Weekly Giveaway: An Awesome Catholic Trio o’ Books

Summer is coming, which may or may not inspire fear and trembling within you. So, thanks to some authors who love their faith and have written books that I think your family NEEDS this summer, I have a trio of Catholic books to give away this week.

Three awesome books, one lucky winner.

Annnnnd, because the warmer temps are making me feel uber-generous, you can enter more than once:

  • enter once for “free,”
  • once for each kid in your family, and
  • once for each rosary, chaplet, or novena you pray for a family in your life (including your own) during the length of this giveaway (May 22-28). 

This week’s Awesome Trio o’ Catholic Books giveaway:

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21 Ways to Worship: A Guide to Eucharistic Adoration

By Vinny Flynn (MerySong/Ignatius, 2012)

I loved this book so much I wrote two different reviews about it (here on my blog and at Integrated Catholic Life). There’s no “Catholic lite” in this book, just a toolbox packed with approaches, ideas, and sincere devotion. You won’t be able to help changing your life as you read this book. This book is a must-read for any Catholic who wants to grow their faith. It’s easy to read and even rather easy to implement. Flynn is approachable in making prayer and Adoration an integrated part of a Catholic’s life.

From the publisher:

Anytime people start talking about Eucharistic Adoration, one question always seems to come up: “A whole hour? What’ll I do for a whole hour?” The purpose of this little book is to present at least a partial answer to that question enough to encourage you to give it a try if you’ve never done it, or to offer some additional suggestions if you’ve already spent some time in Adoration and would like to experiment with more ways to pray while you’re there.

This Little Light of Mine: Living the Beatitudes

By Kathleen Basi (Liguori, 2013)

I’m a biiiiig fangirl of this little book. I don’t know whether Mom Sarah or Catechist Sarah was more excited to read this book, but I do wish that I had gotten my hands on it BEFORE our religious education year was over. This book is a tremendous resource for families, but let’s not limit ourselves here. As an adult reading it, I was struck by Basi’s conversational down-to-earth been-there-still-there-let’s-talk style and her ideas that are not impossible. Highly, highly, HIGHLY recommended.

From the publisher:

When the manger or the cross are front and center, it’s easier to pay attention to our faith. Kathleen M. Basi explains how to keep the light of faith burning bright in your family during the other two-thirds of the liturgical year, Ordinary Time.

In This Little Light of Mine: Living the Beatitudes, Basi shows you how to grow spiritually using the Beatitudes and the Ten Commandments as your guide. Both you and your family will…

- Learn how to make the Beatitudes part of your thoughts and actions each day
- Dig deeper into the Ten Commandments and how to obey them
- Grow together with fun Just Live It activities for the whole family
- Celebrate the fullness of God s gifts during this season

This book is for everyone who desires a real and active faith, one that informs every decision, turns your life into a prayer, and helps you to live in peace and joy!

Catholic Family Fun: A Guide for the Adventurous, Overwhelmed, Creative, or Clueless

By Sarah Reinhard (Pauline, 2012)

Yeah, this is my book. People tell me it’s helpful to them. In fact, Kathleen Basi has given it high marks.

From the publisher:

Game night/day meets Catholicism in this inspirational guidebook offering activities with strategies and suggestions for fun family engagement with one another and with faith! A great resource for parents, grandparents, caretakers, and family friends, this book conceptualizes a wide range of fun, practical activities that strengthen faith formation in young to grade-school age children.

Divided into nine chapters-silly activities, storytelling, craft projects, meal sharing, outdoor adventures, places to go, saints to celebrate, ways to serve, ways to pray-there is a whole lot of fun to go around for everyone! Each activity contains a “Faith Angle,” “Wider Angle,” and a “Make it Yours” section to incorporate elements of the Catholic faith into your activities and life at large. Preparation time, duration, and cost are indexed, so you can find the ideas that correspond to your family’s schedule and budget.

With these activities that can be adapted to suit your Catholic family, you’ll be on your way to having some fun while building a “domestic church” of your very own!

Accepting entries until 7 AM Eastern one week from today.

The fine print: You must have a valid email address (filled in on the comment form below), which I promise not to use for anything other than this giveaway (it’s not public after you type it in). You enter the email as part of the comment form–you do not have to include it in the body of your comment. Good luck!

21 Ways to Worship (and then some)

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Anytime people start talking about Eucharistic Adoration, one question always seems to come up: “A whole hour? What’ll I do for a whole hour?”

21WaysCover

Thus begins Vinny Flynn’s new book, 21 Ways to Worship: A Guide to Eucharistic Adoration. I’ll admit, I only read it because my arm was twisted. I thought I knew the tone it would have and the attitude of eye-rolling it would inspire in me. I was, in fact, convinced I would have to work to write a favorable review.

Being wrong has rarely felt so great.

I’ve been a regular at our parish’s Eucharistic Adoration program for over ten years, and I remember the days of dragging in a couple of books, a notebook, a rosary, and two or three prayer books. I’d kneel, say hi, and get to work.

And there’s nothing wrong with that approach, though I have modified it over the years. My current approach involves a bag of tractors and two sidekicks, ages five and two. My mother-in-law kindly invited us to join her for her hour when it became obvious this was the only way I was going to get my much-needed breathing time in.

It took Vinny Flynn less than 200 pages to convince me of a few things:

  1. I am his newest fangirl.
  2. He “gets” this whole Adoration thing in a way I need to take notes from.
  3. The man is probably hilarious in real life.

Each of the 21 chapters—which are short and easy-to-read—has a snappy title and usually about two or three pages of down-to-earth content. This is a man writing to ME: to the me who is sooooo busy I have an excuse for everything, to the me who wonders if anyone’s listening, to the me who takes small LOUD people with me to Adoration.

In fact, I’ve gained more from this book than just suggestions for ways to pray in Adoration. I’m now looking at the pictures on my fridge as an opportunity to offer a prayer for loved ones. I’m thinking of the Psalms as letters TO ME now, instead of as 3000-year-old poems. I’m using the opportunity to pray as I breathe, an idea that was planted in me during a recent 8-week retreat with Father Gaitley’s Consoling the Heart of Jesus.

One of the biggest mistakes, I think, that many of us make as Christians, as Catholics, is that we get used to being very formal. We have some wonderful, ritual prayers that are beautiful and can be very meaningful, but this can cause us to get used to a certain formality that can carry over into our adoration time and make it hard for us to develop a deep, personal relationship with God.

[A]s Pope Benedict says, the Eucharist “is not a piece of a body, not a thing.” It’s a person—a person who loves us more than we can imagine.

We don’t need to be formal with God here. He doesn’t want us to be. We need to be real with Him!

In whatever you say, do, look at, or read during adoration, keep it personal, realizing that this is between you and God—and God is three persons, each of whom want a personal relationship with you.

How do you get closer to your spouse, to your children, to your friends? You have to spend time with them; you have to get to know them. A relationship takes time, and it takes personal involvement, personal commitment.

That’s what Eucharistic Adoration is all about. You’re there to keep Christ company, to console Him, to get to know Him, to get to know the Father, to get to know the Holy Spirit, to build a relationship, person-to-person, you and God alone.

You are getting to know this God, to know who He is, and then you start to realize who you are and who you are called to be. This is the God who didn’t just create you. He fathered you into existence, chose you from all the millions of persons who could have come from the union of your father and mother.

In this book, Flynn brilliantly and concisely makes a case, not just for Adoration, not just for a deeper prayer life, not just for a gimmick-style Christian life, but for an approach to really living and transforming your life through small actions. Call it prayer, call it worship, call it Adoration: it is, at the root of it, encouragement for those of us who struggle, for those of us who juggle unsuccessfully, for those of us who wonder if what we’re doing is ever enough.

There’s no “Catholic lite” in this book, just a toolbox packed with approaches, ideas, and sincere devotion. You won’t be able to help changing your life as you read this book. Mine’s already better. I can’t wait to read it again.

Cheer for the Sisters of Mary

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This Thursday, May 23, marks the end of the American Bible Challenge saga for this year, and the Dominican Sisters, the "Sisters of Mary," are in the finals. No shocker there. I'll be cheering for them on Thursday (note to husband: don't let … [Continue reading]

Should NFP Be Easy? {Mom to Mom}

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Today it's a pleasure to host another special "Mom to Mom" post. And it's not an easy topic...so I'm glad *I* am not the one to tackle it... Update: NFP stands for Natural Family Planning. Learn more from the USCCB and the Couple to Couple … [Continue reading]

A Dragon Talks About Motherhood (or Tries to)

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Today as part of the Greater Treasures blog tour, I'm honored to host Vern, whose the first non-human AND the first dragon to guest post here. By Vern Vern:  Hi.  I’m Vern, a dragon from Faerie.  Sarah has asked me to talk to you a little … [Continue reading]

Support the Sisters

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I'm like the little white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland this morning, and I didn't get my thoughts all arranged, but it's Monday and I have a book to give away and and and and... So we'll keep it simple. To enter to win a copy of The … [Continue reading]

More or Less (or Something Else?)

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It was the Saturday before Easter, as I recall. I had rolled out of bed to work on my honors project, and I was putting the coffee into the coffeemaker when it struck me that it was VERY STRANGE that someone was having a cookout at 8 (or was it 7? or … [Continue reading]