This month has brought quite a few updates or changes of direction that I’d like to share. I’ll go through them one at a time, building to the one I think is probably the most important or interesting.

Pilgrimage

I was able to take some holiday and go on pilgrimage following in the footsteps of Saint Paul: Philippi, Thessalonica (Thessaloniki), Beroea (Veria), Athens, Corinth, Cenchreae, Ephesus. This is something that I had been wanting to do for a very long time—since well before the pandemic.

There are two prongs to my interest in Saint Paul’s actual journeys. One is intellectual; I actually have an MA in Classical Studies, so the concrete world of the New Testament interests me greatly. But more than this is the spiritual dimension. Part of the spirituality of Charles de Foucauld is his notion of Priscilla and Aquila as engaged laypeople living with others (at Corinth, Ephesus, Rome), in their own trades and environments, but sharing the Gospel. In my own prayer life, this communion of original laypeople has extended to include Lydia (at Philippi) and Phoebe (at Corinth’s port of Cenchreae), too. Thus, the suitability of the pilgrimage around the Aegean.

I may share some from this journey, if I am inspired to do so and nobody strongly objects. And if I do so, there will always be a contemplative, spiritual dimension to what I write.

Lectio divina

I might also start posting some of the fruits of my spiritual reading of the Book of Jeremiah in the abuse crisis. There is a good deal of “trauma hermeneutics” that has been brought to bear on this book of the Bible in the past decade or so, but I’ve never seen anyone try to read the book as if the abuse crisis was on their mind as they did so. But I do this a lot. And I find it very profitable and insightful.

So, as much as this stretches the mandate and title of the blog, I might start posting some of these reflections here, too. There are a lot of themes which I think are especially important, from the pervasive claims “terror is all around” and “shalom, shalom, but no shalom” through to the major players in Jeremiah’s decision(s) regarding the question “Should I stay or should I go?”. As a survivor of some horrendous clerical abuse, I find Jeremiah almost as invaluable a companion as Marcel Văn. Speaking of which—

Publishing

If there is one area that I think I have contributed something to the study of Christian spirituality, it’s in bringing Marcel Văn to an English-speaking audience and focusing on his role as a saintly survivor of clerical abuse. Back in November, I wrote a 10-part series on this topic, and I’ve dabbled in it now and then since.

What I’ve also been doing is expanding on these original articles and smoothing them out into a book-length treatment. The idea is to try to get this book published.

The first Catholic publisher that I approached rejected it, for the reason that they didn’t think it fit their publishing program.

This doesn’t mean I give up. What would undoubtedly help, however, to get this project published would be positive testimonies or endorsements of what I’ve already written on Văn or clerical abuse (or both). I’m sure the length of comment doesn’t matter, and you probably wouldn’t need to have read the whole 10-part series on Văn. But anything that would tell a publisher that I have an audience would go a long way.

If you are willing to provide some testimony and would let your email address be used in my book proposal, I’d appreciate it—especially, but not only, if you have any amount of audience yourself. You can always email me at citmben@gmail.com. And if you are willing to suggest a quick perusal of the 10-part series to anyone whose recommendation might be beneficial for my work’s publication, please feel free to do so as well.

For me, Văn is the heart of a genuinely Christian response to the abuse crisis as a global crisis (he treats it as such), without abandoning the Christian demands of sanctity. Nobody else who has been put forward as a candidate for sainthood has written so much and in such details about so many different kinds of abuse in the Church. It’s a story that needs to be told.

Image in header: Underwater archaeological site of the of north mole at Cenchreae