Free PDF Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl
Surely, to improve your life top quality, every book Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl will certainly have their particular driving lesson. Nevertheless, having certain recognition will make you really feel much more positive. When you feel something take place to your life, sometimes, reviewing publication Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl can assist you to make calmness. Is that your actual leisure activity? Occasionally indeed, however often will be uncertain. Your option to check out Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl as one of your reading e-books, can be your proper publication to review now.
Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl
Free PDF Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl
Exactly how if your day is started by reviewing a publication Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl Yet, it remains in your gadget? Everybody will still touch and us their gadget when getting up as well as in morning activities. This is why, we mean you to likewise read a publication Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl If you still puzzled ways to get the book for your gadget, you can comply with the method right here. As right here, we provide Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl in this site.
When going to take the experience or ideas types others, book Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl can be a good source. It's true. You could read this Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl as the resource that can be downloaded and install here. The method to download is additionally easy. You can see the web link web page that our company offer and after that acquire guide to make an offer. Download Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl and also you could put aside in your personal gadget.
Downloading guide Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl in this internet site lists can offer you much more advantages. It will certainly reveal you the best book collections and finished collections. Numerous books can be located in this site. So, this is not just this Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl Nonetheless, this book is referred to read due to the fact that it is a motivating book to give you a lot more chance to get encounters and also ideas. This is basic, check out the soft file of guide Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl as well as you get it.
Your perception of this book Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl will lead you to acquire exactly what you specifically require. As one of the inspiring books, this book will certainly provide the presence of this leaded Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl to gather. Even it is juts soft documents; it can be your collective documents in gizmo and other tool. The crucial is that use this soft data book Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl to read and take the perks. It is exactly what we imply as book Virgin Time: In Search Of The Contemplative Life, By Patricia Hampl will enhance your thoughts and mind. After that, reviewing book will certainly also improve your life quality much better by taking great activity in balanced.
A gifted writer's inquiry into one of the most profound yet least discussed issues of contemporary American life: the individual's search for faith. It tells of Hampl's quest to escape the indelible brand of a Catholic upbringing, following her to the "old world" of Catholocism in Spain and France, where she meets other pilgrims, back home again, and finally to a monastery in northern California, where she is able to settle into the real goal of her search: the silence of prayer.
- Sales Rank: #1950682 in Books
- Published on: 1992-08-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 6.25" w x 1.00" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 326 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In Catholic parochial school, writes Hampl ( A Romantic Education ), she learned the virtue of contemplation: "Pondering was the highest vocation. . . . Pondering was a special kind of thinking. It was not done in the mind, that chilly place, but in the heart, where the real mystery of intelligence--intuition rather than thought--lay catlike and feminine, ready to pounce." Accordingly, as she seeks the meaning of faith--by visiting several Catholic pilgrimage sites in Europe and a California-based Cistercian women's monastery, and by musing over her religious upbringing in Minnesota--she exercises her observational skills with a fury. She describes the wildflowers of Umbria and the quirks and passions of English agnostic travel companions; she relates how, in Assisi, touring Franciscans "spoke of Francis and Clare as of people who had just left the room for a moment"; in Lourdes, she is overwhelmed by a crowd of supplicants, many of them in wheelchairs; and in the California monastery, she probes the meaning of silence. But for all its prettiness and earnestness, Hampl's prose is finally prolix and enervating.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
