Springtime in Guatemala, Fr. Paul Aumen

"Violence must be told and retold so that no one will ever forget how horrible it is and how little is accomplished by it.  There must be a better way for all people to live together.  As India's Ghandi so truthfully said, 'There is room on this earth for each one of us.'"

This book was a Christmas gift from my aunt and uncle - and a beautiful gift it was!  I saved it for a Lenten read, which turned into a Holy Week read when Mansfield Park took longer than expected.

Springtime in Guatemala is a memoir of sorts, written by Fr. Paul Aumen, a missionary of the Precious Blood.  He served for 20 years in Chilean missions, then moved on to serve an additional 18 years in Guatemalan missions.  The book is a collection of stories and experiences, about several parishes, the Guatemalan people, and Guatemala's 36-year civil war and genocide.  It's not an overly complex book, and is an (intellectually) easy and quick read.  However, the memoir is full of pain.  Through Fr. Aumen's stories, we see how, through pain, suffering, and death - there is beauty and truth and life.

As I read, I could picture so many of his experiences.  The magnificence of climbing a volcano.  The absolute poverty and violence that  has caused (and causes) so many good, innocent people to suffer.  How alive Antigua is during Cuaresma and Semana Santa.  Words cannot express how beautiful this book was for me, in its heart-wrenching, simple truth.

On Wealth and Poverty, St. John Chrysostom

Yes, I have been reading lately, I promise. I just haven't been blogging... about anything.

This short little book, which I finished weeks ago, contains a collection of sermons given by St. John Chrysostom when he was Archbishop of Constantinople. They focus on the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16: 19-31). Despite the fact that he was preaching to people who enjoyed their wealth (or perhaps because he was), he emphasized, in various ways, the virtues of giving up material wealth and the blessedness of the poor in heaven. He points out eloquently that our material goods came from God and belong to Him, to be used among His children, and therefore one who possesses a superabundance is stealing from the poor. He also explores idea of how God punishes and rewards people in the afterlife according to their actions (not wealth) here.

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

After starting several books - and being plunged into preparation for marriage and a wedding (in that order), while working two jobs and working on a graduate certificate - I finally finished a book!  My previous Jane Austen reads have been rather light and I confess that's what I was looking for when I started reading Mansfield Park in February.  No to be!  The introduction (I'm a sucker for Oxford World's Classics) begins: "Mansfield Park is Jane Austen's most dramatic and disturbing work."  And so it is - there are quite a few theatrical themes in the novel, and the characters' actions are at times quite disturbing for Regency England.  Sadly, adultery doesn't seem quite as shocking in today's world.

Fanny Price is not your typical Austen heroine.  At the age of ten, Fanny is sent by her working-class family to live with her wealthy relations at Mansfield Park - perhaps a surprising favor for such an unaffectionate family.  She grows up passive, quiet, and modest, downtrodden by her awful Aunt Norris, but protected by her cousin Edmund.  At the same time, the is the only player not wholly deceived by others' true characters.
The novel picks up when fashionable brother and sister Henry and Mary Crawford arrive to visit their sister at the parsonage, and become "intimate" friends with the party at Mansfield Park.  Flirtation and more ensue.

I really grew to enjoy this novel as I got into it.  Its themes are heavier and content more mature than Austen's other novels.  Mansfield Park is not a love story - probably the reason that recent film adaptations (see imdb.com, 1999 and 2007) have been such poor representations of the book.  But it an excellent read, well-written with well-developed and exciting (if often despicable) characters.