[X1S]≫ [PDF] Gratis Flunking Sainthood A Year of Breaking the Sabbath Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor Jana Riess 9781557256607 Books

Flunking Sainthood A Year of Breaking the Sabbath Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor Jana Riess 9781557256607 Books

Download As PDF : Flunking Sainthood A Year of Breaking the Sabbath Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor Jana Riess 9781557256607 Books

Flunking Sainthood A Year of Breaking the Sabbath Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor Jana Riess 9781557256607 Books

Jana Riess is so like the rest of us that struggle with deepening our spirituality and relationship with God. Her information regarding various spiritual practices is accurate, well explained and encourages one to try the practice. Then, Jana, like most of us falls far from perfection. I wouldn't say she fails as she learns and grows in her walk in faith. She just doesn't reach perfection.

Flunking Sainthood is light, funny, serious, educational and most of all loving. I recommend it highly for any woman.


Tags : Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor [Jana Riess] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <div> This wry memoir tackles twelve different spiritual practices in a quest to become more saintly, including fasting,Jana Riess,Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor,Paraclete Press,1557256608,Christian Life - Inspirational,Personal Memoirs,Religious,Failure (Psychology) - Religious aspects - Christianity,Failure (Psychology);Religious aspects;Christianity.,Perfection - Religious aspects - Christianity,Perfection;Religious aspects;Christianity.,Riess, Jana,Spiritual biography,Spiritual life - Christianity,Spiritual life;Christianity.,Success - Religious aspects - Christianity,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Personal Memoirs,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Religious,Biography & Autobiography,Biography & AutobiographyPersonal Memoirs,Biography Autobiography,BiographyAutobiography,Christianity,Failure (Psychology),Memoirs,Perfection,RELIGION Christian Life Inspirational,RELIGION Christian Living Inspirational,ReligionChristian Living - Inspirational,Religious aspects,Spiritual life,flunking sainthood; jana riess; spiritual practices; spiritual disciplines; brother lawrence; sense of humor; thought provoking; spiritual classics; centering prayer; jesus prayer; spiritual struggle; blog-like; author's personal journey; background of the customs; religious practices; fasting; prayer; gratitude; honesty and wit; desire for faith; spiritual insights; lighthearted look at spiritual life; Sabbath; well worth reading; different religious cultures; well-written; fun spiritual book; book for new christians; book about faith; love your neighbor as yourself; works and faith; get closer to God; spiritual laughter; not perfect; relationship with God; no one is perfect; seeking sainthood; religiously contemplative; encouragement for lifestyle; faith journey; down to earth,flunking sainthood;jana riess;spiritual practices;spiritual disciplines;brother lawrence;sense of humor;thought provoking;spiritual classics;centering prayer;jesus prayer;spiritual struggle;blog-like;author's personal journey;background of the customs;religious practices;fasting;prayer;gratitude;honesty and wit;desire for faith;spiritual insights;lighthearted look at spiritual life;Sabbath;well worth reading;different religious cultures;well-written;fun spiritual book;book for new christians;book about faith;love your neighbor as yourself;works and faith;get closer to God;spiritual laughter;not perfect;relationship with God;no one is perfect;seeking sainthood;religiously contemplative;encouragement for lifestyle;faith journey;down to earth

Flunking Sainthood A Year of Breaking the Sabbath Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor Jana Riess 9781557256607 Books Reviews

I could not put this book down! It is amazingly honest and well-written. The author has a fantastic sense of humor. It is good to know that others struggle with spiritual disciplines, and aren't afraid to say so. I intend to recommend this book to many of my colleagues and friends. I look forward to reading Jana's next book.
Let me say from the start, that this is a great read and a fun book. Jana has the ability to put into words experiences better than most and think she would summarize all of her learning in this approach as "Love your neighbor as yourself" is a way to get closer to God. The Epilogue where she forgives her dying father who abandoned the family when he was a child, is most touching. For her "works and faith" are one in the same.

She outlines a number of "spiritual" practices in which she eventually fails at every one of them. She names 12 in the prologue, but I can only count 11

1. Fasting
2. Cooking and repetitive while practicing the Presence of God - she has to make up for fasting
3. Reading and Prayer
4. Not shopping
5. Contemplative Prayer
6. Practice a Jewish Sabbath
7. Attitude of Gratitude with rules
8. Practice hospitality
9. Don't eat meat
10. Recite the Jesus Prayer 5 times a day
11. Charity - the financial kind

As I read her book I find myself laughing on almost every page. She has a way of looking at her world that is very funny, especially the way she expresses it. If laughing is spiritual, and I believe all things are spiritual, especially laughter, then this is a very spiritual book. Some of her funny quotes

"so he quietly went about fixing them [appliances], sometimes after I'd already gone to bed, like an oversized elf engineer."

"Phil's family motto ("If at first you don't succeed...lower, lower your standards!")

"With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women" - ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

"I'm not sure why I pick Jesus rather than God; Brother Lawrence hardly speaks of Jesus at all. But Jesus seems less abstract, more accessible. I like the idea of him pulling up a barstool to the laminate countertop and listening to me prattle on about my day. His head would be cocked slightly to the right, an eyebrow occasionally raised in interest. He would be gratefully eat a sample of cookie dough, because the Son of Man doesn't have to worry about getting salmonella from raw eggs"

"Lawrence, I am realizing, could be the patron saint of the 1950s American housewife, if he only wielded a Sunbeam blender and donned a chinz apron over his cassock."

"On second thought, it would be hard to sustain serious prayer about harvesting foreskins"

"...and we had the worst health insurance in the Western world. ("So you lost a finger. Big deal! You still have nine others.")"

"I am entirely monogamous with purses; I am faithful to one at a time until the day my laptop computer has warn the straps off it, which usually takes about three years."

