Breathed into Wholeness

“How do we develop a consciousness of wholeness in a breathless world of anxiety and competition? How can we overcome narrow individualism by expanding personhood to include all creaturely life? . . . To live in a spirit of catholicity is to live with deep awareness of God’s life everywhere present and filling all things, the life of the whole.”—From the Foreword by Ilia Delio

"A masterpiece of systematic theological thinking and spiritual reflection and practice, a rich theology of the Spirit that can ground our search for intercultural living and intercultural mission. Breathed into Wholeness is the culmination of a lifetime of reflection on human interiority, on the vast possibilities of science for spiritual integrity and growth, and on the implications for spirituality in ecology's recognition of the interrelationship of everything in the universe. What draws everything and everyone into wholeness--the deepest meaning of catholicity-- is God's creating and redeeming Spirit ...that breathes everything into the mysterious heart of God and breathes outward into participation in God's mission in union with God's Word made flesh." --Stephen Bevans, SVD, Louis J. Luzbetak, SVD Professor of Mission and Culture, Emeritus Catholic Theological Union, Chicago

“Catholicity” is a concept that encompasses the entire dynamic of whole-making and diversifying. In this book, Mary Frohlich explores its application to our spiritual lives, that is, how each of us strives to construct a life that bears both the integrity of ultimate wholeness and the dynamism of real-life change, pluralism, and differentiation.

She offers compelling arguments that “spirit” is the self-transcending, whole-making impetus that is built into human persons, and that awareness of it is most intense in spiritual events that electrify a person’s sense of joyous interconnection with other people, the natural world, the cosmos, and/or God.

Mary Frohlich, RSCJ, is associate professor of spirituality and chair of the department of spirituality at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago. A past president of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, she is the editor of the collection, St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Essential Writings (Orbis).