In the summer of 2003 I attended a Christ Renews His Parish (CRHP) retreat. Following the retreat, each CRHP team undergoes about a six-month period of spiritual formation. The Holy Spirit picked me to lead our team of men as lay director. God did not choose me because I had any special leadership qualities; there were certainly men more worthy than me. No, He chose me because I required the most work.
Each week leading up to the formation sessions, I would nervously comb through the CRHP handbook and surf the net for supporting resources. The more I learned, the more I discovered how little I knew about my Catholic faith. A funny thing happened along the way. As I did my research, I kept stumbling across the writings of
St. Josemaría, in particular points from The Way.
The book consists of 999 spiritual points, which when read reflectively, are like mini-retreats. The book is organized into forty-six short chapters that cover a wide range of spiritual topics. Some include character, cheerfulness, formation, interior struggle and perseverance. The book also has a subject index and a scriptural reference index.
You can choose to read one point daily or read a chapter at a time. You should read the book as a spiritual guide; it’s not meant to be read like a novel. Sometimes, when I read a point, it is as if St. Josemaría was speaking to me as my spiritual director. The overall message of the book is that we are all children of God who are called to be holy in our everyday, ordinary lives.
The book is widely available at Catholic books stores, mainstream books stores and all of their website stores. You can also access it online at
EscrivaWorks.
, will be taking calls during the second hour of Catholic Answers Live on Catholic Radio. Father McCloskey is the former director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C. The National Catholic Register described McCloskey as "one of the Church's most accomplished 'fishers of men.'" In fact, his spiritual direction was instrumental in the conversions of Judge Robert Bork, Robert Novak and Bernard Nathanson, an atheist who oversaw over 70,000 abortions.
