I'm recommending: My Type of Holiness by Rose Sweet

Also known as: how I realized school was the best place for my homeschooled kid

These days, a reviewer receives a copy of a book to review either as a friend, follower, or interested-in-the-subject interested in the subject matter of the book. Gone are the days of for-hire reviewers, so it’s hard to receive an honest review.

I came to My Type of Holiness: Striving for Sainthood with the Temperament God Gave Me as an interested-in-the-subject person of the book. I learned about the temperaments in college, immediately found it applicable to my life and in seeing the comments, - finally a book on holiness for phlegmatics – I thought immediately this is the book for my husband, ahem, me!

In all fairness, when it came, my non-reader husband immediately wanted to take a look at it. I first encountered Rose Sweet through a divorce ministry an acquaintance asked me to volunteer with, leading small group discussions following video segments. She struck me as intuitive, intelligent, rational, and on the money as to people’s wounds. When I saw her name attached to this title, I was hooked.

I have never read anything by Rose Sweet.

Like many self-help style books from Our Sunday Visitor, the tone is conversational, but this one comes as well-informed. There are the obligatory reflection questions and speculation about saint temperaments at the end of each chapter, but they are ancillary to the meat of the chapter.

I wanted a book on the path to holiness as it applies to temperaments. But much of the book is really an introduction to the temperaments.

Such an introduction is needed, I grant you, and a well-balanced update to the archaic literature we might be using.

Sweet hits all the important points. And she actually hits the psychological literature, too.

What a temperament is.

And what it isn’t.

And how these other factors influence how we present. The temperament is the thing we’re born with. The personality is the nature/nurture thing that develops early on. Spot on.

Life circumstances bring out particular aspects. Life circumstances lead us to mask certain aspects.

Family systems.

Rose Sweet gets it in a modern, updated way.

She gives it as a life and relationship coach who is clearly dishing out this information regularly.

And that means, she has very few sources.

This is my great lament of books like this. There are some references, but for the most part, her information is very much integrated in her own mind so as to flow out as easily as a coaching session, but the reader does not have the benefit of the sources from which she first learned it.

Nevertheless, this is the absolute best introduction to the topic. And by the last third, she really does touch on holiness in an enlightening and remarkable way.

I wish there were more.

Personally, her balanced, well-rounded, all circumstances explored look at the temperaments was personally enlightening for me, a person well familiar with the theory.

I have a child who is a sanguine.

As a no-nonsense, let’s get this done choleric/let’s be quiet, read, and think deep thoughts melancholic, his personality has been a challenge both in parenting and during the homeschool day.

Many a behavior we thought, Why is he like this? What is wrong with him?

It turns out, a great lot of us are temperamentally… quiet.

And he is not.

So she has my interest piqued.

But it isn’t a deep dive by any stretch of the imagination. And I’m left wanting more.

The other revelation is her articulation of the weaknesses each temperament will fall into, and their strengths when living a life of virtue.

I said to my husband, whose advice on holiness has always been pray more, lead more, attend mass more – what if you just tried to focus these God-given abilities towards patience, kindness, peacefulness to God, and asked him to guide you in them? And there was silence.

Because when we hit on this path, this is something about the way God made us, and maybe he loves us and wants him for himself, but maybe we’re also okay, just the way we are, there isn’t much response except silence – wonder and awe.

So I recommend this book. Wholeheartedly. To all who will read it.