Abstract
This volume was inspired by Richard Challoner’s Meditations for Every Day of the Year published in 1753. Challoner’s work was intended as a pastoral resource to support and sustain Catholics in difficult times, where persecution was still active and executions recent in memory. The work proved a best seller and was reprinted for over 200 years. While the context has changed, this volume has a similar pastoral intent to support the faithful in a time of significant challenges, albeit of a different order. The intended faithful audience includes not only lay Catholics, but also all the Christian faithful, Jews, and Muslims, fellow children of Abraham. One might wonder at this aim given the very Christian focus of some of the meditations. The broad formal outline of this volume reprises that of Challoner with daily reflections for every day and feast of the year. The reflections are shorter, pithier, and more incisive, in language adapted for today. The attention to contemporary readers matches that of Challoner in his time.
The author, Whiteaker, has a complex biography. A medical doctor, he entered a Benedictine monastery where he discovered Challoner’s work and would pray with it daily. Later when leaving the monastery to become a hermit, the Abbot gave him the library copy of the Meditations as a parting gift. This volume, therefore, is the fruit of many years of personal prayerful engagement. The medical training surfaces at times in the very pastoral approach, as also the monastic experience in the attention to others and their needs. These various influences have led to a creative adaptation of Challoner’s Meditations, which become fresh and accessible daily reflections for today. The pithy and incisive style is a departure from Challoner’s more ponderous and repetitive style but is faithful to his pastoral impetus to connect with one’s contemporaries.
This volume is not to be read in one sitting but over a full year and probably over many years. The disarming simplicity cuts to the heart. Nourished by years of lectio divina, one can detect that the Scriptures are always close to the surface. Whiteaker advises that readers if bid by their interaction with the Meditations should go to the Scriptures. The volume is an aid to the spiritual life but in no way replaces the primacy of Scripture as a location of encounter with the divine.
It is difficult to write a review on a volume for the Christian year, without waiting for the year to pass, for this is how it would be best appraised. Attempting to compare some meditations of Whiteaker with those of Challoner, there appeared to be wide differences and yet surprising similarities. While the themes can vary, when similar, often key pastoral insights are retained and developed. For example, on 26 January Challoner focuses on mortal sin and the rebellion against God, while Whiteaker in his much-shortened treatment retains and gives due prominence to the idol of self-love and how it separates from God (pp. 48–49). Likewise for Spy Wednesday both reflect on the sufferings of Jesus on the Cross, but Whiteaker distils the developed reflection on the sufferings through the prism of the rule of Benedict and its school of the Lord’s service (RB Prol. 45), likening the Cross to a school of love and a teaching of obedience and God acting in divine providence (p. 154).
The volume is a much-needed practical pastoral aid to the lay faithful for the nourishment of their faith and towards its practice in their daily lives. Although inspired by a writing from the 18th century, it has a contemporary style, which at times leads to the loss of some valuable insights. Nevertheless, Whiteaker has recovered much and reappropriated many valuable spiritual insights for today.