Speaker/Media Information and Support Materials

How May I Help You?

You and I share a passion for the Catholic Faith, and for the formation of Catholics. I want to promote my book, but in ways that multiply the gifts God has given by sharing them to promote your ministry. This information package is meant to spark your ideas about how I might contribute to your conference, talk show, Catholic publication, or other ministries. We need to focus on the good, and not the goods, according to G.K. Chesterton. I can tailor talks and articles to the particulars of your situation. I’d be glad to discuss creative ways we can expand on the material in Souls at Rest: An Exploration of the Idea of Sabbath to interest your audience. I wear several other hats: Published Freelance Writer, Founder, Living Poem Society; Conference Presenter, C.S. Lewis and the Inklings Conference; Home Educator and Catholic Homeschooling Conference Speaker; Spiritual Mentor in association with the Apostles of the Interior Life; Catholic and Interdenominational Retreat Designer; Convert to Catholicism. Please contact me to discuss ways we can work together to design a gift for those you serve.

Download the files below, or contact me to have a package mailed to you: charoster@yahoo.com. If you can personally recommend me to your archdiocese, conference, ministry leaders, they will have extra confidence in asking me to speak for you. Thanks very much to those of you who are facilitating these connections for me.

Click on the page you want, or scroll through the package:

Cover Images: Souls at Rest: An Exploration of the Idea of Sabbath, by Charlotte Ostermann

Color, Black & White, Jpg, Gif, Tif, Png, Pdf - take your pic! Charlotte's Picture

Charlotte Ostermann – Bio & Speaker Information

Catholic convert, freelance writer and editor, homemaker, award-winning poet, pro-life advocate, humorist, educator, spiritual mentor, speaker, author of Souls at Rest: An Exploration of the Idea of Sabbath, mother of eight, loves conversation and G.K. Chesterton, milks goats!

I have spoken at C.S. Lewis Conferences, in college classrooms, homeschooling events, retreats, workshops and high schools. I tailor each talk to its particular setting, and negotiate payment based upon principles of solidarity and justice. I have experience in curriculum and workshop design, mediation, and task- or focus-group facilitation. Here are a few titles of previous talks. Please look at justoneyeoman.com for details of these, and ideas for more, talks to meet your needs.

“Tertiary Epic: Lewis’ Space Trilogy and Preface to Paradise Lost”

My paper was accepted for presentation at the annual conference of the C.S. Lewis and the Inklings Society, at Grove City College in Pennsylvania: the form of epic in the shadow of the Cross.

Building the Bridge as We Cross It

For the 2006 Kansas City Catholic Home School Conference, I spoke about how we can educate our children well in spite of our own educational deficiencies, and about why we needn’t worry so much about getting them over the raging river of life. Free: MP3 at justoneyeoman.com

Introduction to the Life and Work of Dorothy Sayers

For a public lecture and discussion series at Signs of Life Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas – an overview of Sayers biography and key works. Free at justoneyeoman.com: a succinct biography of Sayers by yours truly.

A Prayer, A Poem, A Person, A Place

For an interdenominational women’s prayer retreat - What does it mean that a person is God’s ‘poema’, His workmanship? We looked deeply into a poem’s capacity to be a place of encounter. Where ‘poem’ and ‘place’ intersect we find the human person in his fullness.

How Can I Be Loved?

For an Apostles of the Interior Life women’s retreat called “Let Yourself Be Loved”: Four ways of being loved and, for each, two opposite ways of avoiding that love.

The Veiled Self

For an interdenominational women's retreat: We discussed coming to grips with the tension of paradox, integration of rationality and imagination, the imagery and power of the veil, the dimensionality of the human person, the movement from myth to incarnation to being, and the realization of beauty, among other things, in the context of C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces.

The Faces of Unity

For the annual conference of all the Collaborators of Your Joy with the Apostles of the Interior Life: What unity is, why seek it out, and how. We looked at four faces of unity – with unbelievers, with taskmasters, with spouses, and with self, through the words of St. Paul to the Ephesians. We considered some lies that eat away at the roots of unity, and Scriptural truths that help free us from those lies.

