ISBN-13: 9780872432710

In this lyrical book, Thomas Casey sweeps us along on a pilgrimage toward pure love. Carefully distinguishing purity from prudery, he invites us to embark upon this journey with angels to unleash the limitless potential with which we are graced. Avoiding pop culture’s sentimentality, Casey uses angels to illuminate the way of life to which we are all invited, one that brings us ever closer to genuine holiness. “This book,” the author says, “is concerned above all with seeing ourselves and our world in a new way. This new vision unfolds in the light. The darkness that likes to lay siege to our souls must be firmly refused and forcefully rejected; the light is more than ready to embrace us.” To show how we are called to change our lives, he offers, among other illustrations, examples from popular culture, the opera Don Giovanni, and an imaginative reconstruction of the early Christian saint Cecilia.

“Father Casey gives us his own spirited and interesting meditations on faith, life, and especially love. In a time of bleak skepticism he sounds a note of joyous idealism and personal generosity and a call for love in a self-centered world.” Father Benedict J. Groeschel, C.F.R.

Thomas Casey is an Irish Jesuit priest and Professor of Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome. He is the author of Humble and Awake and Life and Soul, both published with Templegate.

Paperback

208 pages

EXCERPT: "Pure love raises us to the exquisite pitch of God. If you take your place in an auditorium a short time before a concert begins, you notice the various musicians tuning their instruments. As each musician makes the necessary adjustments, the orchestra begins to emit a distinctly odd sound. It is as though each instrument were singing a language of its own, inhabiting a separate world, and during this time there are more than a few “false starts” as each musician endeavors to arrive at the right pitch. These moments that precede the concert are like birth-pangs, the sometimes painful and painfully sounding efforts to enter into something larger than any one instrumentalist could produce. In this book I am trying to tune up as well to something which escapes categorization and cannot be tidily or neatly summed up in words. It is a mystery that needs to be approached a number of times, using different instruments in order to get the pitch right. And I hope that what I say at times shows the inspiration of the One who is the source of harmony, who orchestrated a beautiful order from primal chaos, hovering in rhythmical perfection over the waters at the beginning of creation, regular and reassuring as the sound of a mother’s heartbeat heard across the internal sea that encircles the womb."