My Father’s World

My father, David Frelinghuysen Bull, would be 92 this weekend. Yesterday was the anniversary of his birth on June 2, 1925; and if Dad were living, Katie and I would be driving this morning to visit him in Vermont, at the country home he shared with Mom. I would be looking forward to an afternoon of golf with Dad and probably a good long talk, before and after.

My father was a soldier, if not a hero, and war blended with religion in his appreciation of the world. So I treasure a pair of early memories of Dad: weekend visits to Fort Snelling in St. Paul, where he was called to reserve duty, slept in barracks, and marched on parade; and looking up at him every Sunday from a pew, watching his lips proudly voice the hymns, trying to blend my squeaky tenor with his earnest amateur baritone.

When I read more than fifty years later the childhood memories of St. Thérèse of Lisieux attending Mass beside her father, I smiled. “I looked more frequently at Papa than at the preacher,” Therese wrote, “for his handsome face said so much to me.”

Coach Grant, Meet General Belichick

Re-reading William McFeely’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant, my favorite figure from American history, I was struck this afternoon by Grant’s similarity to another great general: New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.

Admit it, the likeness is not half bad: Shave Grant’s beard, remove the headset, and dress Hoodie in a suit and bowtie, and they might be brothers. Both look out on the world with a dour, can’t-be-bothered stare. Neither suffered fools gladly.

What made the connection in my mind was Grant’s comment after receiving Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. He returned to his headquarters at City Point, Virginia, to find Admiral Porter’s flotilla firing salutes in his honor. Grant was not amused, as McFeely relates:

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.

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?

Seven Years with Joseph

I have spent seven years with St. Joseph, who first spoke to me seven years ago today at morning mass in my hometown. Easter Vigil was three days away, and as a convert-in-waiting I was planning to take Thomas as my confirmation name. As in Thomas More, father, writer, statesman, martyr, and hero of my all-time favorite film, “A Man for All Seasons.”

But on Wednesday morning, March 19, 2008, I went to mass and found—I didn’t anticipate this—that the Church was celebrating the Solemnity of St. Joseph. Before that mass was over I had decided that I would take the name Joseph, instead of Thomas.

The celebrant, whose name was David, may have influenced this decision. Or maybe the Holy Spirit did. In any case, I realized that Joseph was right-sized for me, that Thomas might be aiming a wee bit high.

Instead of great man, I went for good father.

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.

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?

Catechism: Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, OCD, Meets the Saw Doctors

I love the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) for some of the reasons I love Pandora, the internet music-streaming service. You just never know who you’re going to hear.

The Catechism is a direct experience of the communion of the saints: all those voices, all that heavenly music. Tune into a chapter on any subject and you may hear St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, or a chorus sung by the Second Vatican Council.

Likewise Pandora. I enjoy what you might call Celtic folk rock: traditional tunes from Ireland and Scotland played with electric instruments, often with a helping of punk. If you start a Pandora station with the Irish band The Saw Doctors, as I have done, you’ll end up hearing songs not only by other Irish bands like The Pogues but also from Scotland (Runrig), Brittany (Tri Yann), Newfoundland (Great Big Sea), and even the USA (Flogging Molly and Boston’s own Dropkick Murphys). Except for the Dropkicks, I didn’t know any of these bands before starting the station.

Just as I didn’t know Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity until I reopened the CCC this afternoon. A French Carmelite nun, Blessed Elizabeth was a sort of Little Flower Junior, who died at the age of twenty-six in 1906, nine years after Thérèse of Lisieux.

Here’s how I met Blessed Elizabeth:

An Open Letter to St. André Bessette

Dear Brother André,

I salute you across time, and from earth to heaven. I greet you on your feast day. You died on this date in 1937, fourteen years before I was born, and you were canonized in 2010, when I was nearing sixty and two years a Catholic.

Chances are I will not be canonized.

But we are separated by more than years and dimensions and holiness. Your life, which began in 1845 in the tiny Quebec village of Mont-St.-Grégoire, is almost unimaginable to me. Let me count the ways.

Word for the Day: Saints

“Let what you heard from the beginning remain in you,” writes John in today’s reading. The word I heard from the beginning of my pilgrim walk in the Catholic Church was saints. 

