Leading up to Lent

Lenten Book Recommendations

Do you know those books that you fill with notes and underlining — the ones you recommend when someone says, “What good spiritual book should I read for Lent?”

This TAN reprint, Love, Peace, and Joy, is one of those for me. The author heavily quotes the writings of St. Gertrude the Great and gives us meditations and practical conclusions to apply to our lives.

Today, February 26th, is the little-known, celebrated-in-some-places, feast of St. Mechtilde of Hackeborn. St. Mechtilde’s sister was the abbess of the Benedictine Abbey of Helfta, Germany, and they lived there in peaceful religious life together. When St. Gertrude the Great was five years old, she was brought to this abbey to be a boarding student and St. Mechtilde was the one entrusted with her care.

“St. Mechtilde exerted a deep influence on St. Gertrude. The two became intimate friends and both were favored by God with revelations.” (p. xii) St. Gertrude even helped to record her friend’s visions in “The Book of Special Grace.” If you want a big thick read of the writings and life of St. Gertrude, The Life and Revelations of St. Gertrude the Great is on sale for $7.00 right now!

Love, Peace, and Joy, however, is a smaller, easier read. The preface gives the reasons for its original publication in 1911:

“1. To help souls…

“2. To win for Our Dear Lord also a greater number of followers who, like St. Gertrude, would respond to His friendship by their confidence and fidelity…”

This reminds me of the interview I gave yesterday morning about my book, Piety and Personality: The Temperaments of the Saints with Catholic Community Radio. The eight-minute interview can be seen here from 1:02 to 1:10 on the show: Catholic Community Radio: Wake Up! February 25, 2025. I admit I was a little repetitive, but my message was the same as this preface: the intentions of all our spiritual reading and writing are to help souls and to draw them to the Heart of Our Lord.

When you think about it, that’s the purpose of Lent too — to help souls and pull them closer to Christ, through penance and remembrance of the Passion and Death of our Savior. I’ve been seeing a lot of pre-Lenten posts on Instagram that bring up a good point — it’s not about giving up chocolate or coffee (though those are perfectly good ideas, but they don’t go deep enough). It’s about stripping ourselves of things that don’t serve us in our journey toward Heaven: like too much food and drink, or too much scrolling, or grudges against our neighbors. It’s about adding things to our lives that we need: like more time with God, more Scripture reading or other spiritual books, more attendance at daily Mass and the Sacraments.

I hope that this Lent my book may help you in that journey too. It is now available in ebook and audible form, and you can pre-order the hardcover here for delivery soon! By popular demand of our in-person book club, it is our next quarter book club selection. So this is our spring read:

I had been working on mystery novels, but I felt God drawing me to set aside my mystery writing to work on this book, because it was more directly for His Glory. We can and should offer all our thoughts, words and actions for His Glory, (“AMDG - Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam”, St. Ignatius tells us) but this book was more specifically in His service than my mystery novels. The whole point of it is to help readers find their paths to His Most Sacred Heart. During Lent, what can we “set aside” to focus more on connecting with Our Lord and drawing closer to His Heart?

“Love alone renders our path easy,” Fr. Prevot wrote in Love, Peace, and Joy. “To live in friendship with Jesus gladdens the heart, and enables us to run in the way of the Commandments… It is, in fine, the dearest wish of the Heart of Jesus, and the sweetest consolation we can offer Him.” (p. 63)