The Lent-Easter Ignatian Prayer Adventure online retreat started yesterday, but you can join in any time.  Take a look.

I thought I’d mention a couple of other Lenten resources.  A couple are out of the ordinary.

Other6 Prays Lent is an online community that helps you find God in the ordinary course of daily life.

You might take some time to listen to the Lunchtime Examen, six guided Examens that lead you through my favorite way of praying.  (I narrated these.)

Creighton University invites you to join a Lenten online reading group.  The book is Thrift Stores Saints, by Jane Knuth.  This is one of my favorite books of recent years, and it’s not just because Loyola Press published it.  It’s about Jane’s experiences working with the poor as a St. Vincent de Paul volunteer.  To call it inspiring is an understatement.

Finally, for something completely different, check out the downloadable video series 40, an allegory about Lent and its meaning from Loyola Productions.  This isn’t for everyone.  Go to 40theseries for more information.

If you like to read novels about priests, Doris Donnelly of John Carroll University has six suggestions.

My book group has read four of the six in recent years.  I’d say (and I think my fellow readers in the group  would agree) that three of them get an A+: The Power and the Glory, The Diary of a Country Priest, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.  The Sparrow, the only one about a Jesuit, is an interesting but uneven science fiction tale.   The Innocence of Father Brown is a good suggestion for our group. As for The Thorn Birds — nah, I don’t think so.

Some years ago I saw a manuscript in the British Library that is thought to have been written by Shakespeare himself in his own hand.  I was amazed and moved.  His art is unfathomable, yet here it was in ordinary ink on ordinary paper.  The experience was akin to viewing the relic of a saint.

I thought of that when I read an essay by America magazine’s Kerry Weber about literary pilgrimages.  She visits the homes of four Catholic authors, including two of my favorites, Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene, and asks what happens when people visit these places.  Here’s one anecdote told by the curator of the Flannery O’Connor home in Milledgeville, Georga.

“At least once a year,” said Mr. Amason, “we watch people weep while standing at the corner of Flannery O’Connor’s bedroom.” A particularly burly man once stood over the guestbook with tears streaming down his face. “He said, ‘I’m crying like a baby; this is embarrassing, but it’s so meaningful,’” Mr. Amason recalled. “I told him it happens all the time.”

Read the whole thing.

There have been rumblings about director Martin Scorsese making a film of Shusaku Endo’s magnificent historical novel Silence, about Japanese martyrs of the 17th century.  Now it seems that the rumor may become a reality, according to Spero Forum.

In a preface to Endo’s book, Scorsese writes perceptively about faith:

How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? … Shusaku Endo understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience.  The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture…That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical.  Yet I believe that they go hand in hand.  One nourishes the other.  Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion.  It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.

I, for one, can’t wait to see the film.

Blogger Wayne Stratz found a book that helped his prayer life quite a bit.  It helped mine too.

And youth minister Daniel Haugh, who works at the American Church in Paris, has a suggestion for the starting the new year.

Anyone interested in the Spiritual Exercises should read Fr. Kevin O’Brien’s book The Ignatian Adventure. He talks about why he wrote the book in this short interview with Vinita Hampton Wright.  (Click here to watch it on YouTube.)

Fr. Jim Martin stops by the Colbert Report to promote his new book, Between Heaven and Mirth. Laughter ensues.  (Click here if you can’t see the video.)

The great river of Ignatian spirituality flows from The Spiritual Exercises, the guided conversion experience developed by St. Ignatius Loyola.  Most of the time Ignatius gave the Exercises as a silent retreat of about 30 days, and for centuries that was the way most spiritual directors offered them.

That’s changed in recent years.  Most people who make the Exercises today do it over the course of six to eight months while living their normal lives.  These “Exercises in daily life” involve daily prayer and a weekly meeting with a spiritual director.  These are called “19th annotation” retreats after a note (the nineteenth!) that Ignatius wrote in the preface to the Exercises.

If you are interested in this approach to the Exercises, I’d recommend reading The Ignatian Adventure by Kevin O’Brien, SJ, just published by Loyola Press.  The book offers material for a 32-week experience of the Spiritual Exercises that Fr. O’Brien has used with both individuals and groups.  The book is also full of short, pithy essays on many Ignatian topics.

You can see what the book is like by clicking the blue see inside button for the book on Loyola Press’s website.

Jesuit jokes stand out in the realm of religious humor, so it’s no surprise that a new book on holy mirth is written by a Jesuit.  He’s Fr. Jim Martin, and his new book is Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life.

There are lots of jokes in the book–Buddhist, Jewish, and Lutheran jokes as well as Catholic ones–but Fr. Martin is serious about humor.  He thinks that a little laughter can enhance one’s spiritual life.  He says, “I don’t think that there’s a problem with Catholics not being serious enough during Mass; I think there’s a problem of Catholics being too serious during Mass all the time. It’s obviously a place for reverence, but it should also be a place for joy, too, and occasional humor and laughter.”  Go here to watch Fr. Martin explain the book.

I’ll end with a joke from Catholic blogger Simcha Fisher:

In America, Timothy O’Brien, SJ, writes about the poet and memoirist Mary Karr about the Spiritual Exercises and Ignatian spirituality: “If you live in New York City, where it’s 105 degrees, I have to walk out of this apartment wondering where I’m going to be of service.”

I’ve written about Mary Karr before. Her memoir Lit is a great story of recovery and spiritual awakening.  Her poetry is searing in its intensity.  Here are a few lines from her poem “Disgraceland:”

Eventually, I lurched out
to kiss the wrong mouths, get stewed,

and sulk around. Christ always stood
to one side with a glass of water.

Read the rest of the poem here.