In Conversation With Islam

For the Serra Club of Lawrence, Kansas: How can we love our neighbor, set aside even religious differences to minister Christ’s love to him, live at peace with all men? A 25-minute self-contained PowerPoint presentation of this talk is available on request.

Putting Down Sabbath Roots

Keynote address for the 25th Annual Mass of Celebration for Women, May 31, 2006, in Wamego, KS: Practical ways to dip into the kind of leisure that brings us interior equanimity and leaves us more whole, more human, more able to balance all the demands of life

Writing for the Cause

For pro-life college students, this talk is equally applicable to any group learning about influencing public opinion through letters to editors.

An Under-Appreciated C.S. Lewis Gem – “A Preface to Paradise Lost”

For a Midwest Regional C. S. Lewis Association conference. See my 'map' and 'digest' of this book at justoneyeoman.com.

Exploring C.S. Lewis’ “Till We Have Faces”

Two talks: a pre- and post-reading workshop. In the first, I help readers understand some of the recurring themes in the book itself, and give a sense of its context within Lewis’ own life and spiritual growth. In the postlude, I serve less as an instructor, and more as a facilitator of the discussion that follows inevitably on reading TWHF. Free: my handout for these workshops at justoneyeoman.com

Introduction to the Life and Work of Dorothy Sayers

Created for a public lecture and discussion series at Signs of Life Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas – an overview of Sayers biography and key works. Free: my succinct biography of Sayers at justoneyeoman.com.

Improving Your College Research Papers

An intensive, two-hour workshop for college students based on my experience helping with student papers. I addressed many of the common mistakes and weaknesses I have observed, and gave a structural model for the design of thesis papers that I have always found extremely helpful. You may see the Outline and Handouts (1: Mechanics Issues, 2:Recommended Reading, 3: Usage Issues ,4: Process and Structure) I designed for these students.

Why Argue?

Well, why not? I discussed, with a class of high school students of rhetoric, common reasons why not, and then made those reasons the very reasons FOR good argument. You may see the reasons and decide for yourself!

Souls at Rest – Fact Sheet, Blurbs, Cover Pic

Small, Medium, Long Blurbs:

Hold on to your hats! Charlotte Ostermann doesn’t want your life to be ‘purpose driven’, ‘goal oriented’, ‘focused on excellence’, or ‘outcomes based’. She’s hoping to help you make it ‘Sabbath suffused’, energized by joy, centered on the Eucharistic Presence of Lord Sabbaoth. In her new book, Souls at Rest, she leads you through a carefully designed exploration of the idea of Sabbath. Not a rehash of arguments for and against keeping a Sabbath day, nor a list of prescriptions and proscriptions, but a genuine invitation to a new kind of freedom – the freedom of the well-rested soul. Contemporary readers will welcome Souls at Rest - an antidote to the cultural poisons assailing us all.

Souls at Rest, a new book by Charlotte Ostermann, is a profound exploration of the meaning and practice of Sabbath for contemporary readers. The restful, poetic tone of Souls at Rest provides a counterpoint to the speed and noise of today’s world – a cure for its primary woes. The ancient, worldwide understanding of cyclical rest is blended with the formal Jewish Sabbath law, then made intensely new and relevant in the light of the Eucharist. Readers are invited to cultivate interior freedom by designing a contemplative, personal, non-legalistic Sabbath practice. Avoiding a bullet-point, sound-bite style in favor of a layered, conversational approach, Ostermann draws forth a genuine, meditative response from her reading audience. Book discussion groups are sure to appreciate the truly thoughtful questions in the Study Guide. If you think Sabbath is a dry, old, narrow – even over-done – subject, think again. In Souls at Rest we find a Sabbath refreshed by sacramental understanding, shining new light into surprising corners – evangelism, education, poetry, and community, for instance. Even the experienced Sabbath-keeper will find some new insights in Souls at Rest.

Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI both have called for a renewal of Christian commitment to Sabbath-keeping. Charlotte Ostermann responds in Souls at Rest: An Exploration of the Idea of Sabbath. Calling it the antidote to the acedia – spiritual lassitude or indifference – that plagues our times, Ostermann develops a rich picture of Sabbath as God’s provision for the fullest possible formation of the human person. Motivated by Pope John Paul’s sense that the world desperately needs a ‘recapitulation of the human person’, she attempts to recall readers to the cultivation of their own being, one Sunday at a time. No list of more things to do on Sunday, or of banned activities, is likely to appeal to contemporary readers. Instead, Ostermann invites the creative, personal response of each reader to the call of Shabbat Shalom – Sabbath peace. Everyone who reads this book will walk away with a unique Sabbath design – especially if they take the time to meditate on the thought-provoking questions in the included Discussion and Study Guide. Her dynamic, personal approach is like an extended conversation with a spiritual mentor. Sabbath, according to Souls at Rest, is going to change your life, change your family, change your approach to evangelization, and change your culture. This is a radical book, literally, if Sabbath is indeed at the root of what it means to be human – to be, as Ostermann puts it, wholly, holy, whole.

Interview Q & A

Q: What makes Souls at Rest (SAR) different from other books about rest, or Sabbath practices?

A: SAR is Catholic – Sabbath can only be fully understood in light of the Eucharist. SAR is not just a list of relaxing things to do once a week, but an invitation to be form one’s own philosophy and practice of Sabbath rest. SAR is concerned with the interior effects of Sabbath, not just with better health or stronger productivity.

Q: Why not just list some suggestions for how to keep a good Sabbath?

A: SAR has lots of suggestions, but to make it your own, you need to answer its questions for yourself.

Q; What does Sabbath rest have to do with evangelism?

A: Immersion in Christ, in Sabbath rest, helps to develop our interior capacity to bear tension and to be affected by other people. Unless we can love them, unless we can resolve the tension between their errors and their beauty, we can’t fully communicate the Gospel of new life to others.

Q: How has your experience as a spiritual mentor affected the message in SAR?

A: I have presented the idea of Sabbath in four layers, because my work with people trying to grow spiritually has taught me that approach. Too often, books stimulate us intellectually without helping us bridge the gap to practice, or move us to action without developing deep understanding.

Q: Why do you say SAR is a paradox?

A: The person who has no experience of Sabbath probably has very little capacity to understand, or receive true Sabbath rest. The one who needs it most is least likely to get my message. Luckily, my readers have known Christ in the Eucharist, so He has prepared the way for this message within them.

Free Study Guide offers many more points for discussion.

Conversation Starters

*Sabbath gives you over seven weeks of vacation in every year!

Holy leisure is the key to human being.

*Sabbath-keeping prepared the Jews to receive Christ.

Charlotte Ostermann is the last person you’d expect to write a book about Sabbath rest!

*A ‘purpose driven’ life can be a dangerous thing.

People who are very responsible and active can be guilty of ‘sloth’.

*People who know how to keep Sabbath are the happiest people in the world.

If you don’t learn to keep Sabbath well, your life will grow more and more tangled and unsatisfying.

*We are free from the law of Sabbath-keeping, because it has been fulfilled in Christ.

Speed can make us ‘violent’ people if we aren’t careful.

*The culture around us is hostile to Sabbath and to us.

True freedom can be cultivated only by true leisure.

*Without true Sabbath-keeping, the human person is two-dimensional, flat.

My priest is a ‘Sabbath convert’!

*Sabbath rest can and must be fit in to even the busiest life (ask my priest!).

Speed and stagnation are opposite enemies of Sabbath rest, and of the human person.

*Danger: If you don’t respond to the idea of Sabbath, you may be tempted to ‘idea-olatry’!

Free – Sabbath in a Nutshell for Busy People

Adapted from Souls at Rest: An Exploration of the Idea of Sabbath

By Charlotte Ostermann

Permission given for churches to copy text with attribution as a bulletin insert.

For other uses, please discuss with the author: charoster@yahoo.com

Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have both encouraged Catholics to renew a sense of Sabbath. If you are too busy to enjoy a restful Sabbath, the problem may be sloth. What a surprise this is to busy, responsible, productive people who are anything but ‘lazy’! Misunderstanding of the sin of sloth (acedia) and of the obligation to keep the Sabbath holy contributes to the widespread abuse of the gift of Sabbath rest.

Sloth is not just laziness in fulfilling your duties, though it often makes you feel drained of the energy you need for your work. The acedia spoken of as sin and translated by the word sloth is first of all a spiritual impotence. St. Thomas Aquinas calls it a sin against the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, because at the root of this inability to reach out for spiritual goods – growth, union with Christ, community with others, the gifts of the Holy Spirit – is the failure to fully receive Christ in His Eucharistic presence.

Sabbath is not just taking bubble baths, or resting from studies and work. It is no longer a list of rules and regulations that could be practiced by rote without interior freedom. The reception of Christ is the source, center, and goal of true Sabbath rest, but the Eucharist is set within the context of an entire day given to restoration of your capacity to receive Him – like a jewel in a setting of gold. Though you might never consider a Sunday without Mass, you might not realize how much the practices that surround your reception of the Blessed Sacrament affect your capacity to be fully, deeply rested in Christ as a result.

Christ came not to abolish, but to fulfill the law of Sabbath. It is still a commandment, but one we now approach in the light of the freedom He has purchased for us on the cross. No one can really design the best Sabbath for another person, because the true measure of the quality of your Sabbath rest is your own being, your own growth in interior freedom and spiritual vitality. You must stop from acting upon the world and allow yourself to be acted upon. You must consider your self, and take into account what activities violate your being, threaten your peace, throw off your equanimity. Taking one day each week to cease whatever activities distract you from Christ and from wonder, interior quietude, balance recollects you to yourself and begins to change every day of the week.

Sabbath can now be any day, any moment in which you step into eternity, into the presence of Christ. To develop this capacity to enter Sabbath rest at any moment, it is necessary to restore your practice of the Sabbath day. “Anytime” becomes “no time” when there is not a specific period set aside and protected for Sabbath rest. Our Sunday Sabbath reflects the decision of the Apostles to celebrate the resurrection as the fulfilled Sabbath with a Lord’s Day that went beyond the Jewish Saturday Sabbath to a glorious ‘eighth day’ of rest in Jesus: Lord Sabbaoth. If your Sunday is a day of work and activity, choose another day to keep inviolate and holy for the Presence of Christ. The practice of this one day of genuine, Christ-centered, re-creating rest will gradually permeate every other day of your life and transform your sense of what it means to be fully human! Give yourself over seven weeks per year of deeply restorative rest, and see blessings begin to flow in abundance.

To Whom It May Concern,

I’m delighted to recommend Charlotte Ostermann as a speaker for your next event. Twice, Charlotte has spoken at day-long events I’ve hosted for a women’s retreat I plan annually for a diverse group of Christians from a variety of denominations and backgrounds.

In 18 years of planning retreats, Charlotte is the only speaker I’ve invited for a second year. She brought sparkle, depth, humor and rich, new understanding to conversations on holy leisure and growing in the interior life. She walked our group through a difficult C.S. Lewis book and helped those who had never opened the book, as well as those who had studied it carefully, come away with practical and soul satisfying new perspectives.

Charlotte is a woman of intensity and intellect and her talks definitely challenge her audiences. She is well worth the challenge, however, because Charlotte brims over with wisdom and faith that rings true, relevant and accessible.

Katherine Dinsdale

Lawrence, Kansas

To Whom It May Concern:

I recommend Charlotte Ostermann to be a speaker for your group. She has given clearly focused, finely tuned, richly illustrated talks to my class at the University of Kansas and at two conferences on campus of which I was chairman. The class was “Reason and Imagination in the Writings of C.S. Lewis.” These C.S. Lewis Society regional conferences, on campus, provided opportunity for her to give presentations on additional Lewis-related topics in groups of students and townspeople.

Since then Charlotte has spoken twice to a C.S. Lewis discussion group of faculty and their spouses here in Lawrence. Her breadth of preparation and understanding, coupled with her unusually fine speaking skills, have made her a popular speaker for age groups from ages 18 to 80, from a variety of backgrounds. Because of her ability and willingness to share her own insights and research, she has and will again be a speaker for two different groups in Lawrence, both secular and sacred, of which I am program chairman. I recommend Charlotte Ostermann with enthusiasm and without reservation to be a speaker for any group that shares her interests.

Nancy Steere Yacher ( nancyty@sunflower.com )

Department of English (Ret.)

University of Kansas

Twenty-some years before writing SAR, I was a young, struggling Christian with a whole lot of growing to do. During those years, I inhaled books – wolfing them down in quantities impossible to fully assimilate. Now and then one stopped me in my tracks and by affecting, rather than just stimulating me, invited a response – the judgment and realization in my life by which I might genuinely receive and possess the author’s gift to me. Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture was such a book. Its thesis was my antithesis, but somehow it quickened in me an attraction to something beautiful but distant – some truth about my own being that was just out of my grasp. I struggled spiritually and intellectually to apprehend it, and SAR is the fruit of that effort to make it my own. So, through the long, slow years of continual conversion, this fast-talking, impatient, action-oriented girl with zero tolerance for staying still became the one, ironically, with a message for the world: “Be still, and know that I am God. Be still and quiet and take heart. Keep a quiet heart.” God definitely has a sense of humor! ***

When true leisure had become much more fully realized in my own being, I was given an extended sabbatical rest – nine months in Europe with my family. Though these months had their own considerable stresses and strains – constant pain from a badly arthritic knee, for instance; lack of fluency in German, Italian, French, or Spanish, for another – the period was marked by long stretches of time to pray, journal, meditate, compose poetry, and connect the many dots of my life and reading into a coherent picture. For the first time in my life, I experienced full restedness, and it brought such deep healing and integration that I came home wanting to shout about it from that mountain-top. ***

Finally, in one miracle week of exhausting 8-12 hour days of writing, it was done. Every day of this Book Week was its own story, with its own miracles of exhaustion and renewal, of resolving impossible tensions, of solutions to every extraneous life issue (picture a path opening through the Red Sea!). As the book took shape in my mind the first day, I faced the daunting task of forming it with a word limit that turned out to be ten times too small! ***

So, you’ve just written a book, or had it written through you in an agony-and-ecstasy of cooperation with the Holy Spirit, and it’s time for a do-over. What do you do? You do it over! My director’s request was for a pamphlet form of it that she could hand out to college students. Writers, I know you understand how humbling it was to give 40,000 hard-won words and be asked for a 1,000-word digest! But, long before, I had come to the awareness that nothing I wrote would be ‘new’ (such a debt I owe so many others for every word of my own!) and that we can but hope to find things worth saying and saying again in new forms. So…a pamphlet! Next, a new book. ***

During this period, I had several opportunities to give talks, small meditations, and retreats on the ideas in SAR. In this way, the book was formed in community, by authentic communication motivated by love for real people. I highly recommend this process to writers, though at times you get tired of reworking, reframing, reiterating the same ideas, or of giving away the gist of the book you’d rather sell. The ‘exercise’ of my thoughts helped get them into shape. The responses of listeners helped me write the accompanying discussion questions. This business of giving away first what I would sell has become my mantra. I really believe you should not sell what you have not learned to give away. ***

Each step of the get-this-book-realized process seems tortuous, sometimes scary, often discouraging, but little by little it gets done, and I keep ‘getting done’ through the work. I want to stress that my life’s duties and constraints (family, home, etc…) did not interfere with so much as impede the flow of my writing. Like the fiber of an orange that slows the rush of sugar to the bloodstream, this is a good thing! ***

The six lessons I hope fellow writers and artists will take away from my experience: ***