A Prophetic Voice in the City: Meditations on the Prophet Jeremiah

In A Prophetic Voice in the City Cardinal Martini delves deeply into some astounding pages of the prophet that are especially appropriate in pursuing the dynamics essential to spiritual exercises: to purify the heart, to free the heart from all slavery, and to find the will of God. Cardinal Martini maintains that we must find the will of God in the context of a city divided, idolatrous, and wounded as Jerusalem was in the time of Jeremiah and as our cities are today. How can one still be a prophetic voice, and what does it mean?

In answering this question, Cardinal Martini invites us to reflect on our resistance to the beneficial and merciful action of God; on the motives for which we abandon God; on our sins as a betrayal of the covenant; on the passion of Jeremiah and on his undisputed and unwavering faithfulness to the Word; and on the pages of consolations of the prophet, for which the whole book was actually written -- pages that open the horizons to a vast and universal hope: the new covenant.

Jeremiah, steeped in a passionate love of the One who called him to be a voice to the people, was a great solitary figure. Just as he found through his interior contact with God, we find in these meditations that the only true outlook for humanity is to place all spiritual values in the forefront, to abandon ourselves with loving trust to divine action, and to live the strength and the joy of the Word of the Lord.