Bookmobile for the Idol-Rich

If you’ve visited my Goodreads page, you know that I read a bit.

Still, you might be surprised to learn the one thing I’ve obsessed about, when planning for the 26-day road trip dead ahead:

I keep thinking about what books to bring. That and whether this old gray head is going to get any sleep at all, given 26 different beds on 26 successive nights.

“L’Arche Across America” launches on Tuesday, May 9, and for twenty-six days I will be traveling 8,000 miles by van with five fellow members of my L’Arche Boston North community. Three of them have lived with intellectual disabilities their whole lives.

All three of these “core members” have gifts, but only one, Woody, shows any sign of reading much, and Woody’s reading is mostly confined to the labels on records and discs in his massive collection of vintage rock music.

Woody can tell you the name of the song and the length of the track, in minutes and seconds, on most of the tens of thousands of tracks that make up his collection. Any way you slice it, that’s a gift.

But reading, as in books—that’s irrelevant to the daily lives of Woody, his wife Doris, and John (seen in the group photo above, along with Jane, Todd, and myself, the three “assistants” accompanying them on an 8,000-mile odyssey to the West Coast and back).

So what’s the deal with obsessing over turning the van into my personal bookmobile?

Norman Maclean and My Final Twenty Years

Norman Maclean, great teacher of Shakespeare, devoted lover of Montana, and author of just two books, one posthumous, lived to be 87. I know that I may not be so lucky.

My father’s father lived to be 83. As my father approached his 83rd birthday, he speculated on his chances of outliving Granddad Bull, but he did not do so. The week Dad turned 83, he was diagnosed with metastasized melanoma and died within four months.

I am twenty years younger than the age at which both my father and grandfather died, and you can do the math. Because of my family history, I don’t think it is unreasonable for me to speculate that I might not live so long as Norman Maclean, who has become something of a hero to me, in a way that even my father was not. It seems quite sensible, in fact, to speculate that I too will fail to outlive my father and die by the age of 83.

These could be my last twenty years.

Robert Hugh Benson and Me

Sunday, for Mother’s Day, I double-dipped. After attending a Catholic mass with my wife, she and I accompanied my mother to a service at the Episcopal Church where Mom worships, where Dad is buried, and where I briefly felt the call of the priesthood as a fourteen-year-old acolyte.

Monday I finished Robert Hugh Benson’s memoir Confessions of a Convert. The two experiences are related.

Like me, Benson (1871–1914) was a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism. Unlike my father, Benson’s dad was the Archbishop of Canterbury. So while my conversion in 2008 rattled nary a teacup, Benson’s in 1903 was a scandal on the order of John Henry Newman’s defection in the 1840s. Formerly an Anglican priest himself, Benson was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904.

His book is a clear-headed, easy-to-follow account of his path to Rome. There are experiences in Benson’s memoir with which I identify deeply, others I never shared. Here are a few points of comparison:

Reading More, Writing Less

I have been reading so much lately that I’ve had little time to write. The evidence is in the column at left where my “Currently Reading” list is magically imported from the only social networking site I use much these days, Goodreads.

I really am reading six books at once, in different formats at different times of day for different sound reasons. That doesn’t make all six of them sound choices.

The Year of Magical Thinking, for example. Not a great choice. I am listening to the audio version of Joan Didion’s memoir for the same reason I am reading the ink-and-paper version of U. S. Grant’s. I am preparing to teach a fall adult ed course with Beacon Hill Seminars which I am calling “Memoirs: Reading Others, Writing Yours.” So before my students read excerpts from seven or eight good memoirs, I am reading (mostly re-reading) twenty or thirty.

My Favorite Memoirist? It Surprises Even Me

Preparing to teach a seven-week adult ed course in the fall semester on Memoirs: Reading Others, Writing Yours, I am now reading memoirs by the handful.

I have begun by going back to some of the memoirs I have loved most, including One Boy’s Boston by Samuel Eliot Morison, The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day, and About Alice by Calvin Trillin.

And I have made a surprising discovery.

There is one figure—a memoirist and much more—whom I find the most compelling all-time, hands down, and his identity surprises even me. For one thing, he was a general, and I was never in the military.

