Akis Mous Mous itibaren 40056 Crespellano BO, Italy
Ellen Carstairs has returned to her home in Glasgow, with her maiden aunt and her brother, after spending several years studying music in Germany. Although she intends a career as a music teacher, she is drawn to the literary life instead, much against the conventional views of her friends and family. It's written in the form of letters and an extended diary kept for Ellen's best friend, and though it did take me a while to get used to Ellen's vivacious, dramatic voice, I ended up liking her a lot and rooting for her to defy society and do what she wanted. The Camomile is a vivid picture of a woman who needs a room of her own: in Ellen's words, "a quiet, clean, pleasant room in which she can work, dream her dreams, write out her thoughts, and keep her few treasures in peace."
This was my annual lenten "spiritual reading" book. Father Greely's writing style really irritates me -- it's incredibly dense and awkward in places -- but I love his ideas and the fact that he has a forum to get them out into the public. The authors argue that to "save" the Catholic Church, we must revive the Catholic imagination and reinstate the importance of storytelling, art, and analogy into the Church. This comes in response to criticism from Protestants that the Catholic Church is too "pagan." But the Greelys attest that what makes the Catholic Church unique is its Sacramentality, its ability to find the sacred in everyday objects, events, and people. With this in mind, they also push for the Church to get over its hatred of women and its squeamishness regarding sex -- both women and sex need to be re-instated to their "proper" place of sacramentality. It's been a long time since I've read so much theory, argument, and abstraction, so I felt like I was in college again reading this book. But it did help me to fall back in love with my Church under the reassurance that there are Catholics out there who "get it." Unfortunately, this book was written back in 1984 and not much has changed in 20 years. And not enough people are talking about change, either. But that's not the book's fault.