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Seeking God with Saint John Henry Newman
RYAN J. MARR
Nihil Obstat
Msgr. Michael Heintz, Ph.D.
Censor Librorum
Imprimatur
Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend
June 22, 2020
The Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur are official declarations that a book is free from doctrinal or moral error. It is not implied that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions, or statements expressed.
Except where noted, the Scripture citations used in this work are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible — Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright © 1965, 1966, 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Every reasonable effort has been made to determine copyright holders of excerpted materials and to secure permissions as needed. If any copyrighted materials have been inadvertently used in this work without proper credit being given in one form or another, please notify Our Sunday Visitor in writing so that future printings of this work may be corrected accordingly.
In quotations from John Henry Newman, some alterations have been made to the original punctuation and spelling, so as to bring the text into closer conformity with contemporary rules of grammar. None of these changes affects the meaning of the quotations.
Copyright © 2020 by Ryan J. Marr
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All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts for critical reviews, no part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without permission from the publisher. For more information, visit: www.osv.com/permissions.
Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division
Our Sunday Visitor, Inc.
200 Noll Plaza
Huntington, IN 46750
1-800-348-2440
ISBN: 978-1-68192-592-9 (Inventory No.T2457)
1. RELIGION—Christianity—Catholic.
2. RELIGION—Christianity—Saints & Sainthood.
3. RELIGION—Christian Life—Spiritual Growth.
eISBN: 978-1-68192-593-6
LCCN: 2020939150
Cover, interior design: Chelsea Alt
Cover art: Bridgeman Images
Interior design: Chelsea Alt
Printed in the United States of America
For Catharine M. Ryan and Father Drew Morgan, without whose support this project would not have been possible.
Contents
Introduction: Newman as Spiritual Guide on the Path to Holiness
1. Highlights from Newman’s Life
2. The Three Stages of the Spiritual Life
3. Learning the New Language of Christ
4. Salvation and the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit
Epilogue: Love, the Seed of Holiness
Introduction
Newman as Spiritual Guide on the Path to Holiness
Life is fleeting! The biblical authors warn us as much. The Letter of James, for example, summarizes the human condition in particularly stark terms: “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (4:14). The psalmist drives this same point home, comparing mortals to the flowers of the field: they flourish for a time, but then the wind passes over them, and they are gone, never to be known again (see Ps 103:15–16). Time marches steadily onward, and if we are not careful, we can reach the end of our days only to find that we have wasted our time pursuing meaningless things.
We all want our lives to matter — to have some sort of lasting significance. But this can prove elusive, even for those who have the best of intentions. Think back, for instance, on the past ten to fifteen years of your life. If you are anything like me, there are many things that, with the wisdom you have now, you would have done differently. Yet, here you are today — your past frozen, as it were — living with the consequences of the decisions that have brought you to this point. I’ve heard more than one older acquaintance remark that “youth is wasted on the young.” For whatever reason, as human beings, we don’t seem to realize how precious time is until it’s gone. But once time has slipped through our hands, there is no recovering it. Life can be lived only forward; there are no mulligans.
This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to find a trusted spiritual director — someone who is able to see shortcomings in our character that we are prone to overlook and who can help us to avoid pitfalls that might hamper our spiritual progress. And it’s not only young people who suffer from shortsightedness and willfulness. The human heart is incredibly prone to self-deception, such that good intentions, on their own, are rarely enough to keep us on the right path. Even the saints testify to the need for a good spiritual director. Saint Faustina, for example, once admitted, “If only I had had a spiritual director from the beginning, then I would not have wasted so many of God’s graces.”1 A good director, Faustina added, “knows how to avoid the rocks against which the soul could be shattered.”2 Saint John Henry Newman had a similar outlook, noting that “we should all of us be saved a great deal of suffering of various kinds, if we could but persuade ourselves that we are not the best judges, whether of our own condition, or of God’s will towards us. What sensible person undertakes to be his own physician? Yet are the diseases of the mind less numerous, less intricate, less subtle than those of the body?”3 Long story short, we can spare ourselves a lot of potential heartache by turning to a trustworthy spiritual adviser.
As a supplement to (not