Fire in the Pew

Somewhere along the way many Catholics quietly concluded that the wonders belonged to another age. Healings, prophecy, tongues, deliverance, the whole noisy inventory of the Acts of the Apostles: fine for the first century, and for saints, and for the people at the loud parish across town, but not for the pew you sit in.

This book says otherwise, carefully.

It begins with the God who still acts, and with the wonders we stopped seeing because we stopped expecting them. It works through the gifts the Church teaches are given to all the baptised, and not to a spiritual elite. It puts love where Paul put it, above every gift. It takes healing seriously as something the Lord still does, and takes seriously too the people who prayed and were not healed. Then it does the thing the loud parish sometimes forgets: it keeps wonder honest. What discernment looks like when someone claims a word from the Lord. What the Church actually teaches about private revelation. How to tell the Spirit from suggestion, and both from the enemy. How fire is kept without burning the house down.

It ends with the fire handed on, because the gifts were never meant to stop with the person who received them.

Where it stands

The architecture is set in seven parts and twenty-seven chapters, the Scripture and Church teaching for every chapter are mapped, and the witness of those who have carried this fire faithfully is being gathered. Drafting has not begun. It will, when the discernment book ahead of it has cleared its reviews, because this book leans on that one.

Letters from this territory will come as it is written.