To learn his identity (sorry, it’s not Samuel Eliot Morison, the admiral in the picture), you will have to click here and read my latest post at the Memoirs Unlimited blog.

Because otherwise, how will you ever know—or read my other blog?

Dawson on Newman: Just the Thing to Give Me Courage

John Henry Newman, central figure in the Oxford Movement, is a compelling character, a brilliant Catholic convert in a British society that found such creatures horrid. But fully understanding Newman and Oxford amid the complexities of English church and government affairs in the 1830s and 1840s has been difficult for me, an American living 175 years too late.

To understand Oxford, you need to understand something about High Church and Low Church, not to mention Broad Church or the meaning of latitudinarian. You need to get around the fact that liberal and evangelical meant different things in nineteenth-century England than they do in twenty-first America. You need to have some understanding of the situation in both Ireland and Parliament in Newman’s day. In other words, it would be best to be a Brit conversant with your own history.

And then there’s this: Newman and his contemporaries wrote in a high, elegant manner that can make a lazy brain hurt. You have to bring your A game to reading him. At least I do.

Anyway, wasn’t Oxford an event of momentary interest, one that launched the future Cardinal Newman into his conversion while giving impetus to present-day Anglo-Catholicism, but also an event with little relevance to our religious lives today?

Not true. Christopher Dawson’s The Spirit of the Oxford Movement has changed the way I think about all of the above. For anyone desiring a better understanding of Newman and Oxford, this is a great place to start or, in my case, restart.

C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy: Dazzled by Brilliance

Like C. S. Lewis, I am a convert, and I have an affection for him because we have this precious identifier in common.

He was an English public school graduate, I the American equivalent, a preppie. Each of us was too smart for his own good, although Lewis’s smarts were to mine as diamond is to coal.

It doesn’t matter to me that he converted to “mere” Christianity and that I am a Catholic. I identify with many of his conversion experiences, including this one:

My conversion involved as yet no belief in a future life. . . . There are men, far better men than I, who have made immortality almost the central doctrine of their religion; but for my own part I have never seen how a preoccupation with that subject at the outset could fail to corrupt the whole thing. . . . God was to be obeyed because he was God.

I did not convert to make a bet like Pascal’s. I did not bargain on the afterlife. Catholic life was full enough just as it was and still is.

I identify too with the very moment Lewis crossed over, recalled in a famous passage:

Paddy Fermor’s Glimpse of God

It is always striking to read of a non-believer whose heart was moved unaccountably by a sudden experience of Christianity. It happened when Thoreau entered Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal. It happened to Henry Adams all his life, especially when writing about Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.*

It happened to postmodern hero/martyr David Foster Wallace, as well. As the biography by D. T. Max notes, Wallace twice flirted with Catholicism and twice backed off.

None of these writers could overcome his skepticism.

The greatest English travel writer of his generation, Patrick Leigh “Paddy” Fermor, decided to stop off at a Benedictine Abbey to get some writing done in the early 1950s—and it happened to him too. Fermor tells the story in A Time to Keep Silence, most recently reissued in 2007 with an introduction by religious historian Karen Armstrong.

Given the book as gift in 2009, I have only just read it.

Why Joan of Arc? Why Me?

I imagine that every Catholic has a favorite saint. The ongoing Crux “Saints Madness 2015” seems to prove it. That competition, modeled on the NCAA basketball tournament, has reached the finals, and it’s neck-and-neck, or halo-and-halo, between Sts. Peter and Francis.

My favorite saint is Joan of Arc who, incidentally, was bounced in the Round of 32 by St. Michael. How is that even fair? An archangel against a peasant girl? But a bigger question dogs me today: Why Joan of Arc? Why me? Why is she my favorite?

I have just finished Helen Castor’s excellent new book on Joan—which I ordered from Blackwell’s in England so that I could read it before it was issued in the USA. Over at Goodreads I gave the book 5 stars and wrote, “If you want a single, short, but comprehensive book on Joan of Arc, this is the gold standard.”