People are surprised by this. I did not hear the voice of God. I did not hear the call of Christ. I was not attracted by the Holy Eucharist or the sacrament of confession.

I heard about the saints. I was moved by the witness of certain men and women who had lived by the teachings of the Catholic Church since the time of Jesus of Nazareth. I was impressed by their example. Eventually, when another system of thought disintegrated within me, I leapt to join the saints. Thus the phrase in the creed that moves me most is the communion of saints. 

Joining the saints was a leap. I didn’t know much about the Church when I entered RCIA and started my six-month basic training in Catholicism. I only knew that I had always wanted God in my life, that the path I had been following led me nowhere, and that these holy folks seemed to understand where to walk. It was as simple as that.

I think of this today, as the New Year 2015 opens before me with its gift of possibility, because my daily mass reader reminds me that today we honor Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen. Who, you say? That’s what I said too. Never heard of them.

The Challenge of Gnosticism

I was speaking with a priest friend recently, explaining to him why I had followed the Gurdjieff system of ideas for many years, then left it for the Catholic Church.

This is the core purpose of the memoir I am writing—not to expose a predator (Gulliver’s dead) or to tell my life (who cares?) but to explain why a relatively well educated person of my generation chose to enter the Catholic Church after a Protestant church-going childhood and a long midlife of alternative spiritual practice.

I think this is a story that might speak to some people.

To my priest friend I said that I thought the Gurdjieff Work was “gnostic.” The Work calls itself “esoteric Christianity,” claiming an insider’s knowledge that ordinary church-going Christians can’t attain. Turning to the dictionary this morning, I find that my use of the word gnostic was apt in this context. It means “of or relating to knowledge, especially esoteric mystical knowledge.”

The priest said, “If I understand the system you are describing, it presumes that Jesus Christ did not leave us everything we need for our salvation.”

Word for the Day: John

Today, the Catholic Church honors St. John, son of Zebedee, brother of James (Santiago), a fisherman who followed Christ. John was present at some of the most important moments of Jesus’s life, passion, and resurrection, and like another of my literary heroes, Norman Maclean, John wrote two great books late in life: his Gospel and the Book of Revelation. John gives hope to the unpublished sexagenarian Christian writer.

But that’s not what prompts me to write about John today. Instead, I want to share a brief story from my early years with Gulliver the Guru, a story not included in the excerpts posted above. This story demonstrates two widely divergent truths about Gulliver, which I hope to make clear by the time I’m “done” with my book, if I ever am. These paired truths are, in fact, the big wow of my life.

First truth: Gulliver was a manipulative messiah. (Wait for the story.)

Second truth: In spite of the first truth, and in spite of himself, Gulliver helped lead me to the Catholic Church.

Another way of saying the second truth is that the way, truth, and life offered by Christ in the Catholic Church can be so compelling as to overwhelm any other “spiritual” influences in one’s life. For me to overcome Gulliver was to overcome much. But I do believe I had help. As does anyone who searches sincerely. Knock and—

The story, a short one, comes from my first trip to Europe with Gulliver:

Ten Things I Didn’t Know About Joseph

The bio of St. Joseph detailed in the Gospels is slender, as I wrote yesterday. There are, give or take, seventeen facts known about the foster father of Jesus and the husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary. These facts you probably know, most anyway.

So to fill out 96 pages on St. Joseph, as French-Canadian theologian Jacques Gauthier does in St. Joseph: Man of Faith, a writer has to focus on the cult of the saint—the traditions and devotions that have arisen around the man in two thousand years of Catholic history.

Protestants of the sola scriptura school can scoff at these, but I find them compelling. They are effectively the result of meditations on the quiet man who stood by and protected the child Jesus and his Mother—meditations by the community of saints. These seem worth heeding, at least to me.

So what did Gauthier’s book teach me about the cult of St. Joseph? Here are ten notable items:

Seveteen Things We Know About Joseph

The day is approaching once again for St. Joseph to grab his staff and take up a post by the manger while Mary gives birth to the baby Jesus.

Thinking this morning about my own favorite saint, I wondered what we really know about him from Scripture.

Many books have been written about Joseph, the patron saint of the Universal Church. Shrines have been erected in his honor. Devotions, litanies, and novenas have been developed over centuries of Catholic worship.

