New Nazareths in Us

Born in the silence and simplicity of rural New-England, this book gathers some brief reflections and sermons of a parish Priest. The sermons fix their attention upon the Mother of God, and the author’s approach is essentially liturgical. Side-stepping the language of apologetics and controversy, he studies the texts of the Roman liturgy and shares what he finds there. The meditations—concentrated and pithy—consider, beneath the light of inspired human reason and Sacred Scripture, such topics as:

• Humility and cheerfulness
• Anxiety and truth
• Modernism and Mary
• The Law and the Little Way of St Therese
• Scandal, hope, and the Divine Gardener
• The cloister’s unlikely lessons on Patriotism
• Courage, pharisaism, and a fate worse than death 
• The peace of the wounded Christ

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Fr Sliwa enriches his meditations by engaging with saints, writers, and philosophers from Augustine and Aquinas to Evelyn Waugh and Georges Bernanos. In a phrase of the priest-poet Hopkins, the grace of Christ’s Incarnation ‘Makes, O marvelous! New Nazareths in us.’ Thus the aim of this book can be summed up as preparing human lives for the visits of divine grace.