Description Hide Description- Show Description+
"These are my reflections of being a gay man of faith, endeavouring to grow in life and refusing to be sterile but creative. For sexuality is the essence of creativity for people of splendour and who are LGBTIQ+. The book also provides candid insights too, as I was managing times of change in the Anglican church of the 1970’s and 1980’s."
This is a spiritual story of personal unity and rediscovery, growth in analytical terms, and originally written for the religious life. The reader can take it to hand as your own, even though written some time ago. Now is the time to learn to love ourselves, so read its testimonials and enjoy its contemplation. This is a narrative against shame.
Author: Noel Jeffs SSF
Paperback Published 5 October 2021 128 pages
Taking vows doesn't end the human quest for fulfillment. Spiritual maturity and happiness require integration of sexuality and spirituality. In Maturing in The Religious Life: The Image of the Heart and the Heart's Desire, Brother Noel Thomas thoughtfully explores the need specially to express sexuality and love in the context of celibate religious life. In the minds of many, vowed religious life seems to rule out sexual maturity. This book is a very important contribution to those discerning a commitment to religious life, and an invaluable resource for those supporting vowed religious as they seek to live out their commitments as continually evolving and maturing human beings.
Clark Berge SSF, author of Running to Resurrection: A Soul-making Chronicle.
In Maturing in The Religious Life: The Image of the Heart and the Heart's Desire, Noel Jeffs challenges readers to reconsider sexuality and spirituality as interweaving states of being rather than opposing demands. Employing and developing the notion of maturity, he argues that the quest to establish an awareness that can acknowledge, and care for, both self and other. At once clearly written and provocative, this is a book that will stimulate heartfelt discussion and meditation.
Professor Ernesto Spinelli, ES Associates, London UK.
In Maturing in the Religious Life, Noel's passion for critical thinking, for questioning norms, and for exploring the meanings of spirituality beyond the strictures of institutional frameworks, emerges boldly. Noel implores us to engage with our 'heart's desire', in this thesis about the relationships between spirituality, sexuality, and indeed, the very essence of being. Why would these ideas not be compelling and intriguing to all of us? While positioned in a rigorous grounding of logic and literature, this provocative work speaks from the heart, pointing to the powerful and unique writing style Noel would go on to develop in his many subsequent works, including so much of his brutally honest contemporary poetry.
Dr Matthew Egan,
Senior Lecturer within the Business School's Discipline of Accounting , University of Sydney.