Identity can be reborn and refounded in a conjunction of sexuality and religious experience to attain a spiritual development. The author claims this as the heart’s desire.
 

 
Reviews
Taking vows doesn’t end the human quest for fulfillment. Spiritual maturity and happiness require integration of sexuality and spirituality. In Maturing in The Religious Life: The Image of the Heart and the Heart’s Desire, Brother Noel Thomas thoughtfully explores the need specially to express sexuality and love in the context of celibate religious life. In the minds of many, vowed religious life seems to rule out sexual maturity. This book is a very important contribution to those discerning a commitment to religious life, and an invaluable resource for those supporting vowed religious as they seek to live out their commitments as continually evolving and maturing human beings. -Clark Berge SSF, author of Running to Resurrection: A Soul-making Chronicle.

In Maturing in The Religious Life: The Image of the Heart and the Heart’s Desire, Noel Jeffs challenges readers to reconsider sexuality and spirituality as interweaving states of being rather than opposing demands. Employing and developing the notion of maturity, he argues that the quest to establish an awareness that can acknowledge, and care for, both self and other. At once clearly written and provocative, this is a book that will stimulate heartfelt discussion and meditation. -Professor Ernesto Spinelli, ES Associates, London UK.

In Maturing in the Religious Life, Noel’s passion for critical thinking, for questioning norms, and for exploring the meanings of spirituality beyond the strictures of institutional frameworks, emerges boldly. Noel implores us to engage with our ‘heart’s desire’, in this thesis about the relationships between spirituality, sexuality, and indeed, the very essence of being. Why would these ideas not be compelling and intriguing to all of us? While positioned in a rigorous grounding of logic and literature, this provocative work speaks from the heart, pointing to the powerful and unique writing style Noel would go on to develop in his many subsequent works, including so much of his brutally honest contemporary poetry. -Dr Matthew Egan, Senior Lecturer within the Business School’s Discipline of Accounting at the University of Sydney.

Read book review by Reverend Dr Nikolai Blaskow, Adjunct Research Fellow, CSU Canberra here.

About the Author
Noel Jeffs SSF is an Anglican Friar originally from Gippsland, Australia. He is a sometimes student of Kate Lilley and others for a Master of Creative Writing at Sydney University. He is a disabled person living alone who enjoys conversations and silence and writing. Noel has a master’s degree in Mental Health and has trained as a psychotherapist.His poetry print publication Under the Dome is still available from Garden Lounge in Newton, Sydney. He has been published in Burrows twice and is currently part of two anthologies, David Reuters’ Outer Space/Inner Minds and Antologie Romana Australiana, a cross-cultural work of dialogue and discourse between his Sydney workshop and the ‘Palatul Culturii Bistrita-Romania’ where he was translated into Romanian.He is currently also working on the manuscript of his thesis poems Walking in Stealth in preparation for release as a print publication, now that he has made this manuscript, Maturing in the Religious Life, available to a wider audience.