IN THIS unusual book, Joanna Collicutt has brought together passages from spiritual texts across the centuries, many of them unfamiliar, and introduces them as someone who is a priest, a psychologist, and a teacher.
As a priest, she is concerned that we should enlarge our spiritual vision through wisdom from periods that are remote and ways of thinking that seem alien. She draws on writing from the patristic period to the 19th century, the Eastern and the Western Church, Catholic and Protestant in a variety of genres. Prefatory essays helpfully discuss the value of writing from the past and how we might fruitfully approach it. “Reading classic Christian spiritual texts from ‘other’ cultures and ages requires that both the cultural differences and the commonalities be acknowledged and negotiated.”
As a psychologist, she takes the process of bereavement as a paradigm of the spiritual life. “Christian spirituality is fundamentally eschatological; the life of faith is about inhabiting Jesus’ absence well as we eagerly await his return in glory.”
Her selections are, therefore, not arranged chronologically or by type, but according to psychological themes such as Lamenting, (re-)Attaching Imaginatively, and Remembering, and she candidly admits that passages have been selected to fit these themes. There is no pretence that her anthology is comprehensive or exemplary.
As a teacher, the author developed her material in courses for Anglican ordinands, and provides excellent introductory notes for each text, with information about author and language, genre, and historical context. Each passage is then left to speak for itself, without pointers to its significance for us. Occasionally, there is a health warning, as when she admits that a 13th-century description of Angela of Foligno’s swallowing a decomposing leper’s bathing water is not for the squeamish.
So Longeth My Soul calls itself a reader, but it is not a primer. Certainly it does not presume prior or technical knowledge, but it does assume a studious interest, and is unafraid to be a textbook as well as a book of texts.
There is a certain tension between its stated purpose as a gateway to Christian writers of the past for the uninitiated and a vehicle for the author’s thesis about bereavement as a pattern for spiritual formation. But its profusion of Christian witnesses and the author’s original thesis for marshalling them invite the reader to think outside several boxes.
The Revd Philip Welsh is a retired priest in the diocese of London.
So Longeth My Soul: A reader in Christian spirituality
Joanna Collicutt
SCM Press £25
(978-0-334-06310-0)
Church Times Bookshop £20
