Description

Herein are collected three different works that, unique in their content and nature, nonetheless complement one another in creating a single image: a triptych like the three-paneled works of art often found above altars, serving as they do to nourish the minds, hearts, and prayer of believers. By gathering these books together here, I have humbly tried to offer a little triptych of word and contemplation. It is my hope that it may help to illustrate the central realities of our human existence bathed in the light of God’s healing, redeeming, and transfiguring grace, and may aid in the work of the Holy Spirit who draws us to the center-point where all fulfillment is found in the everlasting embrace of the Blessed Trinity.

The books included in this collection are:

Sheltered Within Her Heart: 33 Days to Deeper Entrustment to Mary

Responding to the Thirst of God: 40 Days to the Heart of Love

Icon of the Father: 33 Days to Entrustment to Saint Joseph

We thus behold in this three-paneled image not only a reflection of the Triune nature of God, exploring in turn the revelation of the profound work of the Spirit in the Virgin Mary, the countenance and the holiness of Christ, and the icon of the heavenly Father in Joseph of Nazareth. But we also see how the nature of God as Love is reflected and manifest at the heart of human communion, at the heart of the Holy Family and the heart of the Church, God’s ever-enduring and grace-born holy family. In this family we are all carried by the current of his saving tenderness toward the consummation of the new creation that awaits us at the end of time, when God shall be all in all and the entire cosmos shall be introduced into the very heart of the eternal intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

These three books can be understood as a triptych, a three-paneled image centered upon the hinge-point of Christ, with his earthly mother and father standing on either side. In precisely this triune manner, reflecting the eternal nature of God as Trinity as a kind of icon or imagine, this triptych humbly seeks to illustrate the central realities of our human existence bathed in the light of God’s grace, allowing us thus to draw near to the center-point where all fulfillment is found in the everlasting embrace of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

On the one hand, we have the irradiation of God’s beauty into this world in and through Mary, the Immaculate One who reflects the primordial beauty of God more than any human creature ever has. She stands before God in the virginal-bridal stance of perfect receptivity and reciprocity, thus allowing the whole of creation itself to be lifted up, carried, and fulfilled in her in union with God. Joseph, on the other hand, finds himself caught up in a mystery that so far surpasses him, and yet which cradles him with incredible tenderness and intimacy, and all the resources of his humanity are harnessed in sheltering and loving the Blessed Virgin and the Child conceived and born of her. Thus he is a custodian of the mysteries of God, and he invites all of us to “step into his shoes,” to learn to love as he loved, and indeed also to entrust ourselves to his care, to be sheltered and loved, fathered and protected by him, just as were Mary and Jesus.