The Coming of Consolation: How God Gets Through to Us

By Fr. William P. Sampson SJ

Fr. William Sampson, SJ (1928-2000) in his The Coming of Consolation : How God gets through to Us , shares a way to speak to God that he developed over the course of his 50-year career in being a director of Ignatian retreats. To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of its first publication, the Fr. William Sampson Society is sponsoring its republication with a newly added index, short biography of the author and illustrations. The book is meant for those in the social apostolate that he ministered to: health care workers, teachers, social workers, secretaries, missionaries and those running old-age homes, orphanages and ministering to prisoners. Many were also nuns and priests vowed to the evangelical councils of perfection and living the gospel among the poor. They worked for free or for subsistence. The reoccurring question Fr. Sampson and others posed was, "How does God get through to us?" His answer was to love and serve the poor and be honest about our failure to do so. Consolation will come. The Father cares for us more than He cares for Himself. He is determined to love and serve me and the world. He loves my enemy with affection and gives me the power to do likewise when I aks. The poor, not consolation, are the point. Fr. Sampson sums up: "Into the despair we experience at our inability to love, comes the Good News. What does the believer believe that makes his life so different from that of the nonbeliever? What is that fundamental article of faith? The Resurrection? The Trinity? The Incarnation? Not these but this: "that the power to love will be given to him when he asks for it. For that is the believing in Christ which the Apostle urges--'a faith which works through loving.'" The book is divided into eleven chapters; covering God's promises, despair in obtaining them, effective asking, our unloving ways, God's intervention, mental prayer, honesty and mysticism. Fr. Sampson's spirituality, as reflected in each chapter, was egalitarian, although he does not use the term. This included minimizing the "ladder of perfection" conception of spirituality and the graded system running from novices at the beginning level to mystics at the highest with the great mysteries reserved for the privileged. Closer to reality for him was an honest realization of one's poverty in love of God and neighbor. As he put it, the only difference between us and the saints is that they are more in touch with this truth. Following the same doctrine, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, was critical of those who dismissed her as a "saint."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F674F7V6
• ISBN13: 9798280481206
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 145 Pages
• Dimensions: 7.0" x 0.3" x 5.5"