In his Rule (Chapter 48), St. Benedict recommends that each monk in the monastic community be given a book from the monastery’s library and be required to read it from cover to cover during Lent and to return it at the end of the holy fast. This is likely the beginning of our custom of reading a book during Lent. This book by Sister Benedicta Ward, In The Company of Christ, is a good choice for this Lent.

Sister Benedicta Ward is a well known theologian and spiritual writer. She is a member of the Sisters of the Love of God, an Anglican contemplative community of religious sisters. She teaches theology, church history and spirituality in the Faculty of Theology of the University of Oxford and has a special interest in the Desert Fathers and Anglo-Saxon spirituality. She is the author of many books. A short stroll through the shelves of this reviewer turned up four books by her: The Venerable Bede in the Outstanding Christian Thinkers Series, Harlots of the Desert (a study of penitent saints in the early church), The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers (a translation of the sayings of the early monks

of the Egyptian desert) and The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm in the Penguin Classics series. She is certainly the right person to take the Lenten and Holy Week devotions of fourth century Jerusalem and tenth century England and show us how they may guide our own Lenten and Holy Week devotions in 2007.

In her book, she speaks of simple human actions such as walking, kneeling, washing and breathing and tells us how these actions place us in the company of Christ and each other. We walk  together in the processions of Palm Sunday and the Easter Vigil. We kneel on Good Friday as we venerate the Cross together. We wash each other’s feet on Maundy Thursday as we commemorate the Last Supper and the Institution of the Holy Communion. And breathing and praying brings us into Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Ghost in a rushing mighty wind and tongues of fire. Out of these simple physical actions, we derive a deeper devotion to Christ our Lord. She also speaks of silence, another Benedictine theme (chapter 6 of St. Benedict’s Rule) and suggests that we seek “to know ourselves in the silence of God.” She stresses that our devotions in Lent and Holy Week are not ends but rather continuings or even beginnings.  So she adds Pentecost to her book.

Her two major sources are Egeria, a fourth century pilgrim to Jerusalem and the Holy Land who experienced herself the services of Holy Week in Jerusalem, and the Monastic Agreement or Regularis Concordia, an agreement about liturgy and life drawn up by the abbots of the Benedictine monasteries of tenth century England. She selected these two sources “to show the continuity of

this method of prayer, since they are virtually the same as those used today.” To these she adds a marvelous variety of other sources, such as sermons by Edward Pusey, letters by St. Jerome

and St. Ignatius of Antioch, poems by G.K. Chesterton and William Williams Pantycelyn, and prayers by St. Anselm. Even Bishop Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne make their appearances on her pages. In this respect, it is a very Anglican book.

This volume is, I suspect, the product of the author’s own deep prayer and participation in the devotions which she describes. It is a fine book and highly recommended. It has an appendix of hymns that are suitable for the season and is available from the Anglican Book Centre in Toronto, Ontario.