For years, I had heard great things about Well-Read Mom, a national women’s book club, but I had never had a chance to join. Then, last year, a friend invited me to the chapter that meets once a month in her home. I was more than ready to dive into a discussion of great books with like-minded ladies. As a serious bibliophile, I get a little lonely reading in isolation. I hoped for deep literary discussion with fellow women of faith.
A Monk Helps a Mom Written by Marcie Stokman, Well-Read Mom Founder and President The following blog is adapted from Well-Read Mom Founder Marcie Stokman’s book, The Well-Read Life Copyright © 2024 by Marcie Stokman and Colleen Hutt, used with permission. “Mom, I can’t study in our house,” my teenage daughter informed me. “It’s too messy. I…
I loved reading Elizabeth Goudge’s My God and My All this Advent, but I must admit that I struggled with parts of Saint Francis’s life. It made me pause to think about this great saint whose life was so completely different from my own. Saint Francis is known as the saint who most closely exemplified Christ.
I finished reading John Steinbeck’s The Pearl and asked the question, why? Why couldn’t they have surrendered the pearl to the trackers when they saw them coming? They could have just tossed them the pearl, flown their white flag, and pursued a more normal life.
Last year, after reading Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God, it seemed critical to put Br. Lawrence’s wisdom into practice. So, to help encourage the practice in my life, I took a stack of little Post-It notes, scribbled PPG on each one, and taped these reminders in hidden and not-so-hidden places around my house, my laptop, and in our car.
Francis came face to face with poverty and realized that “it was not a loathsome thing to be shunned but something holy”(20). Francis believed that you could not truly love Christ without loving Lady Poverty. It is the natural result of love because “Love must give or it is not love” (21).
actually did not want to read A Father’s Tale, not because of its length but because I am not a father and I have no sons. I thought it would be unrelatable. Yet, I find that despite these very significant differences between myself and Alexandre, we have everything in common that we need to: we are both children of the same Father.
During The Year of the Father, we have encountered remarkable fathers whose love appears to know no limits. On the surface, their stories clearly illustrate sacrificial love—a love that, in one way or another, leads to both death and redemption. However, I find myself wanting to probe deeper—to better understand the connection between the characters—and to begin to truly comprehend what it means to engage in sacrificial love.
People don’t read classic literature as much as they used to. These books are full of wisdom and insight. The best solution is a slow one: read. Reading, especially reading with others, may cause surprising and good ripple effects in our communities.
Elizabeth Goudge’s work, My God and My All: The Life of St. Francis of Assisi, has been a blessing! Her deep academic study of St. Francis’s life, told as a narrative, has given me a new lens through which to perceive the man.