"What's more, I'm married to the biggest cheapskate in America, whose car has 200,000 miles on it and who wears his shoes until the sole is hanging from the leather and I can glimpse his socks."

"After all, the guy's inaugural miracle occurred at a party where he turned water into wine. Jesus was hardly a killjoy."

"If we didn't have organized religion as children, what would we rebel against later?"

"In my relaxing afternoon reading time that first Sunday, I learned that TP (toilet paper) breakage violates the Sabbath law against tearing, so you're supposed to pre-shred all your TP the day before. Who knew?"

"Welcoming the stranger and the friend. "Would you mind taking Patches for a few days?" inquires my friend Shay, a confirmed dog lover like myself. She and her family are heading out for a long weekend, and they can't bring their pound dog of dubious ancestry (part miniature Doberman/part beagle/100 percent insane) with them. Aha! A genuine hospitality opportunity. I readily agree.
When Shay dollop's Patches off, she confesses that the dog recently got into her son's medication and has been having a touch of diarrhea. "But I don't think it will be a problem," She assures me as she heads out the door. And I believe her, because Shay is a doctor, and doctors wouldn't minimize symptoms like diarrhea. Would they?
They would.
Patches turns out to be a pooping machine."

"The practice of praying at fixed times during the day has a number of different names--the Divine Office, the Divine Hours, the Liturgy of Hours. I'm just calling it fixed-hour prayer because "office" sounds bureaucratic. Although Phyllis mentions becoming an "attendant" for God, this feels a bit secretarial, and God can fetch his own cup of coffee."

She also has some sage advice taken from some of her experiences and reading

"Yet I choose to believe that God sees and hears, that God loves me and does not want me to be consumed with worry."

"The less comfortable we are with ourselves, the more we will look to things around us for comfort. The more assured we are with ourselves, the less assurance we will need from things outside us."

"One of Iyengar's long-term experiments of questions whether having more choice in matters of religion makes people happier. It doesn't. Surprisingly, the religions that claim the happiest people are those that make some of the decisions for you by removing certain choices; the unhappiest people belonged to the most open minded and tolerant faiths. Reform Jews and Unitarians were the most susceptible to depression, while fundamentalists faced adversity with optimism and experienced greater hope. It turns out that limits are often very good things."

"So Claudia lays this lovely paraphrase on me from St. Teresa
Place yourself in the presence of Christ.
Don't wear yourself out thinking.
Simply speak with your Beloved.
Delight in him.
Lay your needs at his feet.
Acknowledge that he doesn't have to allow you in his presence.
(But he does!)
There is a time for thinking,
And a time for being.
Be.
With him."

"The Sabbath is the most radical commandment because it's a decision not to let your life be defined by Pharaoh's production-consumption rat race."

"I don't like other people telling me what to do, how to behave, how to live my life. Who does? In the family I grew up in, people who followed others blindly were regarded as lemmings. "Imbeciles," my father called them. I had to look that word up. The messages of childhood were clear question authority, be a critical thinker, don't take wooden nickels. At least in one way I am healthier than my father he hated institutions and the people in them. I am suspicious of institutions but I love people."

"Hospitality is a gift that keeps on giving, as other people pay it forward in a spirit of cascading generosity. My hospitality doesn't have to be perfect to be effective at helping people feel loved. It is through hospitality that we come to know one another and maybe even glimpse the face of God. I'm reminded of the fact that after his resurrection, Jesus' own disciples didn't recognize him until after they had broken bread with him. It was only following a shared meal that they truly saw him."

Although some of her acronyms and new terms should be spelled out for us older folks

DIY - Do It Yourself
ODD - Oppositional Defiant Disorder - although I think she didn't use the acronym and did spell out its meaning ;-)
BFF - Best Friends Forever
I was not in agreement in everything that Jana concluded as she wound her way around her spiritual journey, but I found many good nuggets of thought and even a few revelations in her book. Jana Riess is readable and not at all sanctimonious or churchy. What she finds as she tries to practice the tenets of several different religious cultures is well worth knowing.
While I struggled through the first few chapters of this book, the writer grew on me as it proceeded. Her applications of the spiritual disciplines were real life, probably how I would deal with them (with complaining and failing!). She got into a groove as the year went on, and I really enjoyed the last few chapters, especially the ones on Sabbath and giving.
It was alright. Like reading several long related blog posts. Jana Riess is funny and endearingly self-critical. It just felt a little gimmicky to me, and, as she admitted, there was no particular moral other than the vague sense that the effort brought her closer to God and prepared her for the challenges ahead.
This is a fun book. I love Ms. Riess' self-depracating sense of humor as she tries out some of the most ubiquitous religious practices--fasting, prayer, gratitude, etc. Her honesty and wit are refreshing. I'm left feeling like I'm not the only one who struggles yet maintains a desire to have faith. Flunking Sainthood provides many spiritual insights while not getting too heavy. Definitely worth the read!
Thoroughly enjoyed this one. It's blog-like in terms of voice and structure, and more about the author's personal journey than the doctrinal behaviors she put into practice than anything else. I would have liked more of the background of the customs (such as the Muslims' fast and Christian's hourly prayers), but all the source material is cited. ~In fact, the number one thing this book did was to motivate me to want to read more (okay, what it REALLY did was make me want to copy her journey!)
Jana Riess is so like the rest of us that struggle with deepening our spirituality and relationship with God. Her information regarding various spiritual practices is accurate, well explained and encourages one to try the practice. Then, Jana, like most of us falls far from perfection. I wouldn't say she fails as she learns and grows in her walk in faith. She just doesn't reach perfection.

Flunking Sainthood is light, funny, serious, educational and most of all loving. I recommend it highly for any woman.