What struck me while reading was nothing that Castor did (more on that at Goodreads) but what I did. A slow reader, I bombed through 250 pages in two days. I couldn’t put it down. And I already know the story. It is the fifth or six book on Joan that I’ve read, not to mention the three movies I’ve seen.

What was that about? Why Joan of Arc? Why me?

History Proves It: God Sets Us Straight

Passover 30 AD was not exactly the best night of Peter’s life.

Set aside his boo-boo of lopping off the ear of the soldier in the Garden—quickly corrected by Jesus, who told Pete to put his sword away. Set aside, too, the three denials before the crowing of the cock.

Turn the clock back a few hours and you’ll see: The whole night was a cock-up where The Rock was concerned.

Here it was, Jesus’s last meal with his closest followers, they were all gathered in the Upper Room, Jesus was fixing to wash Peter’s feet, and Peter wouldn’t let  him.

Then when Jesus insisted that he must wash his feet or Peter would lose his “inheritance,” Peter demanded an all-over bath instead!

Earth to Peter! This is the Lord!

The Greatness of Patrick O'Brian

I first heard of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series from a yachtsman. He was a client of mine; I was helping him write his memoir; he kept glancing at the series of twenty historical novels in his private library (first editions, probably signed, of course) as though they were the holy of holies.

This made an impression but I am no yachtsman.

In fact, I am known in my family as Bert Dow, Deep-Water Man because of an unfortunate incident in the lagoon at Disneyworld, during which I abandoned ship while my two young children were still aboard. But I’ll leave that lying with my deeper, more shameful secrets.

A friend of mine with whom I used to take took long Saturday hikes along the North Shore was next to tell me about O’Brian’s series of twenty historical novels, which stretch to more than 6,500 pages in the Norton edition. Dick said that he was rationing the books so that he would not finish them much before he died.

Dick was sixty then. I don’t whether he has finished them yet or not, but he is not dead that I know of. Unless he died last night.

Still, I didn’t bite.

My Reading List

The close reader of this blog, taking the extra five seconds required to troll the outside columns and coming upon the list of “Books I’m Reading,” will note two odd intruders among the usual pile of Serious Catholic Tomes.

In particular, this list of “Books” that I am “Reading,” which is a “gadget” provided for bloggers by Goodreads, includes The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr and You Are Your Own Gym: A Bible of Bodyweight Exercises by Mark Lauren.

What gives?

One Boy’s Boston: A Great Little Memoir

And now for something completely different.

I am planning to teach an adult education course this fall. The working title of the course is “Memoir: Reading Others, Writing Yours.” The idea is for students to read excerpts from memoirs and then to begin making notes on their own lives in light of the readings.

It will be a low-pressure, not-for-credit course directed to older adults living in Boston who may have considered writing their memoirs but haven’t done so. It will draw on my experience of ghostwriting and publishing fifty memoirs for private clients over the past twenty-five years at Memoirs Unlimited.

The Formation of Christendom: Deeper into History

History was one of my Catholic convincers. In becoming a Catholic convert seven years ago, I knew that I was diving into two thousand years of tradition and wisdom, and I loved the feeling.

I was like a person who delves into his family’s genealogy, seeking a deeper connection with the ancestors. I was like a Little Leaguer who memorizes statistics about those enshrined in the Hall of Fame, hoping some day to write records of my own. I was like a scientist, too, who time-travels in company with a brotherhood of fellow searchers, hoping to further their journey.

I never had such a clear sense of connection with the past as a Congregationalist or Episcopalian in my well-churched youth. The Catholic Church gave me this connection.

So when a highly respected Catholic friend suggested that I read Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, I started right in. I began with Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, which I gave five stars at Goodreads. Now I’ve moved on to two books tracing the history of the Church since the first century. The first of these is The Formation of Christendom, about which I’ve already written briefly already. 

The purpose of this post is to summarize a few other key ideas I underlined in The Formation of Christendom.

Reading History, Muttering Wow

I have finished reading Christopher Dawson’s book The Formation of Christendom and am reviewing my notes on it for a longer post.

The first thing that strikes me is that I wrote the word WOW in the margin of my book four times. History that makes you say WOW is history worth reading.

