When I got my first teaching job (about fifteen years ago now), I simply wouldn’t give a lecture on any topic whatsoever without looking to see if Sheen had a talk on the subject that I could listen to first. And, of course, he had talks on nearly everything. Even so there were a handful of themes that surfaced over and over whenever he spoke and whenever he put pen to paper. These five themes were the Eucharist, the Cross, the Holy Hour, Mary, and Sin. He spoke on these topics so much that I came to recognize not only the ideas, but even the formulations he used to express them. Sheen never minded repeating himself, plagiarizing his own best phrases across different works. If there was a point to be made, he made it, reiterated it, drove it home tirelessly over decades for the conversion and edification of his listeners.
Many of these classic Sheen insights on the Eucharist, the Cross, the Holy Hour, Mary, and Sin have been gathered into the anthology recently published by Sophia: Lord, Teach us to Pray. This volume embodies the heart of Sheen’s message, the essence of what he wanted to say, and the fruit he hoped that message would bear in his audience. And in addition to characteristic Sheen themes, this book conveys the characteristic elements of Sheen’s style.
He loved to insert poetry into his teaching and exhortation, and many of his favorite verses enter into this compilation. (Perhaps none is more lovely than St. Robert Southwell’s metaphor for the Incarnation: “The bird that built the nest is hatched therein.”)
One of my favorite Sheen traits, one he shares with the greatest theologians, is his delight in correlating the discrete parts on one aspect of the faith with the discrete parts of another. For instance, in Lord, Teach us to Pray, he lines up the seven last words from the cross with the seven parts of the Our Father and the seven parts of the mass (as it was at the time of his writing). This means that when we pray the Confiteor, for instance, we can imagine the crucified Christ invoking the Father’s forgiveness, and when we pray “Give us this day our daily bread,” we can link our wants and needs to the Lord who said “I thirst.”
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
