I first encountered John Neafsey as an essayist in Revisiting the Idea of Vocation: Theological Explorations, a compilation of reflections published by the Loyola University (Chicago) faculty in 2004. His remarkable and thorough piece integrating the Ignatian method with psychotherapy demonstrated how therapeutic practice honors the presence of the sacred in the exchange between client and listener. Just reading the essay was an engagement in soul searching.

Neafsey's latest book is another exercise in soul searching but with a wider listening range. Anyone looking for a source for viewing life through the lens of vocation will find his book useful and comforting. Those who lead service experiences for young people will find in these pages material to assist group reflections. Teachers seeking a pedagogy wherein one's calling is considered alongside the social consequences of belief will find Sacred Voice an encouragement and advocate in raising consciousness among students and parishioners. For Neafsey, the inner dialogue about vocation is "a high stakes process" (Preface, x). Because someone else's life or quality of life is impacted by our response, it requires a careful listening to voices that resound in our lives.

This book is genuinely anticipated by his earlier essay, but is more particularly addressed to the needs of young people considering the reality of a call. The chapter, "Symptoms as a Voice of the Soul" (pp 112-122), is noteworthy for Neafsey's fruitful attention to psychological issues that are often the first signs of hearing the Sacred Voice. To name one, he notes the feeling of not fitting in - so common in young lives - as a possible sign that an original deafness to the voice of calling is being breached. Beyond "not fitting in," there are the other common symptoms of boredom, loneliness or emptiness. Prudence and a willingness to live with these symptoms and to be curious about their possible messages might bring one closer to a discovery of soul and of God than any pre-emptive fixing. In a culture that is neurotic about being mentally healthy, Neafsey points to the need for reliable guides who know how to read these symptoms in ways that do not limit and condemn but enable honest reckoning with the voice of the soul, or "the inner voice of love," as Henri Nouwen names it. He offers Jesus, along with Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa and others, as examples. These women and men address symptoms as opportunities to reorient the soul to an inclusive understanding of and response to the human condition, that one unlimited spiritual community.

Another highly useful section is the chapter on conscience (The Morality of the Heart). The careful distinctions made here will be most useful to discerners who work in company with a spiritual director or companion. This chapter points to one of the most valuable and perennial practices in the spiritual life - distinguishing voices that resound within from voices that come from without. Neafsey borrows a term from moral theologian Richard Gula to identify a common pitfall of interior work - the "conscience/superego mix-up." An exaggerated identification with parental and other internalized voices can hinder authentic contact with the self in the work of discernment. In contrast, Neafsey identifies the true inner voice as a self deeper than these other cordons of demand, as "a helpful, growth-promoting source of inner wisdom and guidance." Elementary, perhaps, but those who work with young people would know the necessity of making such a distinction.

Among the other merits of A Sacred Voice is its prodigious reference to models for thinking about vocation. These include voices from the African, African American and Latin American churches, Sioux medicine man Black Elk, Walter Bruggemann, Ignatius of Loyola, Viktor Frankl, Martin Luther King, Sharon Daloz Parks, Daniel Berrigan, Etty Hillesum, and James Hillman, each in their own way echoing the voice of Christ, the Great Awakener. Cumulatively, they contribute to the book's central thesis that a call heard apart from the call of the distressed and marginalized or the stranger is one only half-heard. It is also a catholic work in the most profound sense: in that it opens human experiences under a variety of cultural and religious forms in order to awaken what the dull thud of culture tends to disguise for nearly everyone (Buechner, cited p. 163).

This study is best used as a tool in the hands of teachers rather than as a solitary read. Like being dipped in a succession of solutions, Sacred Voice represents a sample of approaches that not only awaken conscience but which may place the inquirer in touch with a calling that mends the world. It will sound best through someone like a teacher, a spiritual guide or a youth director. It would also make a good source for catechumenal and confirmation processes. As I have encouraged student life staff and campus ministers, I will say the same to pastors and catechists, this book will work best when they include their own encouraging and provocative voice - with its unique story. Their added voices may be the "nothing more than nothing," the additional snowflake (pp. 159 - 60) that cracks the branch of complacency in their hearers.

A version of this review appeared previously in the Sewanee Theological Review, Easter 2007. Vol. 50:2.