Over the past couple of days, I’ve “read” three books. I write “read” in that way because I can’t claim that I absorbed every word or even every half-page of the last two. But I engaged with them for a purpose, and it didn’t take a close reading to fulfill that purpose so here we are.
One was a novel, about which I will write tomorrow. The other two were spiritual memoirs by the same person, and here’s the road that led me to them:
I was looking at one of my book blogs – Stuck in a Book in this case. You know me and those midcentury novels of any sort, whether they be middlebrow, post-war American suburban or urban adventures, or noir. I’m there, for some reason, in those years right before I was born, perhaps ever trying to understand the people who brought me into being.
St Cedric was martyred a thousand years earlier, and there is a legend that he will return on that anniversary – firmly believed by Lady Eileen Francis, who patiently waits at the ruins of Abbey where St Cedric once served. Seeing an opportunity for money (which, for slightly complicated reasons, he needs for a friend – I suppose to make him more sympathetic to the reader), Ceddie Conway decides to impersonate him. At which point he is called upon to do the miraculous healings that St Cedric is famed for – and it works!
Only it turns out that Ceddie-the-impostor is being helped from the sidelines – by the genuine St Cedric, who has come back to life after all. Stern has created a lovable character in both Cedric and Ceddie, and this slim book plays out the conceit just long enough to keep it entertaining and tense.
Well that sounds like an entertaining and interesting way to spend a couple of hours – but I couldn’t find it online, anywhere, including my old dependable archive.org.
What I did find, however, were two spiritual memoirs by the author of that novel, a woman named Gladys Bronwyn Stern (1890-1973) Stern was born in England of Austrian Jewish immigrant parents, was a novelist and critic, converted to Catholicism relatively late in life, and wrote two spiritual memoirs: All in Good Time and The Way it Worked Out – both links will take you to the full texts at archive.org, borrowable for an hour at a time.
As I said, I didn’t engage with these books intimately. Both contain eminently skimmable portions focusing, for example, on various saints important to Stern – I mean, if you don’t know anything about St. Francis de Sales or St. Therese, go for it, but otherwise, yes, you can skim.
What interested me was what always interests me about this kind of writing: first, what it tells me about another human being’s experience of God and spirituality, and secondly, what it tells me about the time and place and context of lived Catholicism of the period.
People are talking a lot about Vatican II these days – well, who am I kidding – Catholic types are always talking a lot about Vatican II. But now, as ever, one of the topics that continually pops up is the State of Catholicism before Vatican II.
(It is extremely tiresome to have to repeat myself on this score, but something tells me a caveat is in order. I do not wear rose-colored glasses when viewing any period in history. I’m not an historian, but I am a serious student of history, which makes me a realist. Catholic life before Vatican II was not perfect, nor was it dire. Neither positive nor negative caricatures are accurate or useful.)
It is common for advocates of a certain Conciliar vision to try to convince us that not only were pre-Vatican II Catholics spiritually immature, there was something about, well, everything about the pre-Vatican II Catholic landscape that mitigated against spiritual maturity. It was dry, bankrupt and empty from pole to pole. Which, of course, is patently ridiculous considering that yes, there were a few spiritually engaged Catholics during the nineteen hundred years before Vatican II.
The life of the Church has, indeed, always been a mix of wheat and chaff. Jesus himself tells us. And if you know your history, you see this very clearly. Even the century or so before Vatican II reveals this: the Liturgical Movement, especially in its 20th century iteration, was mostly about connecting lay Catholics with the spirituality of the Church’s liturgical life in a deep, conscious way. Problems were regularly noted by observers, from Frank Sheed, who wrote frankly about the ignorance of even those charged with catechesis in The Church and I to Ratzinger himself, who wrote an article in the late 1950’s describing the shallowness of much Catholic religious life. An extract from Sheed below:
Click on images for full-screen.
But that’s not the entire picture, is it? We all know this and unless we are ideologically-driven, we are willing to admit it and discuss the past as it was (the best we know), not as our prejudices wish it to be.
When unpacking this, as I have said before, what I find most useful is not theological writing, but rather personal spiritual memoirs, letters and even fiction – most useful is fiction written by writers outside the Church, telling us what they see when they see Catholics.
These books by Stern fall, of course, into the first category. I won’t outline her entire trajectory here, but want to highlight a couple of points.
Why did she become Catholic? By her own account, the journey – she didn’t convert until late middle age – was about a few things: Exposure to Catholic practices as a child and young woman (she was sent to a Swiss Catholic finishing school) was important – it seems that the most serious Christians she knew were Catholics – was important. But even more important, and unpacked by Stern herself were two aspects of her interior life: an attraction to story centered on the person of a self-sacrificing Hero, and a deep desire to belong and a fear that she was forever an outsider. There’s no mystery about any of this in her books. She is forthright and bemused with herself.
(Stern married once, briefly, at a young age, had many, many close and lively friendships and professional associations, but, it seems, lived with an essential loneliness at her core.)
And, so, through various ways and means, she found peace, home, belonging and a Hero in Catholicism.
That’s the story of the first book. The second is a sequel, written a few years after, to tell us, as the title indicates, how it’s going. It’s dedicated To Alec Guiness because of St. Francis de Sales.
What is quite refreshing about the book is, again, Stern’s honesty. If she hoped that the graces of the Faith would make her automatically a more virtuous person, would make her flaws and weaknesses simply go away, well, her life as it is lived erases that fantasy, she tells us ruefully, again and again. She’s able to pick out points of improvement, of how she has, indeed grown, but no, she is not perfect yet – and the takeaway for her and for the reader is important: her own continued weakness, well, her humanity makes her more tolerant and understanding of others in their weakness – which is perhaps one of the greatest graces of all, isn’t it?
I should now write its sequel of treasure found, not indeed for safe possession, but for the constant re-discovery that no guarantee was ever given.
As I read narratives like this, mindful of current controversies in the Church, I am always particularly alert for a sense of how the writer sees, for example, her relationship to God through the liturgy. Does she feel distanced? Does she express a dissatisfaction with her permitted level of “active participation?”
Well, no, she doesn’t -which would not surprise us given she is a convert and was attracted to the Church as it was, not as she imagined it could or should be. So perhaps that is not telling us anything new.
But was is, if not new, at least illuminating, is her description of her experiences and her sense of what is going on at Mass, no matter where it is or with whom. As in this passage, at the end of chapter describing various enjoyable Christmases she’d had through her life, all of which, however, were satisfying only at the level of “Yule” – but never Christmas:
But as for the perfect Christmas, it happened at last when I knelt for Midnight Mass with Sheila and Penrose in the little church they had built in Doucegrove to the honor of St. Thérèse Dim, root-smelling Sussex fields around, and German prisoners crowding the aisle and singing Adeste Fidelis as if they were at home, as indeed they were that night, and so were we all, all over the world.
Charlotte was Both 