Fred's Book Club: The Work of Forgiveness.

Greetings, fellow readers! Welcome to the Humpback Writers feature, our Wednesday (a.k.a. Hump Day) entry that looks at books and lets them look back at us. The writers may not actually have any humps, but the books have spines, so there is that.

Today we're preparing for Christmas, and while Advent is a season of joy, it's also a time for examination of conscience and learning to love our brethren. This will be helpful if we're going to be stuck with our brethren all Christmas Day at Aunt Tilly's house. But forgiveness is often more than we can stand to do, especially if the wound has been very deep. What is to be done?

Today's book is one of the smallest in our vast collection, at 71 pages, but is meant to help us in this work of forgiveness. Joan Mueller, Ph.D., is a professor of theology at Creighton University in Omaha, and also a professor of Christian spirituality. Forgiveness is one of the gigantic pillars of Christianity, something we all need and we're expected to give, so we might think Dr. Mueller has some useful thoughts. 

Forgiveness: Three Minute Reflections on Redeeming Life's Most Difficult Moments is a helpful book for those seeking to forgive and those seeking forgiveness. It is a series of meditations, broken into four sections of seven each, that can be literally read in three minutes. Each has a scriptural reading, a thought connected to it, and a spiritual exercise to help the reader. The exercises can take a lot longer than three minutes, of course, depending on how much thought we want or need to apply to them. But taken along the way, all can be useful, and if done one a day, the book can be completed in a month. I won't say painlessly -- forgiveness can be painful for everyone involved. But grudges can hurt a lot more.

Here's a sample page:

You may hate this kind of stuff. Dismiss it as nonsense or happy horse-hockey (or worse). Well, so do I, much of the time, and I used to all of the time. But I approached this with an open mind and I believe it was good for me.  

I picked this book up in the lobby of my Catholic church, when some of the publishers from New City Press came down for a visit. New City Press is not a Catholic publisher, but they seek to help any Christian or anyone looking into Christianity or anyone who needs to find faith. (And Hyde Park, New York, where they are based, is not far from where I live.) I wanted to support the small press, so I looked for a book that might be of interest, and this one surely was. I think it did help me make peace with some of the people against which I held grudges, even if they didn't know I was still mad. 

Finding peace with an angry world and the people in it can surely be a daunting task, but one particularly good to do, or at least try to do, at Christmastime. I thank Professor Mueller for her book, and New City Press for bringing it to my attention. But I'm still a work in progress.