"People like me, fused by fascination to their past, find themselves taking planes to distant places," observes Hampl, whose A Romantic Education ( LJ 2/1/81) reported on growing up Czech in America. To sort out her feelings about the Catholicism she rejected as a young woman, Hampl heads for Europe--the past of dusky cathedrals and centuries-old monasteries where her religion was forged. But along the road to Assisi, at the Poor Clare monastery on the Borgo San Pietro, and at Lourdes, she encounters not religious exaltation but vapid tourists and an American nun who is singularly unwilling to share her feelings. Only at a retreat in Mendicino, California, where religion is being remade, does she find true spirituality, learning to accept rather than to impose. Poet Hampl's prose is beautifully incisive, delivering her cascading reflections and sardonic asides on some loutish fellow pilgrims with equal vigor. Unfortunately, the reflections don't quite cohere--it's hard to follow the development of her thought--but her beautiful scattering of ideas is still well worth reading.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Hampl, a poet, professor (English/Univ. of Minnesota), and MacArthur Fellow, peers into her soul and finds the Church. A rambling, radiant travelogue-cum-memoir, a sequel of sorts to the author's acclaimed autobiography, A Romantic Education (1981). Raised by devout Catholic parents, schooled by nuns, Hampl nevertheless finds that ``most of the time I'm so removed from belief I confuse it with having an opinion.'' To resolve this dilemma, she heads to Europe to ``see the old world of Catholicism.'' Most of her time is spent in Assisi, scrambling up holy mountains, kneeling in crypts, sifting her past, recording the chatter of priests, nuns, and other seekers. Just about all of it is passed on to us: encounters with fellow travelers whose passions and prattle fill up too much of the text; superb memories of a Catholic childhood drenched in dogma, instructed by nuns who radiated ``a bracing coolness''; gems of theological insight (``it was integral to the fundamental inspiration of Christianity that Jesus was poor. He was nothing and nobody, and therefore he could be a metaphor from minute one. He was the Word made flesh''); too many passages that sound like warmed-over Annie Dillard (on an airplane, ``wrinkles of terror run over the soles of my feet. My toes curl towards earth''). Over all hovers the kindly presence of St. Francis; beneath all runs the urgency of Hampl's quest, driven by the realization that ``God was not at stake....prayer was the real question.'' A tentative answer comes, oddly, not in Assisi but in a tacked-on visit to a Cistercian monastery in California. Much like a High Mass: rich, beautiful, boring, elevating. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
a book for the spiritual seeker
By Constant Reader
From the other reviews, this is clearly a book you either love or hate; as someone who loved it, I also found it (as the other fans of it did) a very moving and coherent tale. Hampl takes us with her as she seeks for a way to understand what it means to seek; she (like many of us) yearns for some sort of spirituality, but rests in a deeply uneasy relationship with her childhood Catholicism. The book follows her on a series of trips-- to Italy with jaded English tourists, then with Franciscan pilgrims, to Lourdes, back into her childhood memories, and finally to a retreat in California. I think readers who find the travelogue parts and the retreat section disconnected are not seeing this as a spiritual journey (in fact, most of them admit they aren't interested in it!-- then why read this book?) but it is-- and one that moves Hampl, not into certainty, but into peace and acceptance with her own doubt. The book charts her finding her way to accept and forgive those who travel with her, and especially to forgive herself for the dance she does between wanting this contemplative life and not wanting to give up the world-- adoring her sweets and coffee, her human companionship, her writing, her shyness, all the weaknesses that make her human and that she finally realizes do not have to be left behind, but instead embraced with compassion. The lessons she lives out are not solely Catholic or Christian but remind me of Pema Chodron's teachings on living with uncertainty. I found it honest, moving, and, in the end, deeply joyful.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Wonderful fun read, simply could not put it down!
By G. Messersmith
Although I do not consider myself to be religious and have seldom set foot in a Catholic Church, I found this book captivating. It is refreshingly honest and simple to read and the characters are charming and sometimes quirky. The narrator has spent her life trying to break free of her childhood Catholic roots only to find herself drawn back into them in middle age. She begins her pilgrimmage in Italy with a group of agnostic British couples and moves on to a group of Friars and Nuns, who are delightfully humorous and not at all what one would expect them to be. Throughout her trips in Italy we learn bits and pieces of her childhood along with the story of St. Francis and St. Clare. The places she stays and sees are described beautifully and I felt as though I were on the trip with her. The book is fun and charming to read and I highly recommend it.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Beautifully written spiritual autobiography
By Astoria Ann
This book is carefully and elegantly constructed, with the quiet pacing of a richly written travelogue. Her writing is so clear, descriptive and nuanced that the countryside, her fellow travellers and her own inner life are vividly realized. I enjoyed her candidness about the difficulty of constructing an authentic spiritual experience and the magic of actually experiencing one. It has what the best spiritual autobiographies have: hopeful doubt, caution, journey and joy. It is her stark candidness and the quality of her writing that set it apart as an excellent read.
Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl PDF
Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl EPub
Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl Doc
Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl iBooks
Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl rtf
Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl Mobipocket
Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment