Tolle et Lege

Oh, how clever to title my book post this way on the feast day of St. Augustine.

I’m still around, counting the days until September 8. What happens on September 8, you wonder? PreK 4 finally starts. For half-days until the next week when they finally go full day. At which point I will have been paying tuition since July already, with virtually nothing to show for it. Ah well, I keep thinking – Child Care Tax Credit come April, at least.

I always begin the summers with high hopes for my creativity, but by this time am near -madness of a sorts. I just can’t think with all of these people around. It’s all kind of strange. You can put me into a bookstore, coffeeshop or outdoors with whatever writing equipment I need for the day – notebook, computer – and I do fine. But I can’t work at home with any kind of focus if even the most undemanding child is coming in and out of the room. Because, I suppose, the strangers at Panera aren’t going to ask me to tie their shoes or write a check for the damn gift wrap fundraiser.

Then there’s the house business (which is chugging along), a talk I’m giving tomorrow, a small project that was nagging at me, and well as everything else. Of course

Once again, I am going to attempt 2 entries today. One on books, and one just on life. Last week, I was unsuccessful in a similar attempt. I don’t remember why.

So let’s get started here. I’ve been reading a lot – it’s very unfocused, but some of it might interest you. We go to the library today for the first time in about 3 months, I think – after, that is, I go online and clear up the fines which I’m sure are sitting there waiting to be paid, barring us from borrowing. I really tried extra hard before we went to Sicily to scour the house for library books, but since Michael found some Superman book stuck under the couch just last week, who knows what demands for replacement costs I will discover.

Start with fiction. I picked up both of these at the bookstore, judging books by their covers and the felt needs of the moment.

The Condition by Jennifer Haigh

Why did I pick this one? Because, I suppose, I wanted some insight on how a well-received middlebrow fictional family saga reads.  How does one write one of these things?  Well, the answer here seems to be: Plug familiar types into an overarching metaphor and include lots of detail about lifestyles, diseases, subcultures and so on. The overarching metaphor being the “condition” of one of the children in the family that prevents her from physically maturing beyond prepubescence.  Point being: every member of the family shares the same condition, so the novel concerns their journeys to figure this out and overcome it. It was okay. Readable. A diversion. But formulaic in its own way.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

Set during the Siege of Leningrad. Two prisoners – one 17-year old who had been caught looting a dead German soldier’s corpse and another, older Russian army deserter – are set free for a few days, with the promise of continued freedom if they can obtain eggs for the wedding cake of the daughter of a higher-up.  Paints a grim picture of a grim time, naturally enough, complete with cannibals. Some evocative imagery, but in the end, rather flat in its effect, as if the writer were not so much seeking to evoke a deeper reality of time, place or meaning, but simply to pull along and horrify. It was one of those books you read and like well enough at first but halfway through begin to dislike the author because it becomes clear he’s not all that, and he clearly believes what he’s doing is all that.

Boy, I’m out of practice here. Oh well.

Now to the non-fiction:

Two Mertons:

Compassionate Fire The Letters of Thomas Merton and Catherine de Hueck Doherty

There aren’t a lot of them – it’s a slim volume, recently published by Ave Maria Press. But they are important because Doherty did play a role in Merton’s early vocation journey. In fact, when the Franciscans rejected him in 1941, he was torn between a pull to the Trappists and to a house of hospitality like those of Dorothy Day or Catherine. He spent “two weeks of evenings” at Friendship House in Harlem, ultimately went for the Trappists, as we know, but continued a sporadic correspondence with Catherine until the end.

The most interesting parts of the letters to me involved, first of all, their conversation about Catholic Action and the role of the Christian-Catholic-the Church – in political and civic life. As one might expect, given the nature of the apostolate, Catherine emphasized individual witness on a one-to-one basis.

Here in the USA the problem is immense. Neither laws or poliics are important here. Only one thing matters — to bring out from the deust of years CHRISTIANITY, and show the people its workings which is the face of Chrsit in the hearts of men. And that is for the time being the duty of a handful of people. Here is wehre Friendship House and the Catholci Worker come in. They are and exit primarily to awaken people — Roman Catholics at that — to their obligations, by assuming, in a spectacular manner, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; and using all the means of propoganda – papers, lecture platforms, writing and above all, living, to bring for these forgotten fundamental truths. (CHD – 1941)

The other point that hit me in this reading – as it did in Dorothy Day’s letters, as it does in any unvarnished reading we are able to do of holy people  – is how hard it is.  I don’t know where this notion that once you give yourself to Christ, everything will be “fine” on every level comes from. I really don’t. Michael used to say, “The only thing Jesus promised his apostles was that they would suffer.” Actually, I think he was quoting Groeschel when he said that.  And when you read the saints with a clear eye, that’s so true. And not just “suffer” in the sense that we tend to define it today – suffering from you know, self-doubt, lack of self-confidence and low self-worth – but really suffer from persecution, even from within the Church, suffer failure and disappointment, suffer from the consequences of their own mistakes and misreadings and wrong turns, suffer from doubt, and suffer because…I really could be doing something else more pleasant. I could just walk away. Why don’t I?

I’m currently reading a ‘best of” of Carlo Carretto, a follower of Charles de Foucauld and important figure in Catholic Action in Italy, and the same applies, as does the truth of the limitations of programs and plans. Carretto went to Africa for precisely that reason – he felt as if his discipleship had become defined by worldly standards of “success” in relationship to church programs and movements.

The other Merton was Seasons of Celebration: Meditation on the Cycle of Liturgical Feasts, also from AMP.  It’s an interesting little collection, not the most cohesive in the world, but with nuggets of interest and value. Some of the essays are on moments in the liturgical year – Ash Wednesday, Easster – , some are on general liturgical issues and others, such as one on the name of the Lord, that are only tangential to the matters at hand.

The high points of this small collection were twofold and of two different types: one which I found personally nourishing, and the other that was just fascinating from an historical perspective.

There’s an essay here on “Christan Self-Denial,” written in 1950,  which is one of the best I’ve read. In fact, if I were talking with someone who didn’t understand the nature and purpose of Christian asceticism and couldn’t approach it closely because of their sense of what Christian freedom means – I’d hand them this piece, along with the preceding piece on Ash Wednesday.

Often in the course of the liturgical year the Church complains, in our behalf, that we are pressed down udner the burden of our own human activity. That seems strange! To be free to do things in our own way would appear, at first sight, to be ‘the liberty of the sons of God.’ but no. As we enter into the ascetic life and advance in the ways of self-deinal, we find that our biggest obstacle and our biggest burden is this old man of the sea, this body of death, this inescapable self we carry around with us. He is not our real self at all. He is the caricature of what we ought to be. But he rides us without mercy and, without the all-powerful help of God, we will never be able to shake him off. And he is the one who makes us act according to the ‘wisdom of the flesh.’ He is the father of all our worldlienss. He is the one who prevents our liberation from ‘the world,’ and our transformation in Christ. He is the one who makes our life and work in the world a sterile and trivial assertion of our own futility.

And so we must remember that our asceiticsm is not directed against created things as such. Our real enemy is within our own castle. It is only because this enemy surrounds himself with the images and sensations and delights of created images and things and thus fortifies himself against all efforts of grace to dislodge him, that we must necessarily control our natural love for good things in order to fight him. When the church prays, as she does, that god may give us the gracde to despise earthly things and desire the good things of heaven, she does not mean to imply that cfreation is evil: but than an ego-centered love of the good things of life is a source of darkness and evil in the world.

The second, of great historical interest, is an essay, the last in the book, he wrote in 1964, on liturgical renewal.  An English Dominican, Thomas Crean, O.P, has a summary and critique here. In brief, what interested me most about this essay was that Merton’s vision and dreams for liturgy were entirely ungrounded in anything historical. At all. I think this was not unusual for the time – you have a vague idea of how the “early Church” celebrated the Eucharist, a concern with the contemporary gestalt and perceived needs of the present, and you run from there.

To shift gears – I finally caught up with Heather King’s first memoir, called Parched (bargain priced now, at $4 at Amazon - I got it for $2 at brick-n-mortar B & N. Depressing for an author, but the reality..). I discussed King’s book about her conversion, Redeemed here.

Beginning from young adolescence, Heather King was a serious alcoholic. I mean – serious, deep and soggy.  Reading Parched,  it really does seem to be a miracle that she is alive and well today.  The book, beautifully written as is anything King writes, is unrelenting. She doesn’t spare herself or us.  Her moment of clarity that leads to her eventually entering rehab (with some..intervention..as they say)  is terrifically moving, laying out how God never abandons us, if we can just take one small second to listen to him in the midst of our messy, bogged-down lives.

Finally (I think there are more, but I can’t remember right now…) there’s A Little Guide to Your Last Days by Jeffry Hendrix. Jeffry, a former evangelical Christian pastor and Catholic convert, was diagnosed with kidney cancer and wrote this book – a quite specific book reflecting his own experience, on how to approach life and death when the prognosis is clear. Of course, the prognosis is clear for all of us, whether we believe it or not, so this is not just a book for those who are terminally ill – for, of course, we are all terminally ill.

Jeffry has a website here about the book.

It is very practical – refreshingly so.  What to do, what to avoid, an honest acknowledgement of the discomfort your reality will cause for you and for others, the disruption, the tension – but also the opportunities to draw closer and closer to Christ.

I was startled because the central question Jeffry asks happens to be my question, one that I have asked constantly throughout my own life, but with more intensity over the past few months: Why am I still here and what am I supposed to do with the time I still have?

Good question, eh?

Good answers to that good question are offered in this book.

Dawn Eden has an excerpt here.