Sister Clare’s Lover: A Romance of Catholic Tantra
Catholic Tantra? Can such a thing be?
Father Shalgry is a priest in trouble with his Church - he has written a sympathetic book trying to understand the American Spiritualist movement. He is in trouble another way - his empathy, his sense of the energy of people and situations, is so strong that he must take medications to mute it.
His bishop surprisingly sends him to find the origin of an intensely sexual tantra-like devotion to Jesus that has grown up in the convents. His journey will lead him through trying to understand, through service and friendship and experiencing the movement of energy, to falling irresistibly in love with a French-Indian woman. And then he must choose...
Birrell Walsh, Ph.D., earned his doctorate in comparative religion in 1999. In 2003 Crossroad Publishing published his Praying for Others. A sequel to Sister Clare, ILLUMINATING FOUR CITIES, is also published by lulu.com
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By wytchywmn
Mar 28, 2011
Found this book in a Kindle version quite by accident when I was looking for non-fiction books on tantra. A good story with a lot of wisdom tucked into it. His descriptions are incredibly beautiful. I loved the conversations between Fr. Shalgry and his Aramaic "guide"...made me chuckle. Mystery on many levels, gentle humor, though-provoking. It was one of those books that I couldn't put down, but tried to go slow so I could savor it. Liked it so much I had to buy the print version. I will most definitely be reading it again.
The author's I enjoy most are those that stay out of my way and allow me to inhabit their stories. I believed in Father Shalgry from the moment I met him and each additional character fit smoothly into the panorama being built to unfold the story. Really excellent writing and engaging storytelling. The big change-up at the halfway point was completely unexpected and took the story to a completely different place that no reader could have anticipated. Well done.
I loved this book - couldn't put it down,in fact. I really enjoyed Birrell Walsh's writing style. I often wanted to re-read sections as they were so splendidly written. The only thing that slowed me down apart from that, was stopping to try some of the tantric exercises the characters were involved in doing. Anyone with even a passing interest in Tantric will be fascinated. The author's ability to cross the bridge between that and esoteric Catholicism blew me away. His character painting and sensitivity to psychological process had me really believing in them, caring about them and learning from them in their trials. It was also a jolly good yarn. I really wanted to know what was happening next for the characters and never lost the thread of the story in the wealth of fascinating detail. It's ending also, the great danger for any novelist, was deeply satisfying.