Here are my four WOW moments reading Dawson:

“The Boys in the Boat”: Some Unanswered Questions

Leni Riefenstahl’s films “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” documenting the rise of Hitler, are still shown in film courses as early models of the craft. “Olympia” was a centerpiece of the Nazi PR effort known as the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The film, like the 11th Olympiad, was meant to show the world the greatness of Germany, its leaders, and its athletes.

Germany did win the medal count with 33 gold and 89 total in 1936, but some athletes from other countries notably disappointed Hitler and his Reich Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, who was also Riefenstahl’s boss. Most famous of these was the black American track star Jesse Owens, whose four gold medals may have suggested to some that Aryans were not necessarily the dominant race. In “Boys in the Boat” Daniel James Brown chronicles another American gold winner, the nine-man boat from the University of Washington.

Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity is Too Far Ahead of Me

Maybe I was too hard on Jennifer Moorcroft’s biography of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity. Over at Goodreads, I called it a hagiography. I almost never use that term.

It was the saints who brought me to the Catholic Church, and I speak reverently of saints’ lives, not of hagiography, a dismissive term that suggests author exaggeration and reader incredulity.

I guess Elizabeth Catez (1880–1906), who became the French Carmelite nun Elizabeth of the Trinity, is simply not a saint I relate too very easily. Her sanctity, in the face of excruciating end-of-life pain, completely unthinkable to me, comes off as too easy in Moorcroft’s telling.

Medieval Catholic History Through a Glass Darkly

Pilgrimage may involve traveling from point A to point B, but it is hardly one-dimensional.

In The Age of Pilgrimage, Jonathan Sumption demonstrates that from the time of the desert Fathers until the Reformation, a period spanning about twelve hundred years, the nature of pilgrimage changed “from private austerity to popular enthusiasm and thence to abstract ritual.”

In another summary statement, the author notes that “Pilgrimage, like almsgiving, had begun as an accessory to the moral teaching of the Church, and ended as an alternative.”

These conclusions—and the four hundred pages of closely researched detail leading up to them—are challenging for a person like myself who has walked the Camino de Santiago and is planning another pilgrimage on foot to the Oratory of St. Joseph in Montreal.

But as a spiritual advisor told me recently, the Catholic Church and its history are “messy,” and being a happy Catholic, as I am, means learning to live with the mess.

Skeptical About Miracles

Eric Metaxas’s new book Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life reminded me that miracles don’t interest me much.

Saints were what drew me to the Catholic Church, not the miracles attributed to them. I am in greater awe of the single-mindedness of Joan of Arc than of some sword she allegedly found beneath an altar. I am more impressed by Brother André Bessette’s devotion to his faith and work than I am by all the crutches that hang where he once healed.

I suspect that the present fascination with miracles, including books about little boys going to heaven and doctors having near-death experiences, points not to God but to the tepidness of our own religious conviction. I wonder if we aren’t like children fascinated by the glitter on a lady’s crown, not realizing that the lady is the queen and the queen has power. Do we tune into the Super Bowl for the half-time extravaganza, with no real interest in football?

I Agree with Pope Francis! Lord of the Word is a Must-Read

Writing at Crux yesterday, John Allen suggested that Pope Francis is driven by a “sense of urgency,” and Allen thinks he knows why. During his recent airborne press conference, the Pope advised listeners to read Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 novel Lord of the World, a dystopian vision of a near future in which the Catholic Church has been marginalized and a charismatic, secular world ruler is taking hold. 

We’re not talking Oprah’s Book Club here. When the Pope recommends a book, it’s striking news that Catholics might well heed.

Trying to read between the lines, Allen notes that Lord of the World displays a “keen sense that the world is reaching a turning point and there’s not much time left to set things right.” This, Allen writes, may explain why the Pope has such an accelerated travel schedule over the coming year: not that the Pope thinks his life may be coming to a close but that civilization itself may be nearing a “turning point.”

I read Lord of the World nearly four years ago when I saw that it was recommended by some of the smart folks of Communion and Liberation. At that time, I posted a review at Goodreads, which is still there. This is what I wrote: