December 2011

Running With Expanding Heart: Meeting God in Everyday Life, by Mary Reuter OSB, Liturgical Press, Collegeville USA, 2010

Reviewed by Sue Barker SGS

In this easy-to-read text, the author shares her own reflections on her everyday experiences as a means of exploring such Benedictine themes as: seeing the sacred in the ordinary, being awake, hospitality, stability, obedience, living contemplatively.

Her style is simple, her shared experiences homely. From her reflection on sharing the task of un-stacking the dishwasher to noticing the movements within her heart when she dropped a bottle of salad dressing, she humbly lets the reader into the less graced (as well as the more graced) corners of her own heart and allows us to perhaps recognise where our own life experiences and responses resonate with her own.

In most chapters, she combines anecdotes of daily experience with reference to Scripture and the Rule of Benedict.

I wonder to whom this little book might appeal. Perhaps a book group looking for a gentle introduction to the spirit of the Rule of Benedict might be engaged by this author, or those stimulated by her anecdotes to find God in their own life experiences. For those unfamiliar with the Rule, there is only brief comment on Benedict’s teaching, and there is almost an assumption that the reader is familiar with such concepts and practices as stability and lectio divina.

Perhaps the comment on the cover of the book gives the best guide to this book’s appeal: maybe through the author’s writing “readers will also take up the practice of looking for God in unexpected places”.