We find our human formation and education introduced through various prisms. Literature and art throughout the ages have given us a way of seeing nature and our own humanity through eyes not our own. The breakthroughs of science and technology happen because people take a new look at a given reality and see a previously unnoticed set of relationships or pierce through a complexity to a simplifying of its elements. All of these human ways of sharing insight into the makeup and relationship of our everyday world are part of what I want to include in my use of the word prisms.

Without prisms we languish in a kind of prison (to play upon a "sound-alike" word), the prison of our own myopic vision. Prisms are important for the healthiness of our spiritual, moral, and intellectual life. Unless we are able to break out of our own limited way of knowing, we are caught in the prison of our limited experience, or our particular culture, and of our own historical period. We need an openness to looking at our life and our world with new eyes our whole life long. This is what it means "to really live," "to be alive.:

The great gift of our Catholic faith includes its own special gift of prisms for us. Our faith, because it is truly catholic, gives us new ways of seeing ourselves, God, our neighbor, and our world. Faith is not a single, once-for-all-time vision, but ways of seeing that continue to open upon new vistas in every time and culture. Personally, too, our faith continues to expand our vision and stimulates us to keep growing. Of course, for such a continuing growth to happen, we need to cooperate with God's grace by praying, by our reading of the Gospel, by listening to the word of God broken open in homilies, by reflecting upon the conversations and life-situations that are a daily part of life.

Some ten years ago, as editor of Review for Religious, I began to write an introductory reflection called "Prisms" in each issue of the journal. Many people have encouraged me to collect and publish these reflections in a more permanent way. I have edited, revised, and sometimes expanded a number of those reflections, and they now form the content of this book. It is my hope that in their brief form they may stimulate your personal reflections on your own faith living and so further your spiritual growth. It is also my hope that these prisms might be an occasion for deepening your prayer about some basic issues of Christian life. To help in this movement to prayer, I have concluded each reflection with a psalm selection or a scripture passage that complements the hue and value of the reflection.

I express my gratitude to Father William Hart McNichols SJ for his permission to have his icon rendition of Christ the Holy Silence grace the cover of this book. I need not belabor the fact that icons truly are prisms into the holy, and this particular icon is most appropriate for the theme of this book. I am also indebted to John R. Page, executive secretary for the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, for the express permission to reproduce the ICEL translation of The Liturgical Psalter (1995) for psalms and scripture readings used in the prayer reflections. Two scripture readings (p.38 and pp. 70-71) are from the text of the New American Bible (1970) by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C.

Finally, I thank the staff of Review for Religious, particularly Father Philip C. Fischer SJ, Mary Ann Foppe, and Tracy Gramm for their invaluable help in seeing this book through to its final production.

We can be grateful that our Catholic faith provides us with many prisms, many bright facets and lusters. But our living of our faith will be as rich as the sustained use we make of its many prisms --- always (re)viewing life in our time and in our culture through the eyes of Jesus Christ.