Imagine the following situation. You are in church, the Gospel has been read, and you have sat down to listen to what the priest has to say about it. To your delight, you realise that you are hearing a fresh and even slightly surprising interpretation of a familiar text. Something speaks to you, resonates in your soul, and you feel that today the homily nourishes and comforts you and even fills you with inspiration.
After Mass, you chat with friends over coffee. You tell them that you liked the homily and that it gave you a new insight. Everyone agrees: the priest spoke well today. Then someone asks: What was it, exactly, that the priest said?
The question leaves you puzzled. You try to think what it actually was that spoke to you. Hesitantly, you manage to put something into words that only vaguely captures your insight. Before long, it becomes clear that no one else really remembers what the priest talked about either, or what it was that had seemed so apt. And yet it really had been an excellent homily.
Understanding what we hear, let alone remembering it, can sometimes be difficult. Homilies are occasionally published online to refresh our memories, but might it not also be good to have a postil – a collection of homilies, quite traditionally, in the form of a book?
The idea of collecting Father Stan’s homilies into a small devotional book that is easy to carry around was hardly an original one; after all, the postil is a well-established literary genre. The homilies in this collection are characteristically concise and usually contain a carefully considered thought together with a mood that supports it. Homilies are not belles-lettres, but this collection nevertheless brings to my mind the term “central lyric”, meaning a kind of poetry in which the personal experience, emotion or thought of the speaking self is at the centre. Father Stan’s homilies are not poetry, but there is nevertheless a certain presence that comes through them. It arises from the choice of words, the tone of the text, the rhythm of the sentences.
The Kiss of God is a book to browse through over the course of the year. The texts are meditations that Father Stan has prepared for his parishioners to help them encounter God. They are arranged according to the liturgical year, and the chapters are separated by icons painted by Father Stan himself. He says that the book is an account of his growth as a preacher and theologian, but also the story of his relationship with the Finnish language and of learning it. Writing his first homilies took him a week, a large number of dictionaries and grammar books.
Father Stan invites us to read these texts alongside the texts of the Bible, so that they may become for us an invitation to deeper meditation. In the Catholic Church, a homily is a momentary pause before the richness of the word of God, but also an exhortation to take this word to heart and carry it home with us. The Christian faith is not a “religion of the book”; it is the religion of God’s “Word”, a Word which is not “a written and mute word, but the incarnate and living Word”, writes St Bernard of Clairvaux (cf. CCC 108). The title of the book, too, draws its inspiration from the thought of St Bernard. Our relationship with God is called to be close, tender and deeply personal. Prayer and adoration are not merely words or thoughts, but sometimes a silent closeness to God that resembles a kiss between human beings – a sign of love, trust and intimate communion.
The book can be purchased directly from Father Stanislaw, ordered from the publisher’s online shop, or picked up from the recently opened Catholic Bookshop. You can also ask your local library to order the book for its collection, along with other Catholic literature, so that everyone has an opportunity to access it. The book is intended as an aid to prayer and meditation, and it comes with a satin ribbon bookmark that can always be placed at the point you last read. The book is published by the small and agile Catholic publishing house Hemmingus Oy.
Kirsti Ellilä