Newman can heal

Healing the Wound of Humanity: the Spirituality of John Henry Newman by Ian Ker, Darton, Longman and Todd,
£7.95
NEWMAN'S LIFE DIVIDES into
two almost equal phases and both show his great gift and need for friendship.
His Anglican years were spent in an Oxford college and the semi-monastic retreat at Littlemore. The Catholic years were devoted to the Birmingham Oratory. He thrived in close communities of friends.
Furthermore, he wrote one of the greatest, most profoundly introspective autobiographies in the English language, tracing his own quest for truth. It is hardly surprising therefore that as a writer and theologian he should have been absorbed by the personal character of Christianity.
God was, for him, one luminously self-evident being with whom he had had a profound relationship since childhood. The person of Christ commanded his warm personal devotion since his youth as an Anglican evangelical. He sacrificed everything to enter the communion of persons who make up the Body of Christ. These were the great engines of his spiritual life and Fr Ker's book is devoted to precisely these aspects of thought.
It is a book that was waiting to be written. Fr Ker has attempted to describe the central thread running throughout Newman's life and theology.
Newman produced three very great books. His autobiography, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, speaks for itself: a deeply revealing and touchingly personal work. His study of the development of Christian doctrine was a major contribution to the understanding of the nature of authority and teaching in the Church.
Newman devoted his life to deepening his understanding of the Church and he revolutionised Anglicanism, and eventually Catholicism, in the process. His third great book was a study of how people come to faith, not by paper logic but by the movement of the whole person.
These achievements of Newman are brought together by Fr Ker in what is, in effect, an essay on the role of the persona) and the person in Newman's thinking.
The best part of Fr Ker's book by far are the three
chapters on the sacraments of the Church and the spiritual life. Here, he sustains and develops a unified theme, richly illustrated with telling quotations from Newman's different writings. Anyone wanting a summary of Newman's main contribution to theology and get a feel for the cast of his mind could make a useful start with these 40 pages.
After them, we get a last, tantalising, chapter on Newman's teaching on death as a personal encounter with God. This leaves unsatisfied the desire to understand more what Newman thought of resurrection as a great patristic scholar, he must have been well aware of the vital place it held in the early Church's theology of salvation.
It was a book that was waiting to be written, but a Fr Ker has not made best use of the unrivalled knowledge he has of Newman's writings to develop fully just how far Newman did have one central theme that unites his thinking. We finish the book wishing that he had supplied us with a conclusion, pulling it all together and answering a few more penetrating questions.