused does not predispose you to being an abuser, in fact it might lead to your being incredibly special – and that truth resonates with the Christian realities.  What I also would point to is Miller’s focus on “ the inherent human tendency to disavow the real failures of those we rely on for care taking, despite the immeasurable human cost” it exacts throughout our adult lives.  It’s a great insight into the dilemma and promise of surviving, and it’s good to know the lay person’s literature leaders.

Thomas Merton

Then, sometimes I want to float around in meditations by Merton on specific ambivalences that can arise in our journeys.  He lived in the world of darkness, he emerged with simple clarity that has become a model for my own healing and prayer.  It is from Part 2: II in this book that the world seems to have pulled the prayer “Do Not Know Where I Am Going.” The whole book is exactly that, and it opens the reader if the reader surrenders.  It is the ultimate survivor prayer.  It is not about forgiveness, it is about trust.  From trust in God all else can follow, in God’s time, not our time, not according to the speed demanded by people who do not like the inconvenient truth of our suffering.

Philip Yancy

Peter Kreeft

Kathleen Norris

With at least a renewed idea of the compelling reality of God and Christ, of the role of suffering in our relationship with God and why suffering is not eradicated as a “prize” for knowing God, it might be good to move into lighter and more soft and less heady fare. So, what about a gorgeous read of yet another NYT best seller?  Here, the author of other best selling books shows us a spirituality order and its fellowship, and reminds the reader of something at the core of real religious practices.  Norris, a married woman with fiercely fire and brimstone Protestant background, gets an “academic” interest in the ancient practice of monasticism, and ends up moving in for two long stints at St John’s Abbey in Minnesota, living among many Benedictine monks.  It is impossible not to feel safe in the presence of men in habits when they people her book, and her reflections soften the harder edges we naturally have looking at the absurd evil related to the pedophilia scandal by drawing the view into the deepest and enduring, timeless practices among these holy celibate men.  Norris’s observations of them and her feelings, rages, moods, are permission to be real with God and real about the Church too.

C.S. Lewis

This very short classic, sold in millions of copies every few years, lives on as his private reflections and rage at God over the loss of his wife to cancer.  Really about his rage over the betrayal he felt by God.  The story was made into the movie recently released, but these pages and their treatment of rage and the stages of grief walk our own walk, for our walk to healing is grieving before it is anything else.

Scott Hahn

Scott Hahn is one of the leading speakers and catechists of the Catholic Church now who “read” his way into Catholicism.  He is an able speaker and explainer – and here is a key read on the basic reason why the wounds of a predator, any predator, and any abuser of our trust or betrayer, no matter how powerful or “right” he is seen by the rest of the world, can succeed. 

G.K. Chesteron

This is one of Chesterton’s short novels and one of the most readable. This wee work is another exploration of a spirituality tradition which is encompassed by the Church – the Church which provides a wide and broad road where many different types of people relating to God in very individual ways are all safe and treasured.  It is a road not controlled by predator priests hiding inside the holy Roman collars of good and holy priests.  Among these is this saint whose post traumatic stress disorder evolved through many injustices and (his own and others’) stupidities – to a fool’s joy in God.  What is key is how the entire story is told on a basic premise Chesterton explores at the outset – that God raises up the most unlikely of antidotes to the evils in every age.  It tugs with an invitation to be a fool too, and so be free.

Fulton Sheen

Henri J. M. Nouwen

This is the path out – this is what AA knows and why it is the singularly most effective program in dealing with every compulsive disorder – this is the definition of freedom from suffering – this is why volunteer work is what grounds otherwise lost people and why thousands every year forgo their high level career paths to serve – this is why communities are solid and strong because of the private good deeds of their members - this is also what it means to put on Christ – this is a wee book that is an answer to the What Now question after victims stop resisting their experiences …. And it is GOOD it is a wee book because this is also classic Nouwen, pensive in a lovely way but dense in a pensive way alas Nouwen through and through.

Sharon Salzberg

By one of the leading Buddhists (although that is a contradiction in terms) in the US who has established key Buddhist communities in the Northeast and who teaches in NY and DC regularly, as well as around the states, Salzberg’s many books have all been on the NYT best seller lists many times for long periods.  She practices the Buddhist tradition known as “metta,” and is a really practical funny speaker, and down to earth person.  “Metta” as a practice is very close in its practical applications to charity, and what is so instructional is how Sharon’s exploration of this practice runs into issues like forgiveness and rage.  For me, I had to step out of the Catholic-speak about forgiveness because I could only hear platitudes and rely on friends who seek light to help me find different roads to forgiveness.  Led there with grace, I was returned to the place from where I was exiled, too, God’s promises ever faithful and true.

Luskin

M. Scott Peck, MD

Bernie Siegel

Siegel was and may still be an atheist oncological surgeon who began to study the impact of prayer on his patient’s recovery, then began to ask other surgeons, particularly cardiac surgeons who happen to believe in many cases in the “broken heart” they cannot fix.  Then he began to study the mind body connection, starting with Herb Benson, whose book is noted below.  What came of this was a passionate new mission, and it is to him that it is credited that most medical schools have courses only recently on prayer and faith in healing. Siegel travels the country and world insisting that faith and all its virtues like prayer and forgiveness are part of physical healing, which he equates with spiritual healing. This book is his seminal work, and stayed on the best seller list for years, and still sells tens of thousands of copies each year.  It culled all the medical research and explored for the first time really the big picture on how we heal.

Vicki Mackenize

This work is a long-time NYT best selling memoir of the first woman monk, and first American, to live for decades in a cave in the snowy peaks of the Himalayas where she dug into her soul as daily work. I have found nowhere such honesty in the nature of our spiritual struggle – with the millions who bought the book and heard her speak when she returned to the US take from her key insights into my own dark side, the “shadow” of me not just as a survivor of abuse by priests but also as a human being subjected to suffering.

Kathryn Clarke

Janet Woititz

Herbert Benson,
M D

Arthur Frank

Antoine de Saint- Exupery

I cannot articulate why, but he was so alone in his journey.  His sweetness is our, survivors’, sweetness.  He gave permission to be myself.  And to keep roses in my home.