But what documented facts do we have about him? I counted seventeen facts in Scripture, all of them from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

We Three Kings: A Sacerdotal Selfie

My wife and I attended a small dinner party of church friends last night. Three of the guests—the most honored guests—were priests who formerly served in our parish.

I gather that the photo above is a sacerdotal selfie, taken by Fr. Kwang Lee, featuring (l to r) the priestly photographer, Fr. David Barnes, and Fr. Ixon Chateau.

Our former pastor and my first, Father Barnes is now the Catholic chaplain at Boston University. He posted about the event in his wonderful blog, “A Shepherd’s Post.”

You can read his words here.

Joseph’s Third Day

St. Joseph is honored by two official Catholic feast days, March 19 and May 1. That’s twice what most saints get, though still a fortnight or so short of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

St. Joseph’s first day, March 19, is his official feast, observed traditionally in the Roman Catholic Church for eleven hundred years and officially for nearly 450 years. In 1570, Pope St. Pius V made it standard for all churches celebrating the Roman Rite. It was on this day in 2008, four days before my confirmation as a Catholic, that, hearing the day’s liturgy, I decided to take the name Joseph when I was received into the Church.

From 1870 until 1955, the Church celebrated a feast honoring St. Joseph as Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Patron of the Universal Church, also known as the Solemnity of St. Joseph. In 1955, that observance ended and a new one replaced it: the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker. May 1 (May Day) was chosen because it was International Labor Day. This is St. Joseph’s second day. I have chosen it for the start of my pilgrimage to the Oratory of St. Joseph in Montreal.

Today’s Gospel chronicles St. Joseph’s big moment in salvation history. Thus it marks a sort of third day for the patron saint of the Universal Church. Joseph is also the patron of fathers, carpenters, social justice, and the dying.

Word for the Day: Mary

Today the Church celebrates the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is to say that, as it does so often, the Church celebrates Mary.

Reflecting on the Gospel readings this morning, I realized how central “Mary” has been to my life.

• Her apparition at Lourdes as the Immaculate Conception in 1858 led to an important experience for me in 1972, as I wrote in the memoir excerpt posted yesterday
• My daughter, whose name is a variant of Mary, invited me to walk the Camino de Santiago with her forty years later in 2012, a definite turning point in my spiritual life.
• One of my sisters, another Mary, has been instrumental more recently in helping me see certain things about myself, for which I sincerely thank and honor her.

I salute Mary in these and other guises.

The first Mary in my life may have been the most important. Long before I myself became a Catholic, my mother’s mother, named Mary, did so. I have decided to post an excerpt about her today in her honor and of course in Mary’s.

Now a grandparent myself, I recognize that “Ammie,” among all my parents’ parents, may have done more for me—unnoticed, uncelebrated, not always appreciated—than anyone in my young life. Every time I play with my own granddaughter, she inspires me.

This is her story in brief.

Word for the Day: Kin

“I will praise you, Lord, among the nations; I will tell of your name to my kin.”

Today’s antiphon contains a disturbing juxtaposition. On the day when the Church honors St. Francis Xavier (pictured) who praised the Lord “among the nations,” we vow to tell of the Lord’s name “to our kin.”

Which feat of evangelization is more difficult?

1) Saying eternal farewell to everyone and everything you know, including your best pal Ignatius, and hopping a rickety wind-driven vessel for a port halfway around the globe, where no one speaks your language or knows your God, and evangelizing them? Francis Xavier (1506–1552) did that. For this feat of faith, the Church honors him as patron of all foreign missions.

Or—

2) Talking about faith with your family, your “kin”?

Six years a convert now, I have lectored before hundreds of strangers and (more difficult) I have taught religious education to a handful of fourth-graders who knew me only as Mr. Bull.

I have walked five hundred miles in Spain on the Camino de Santiago, and talked along the way with people from twenty nations about the religious reasons for my pilgrimage.

I have blogged about my faith and (according to Blogger stats) been read, or at least eyeballed, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as the Americas.

But—

In a large extended family largely unconvinced about the Catholic faith, how good a job have I done “telling of His name to my kin?”

The antiphon, stated in future tense, gives me hope. There is still time.

I will—

H. P. Lovecraft, Really?

As I continue to gnash my teeth over Stephen King’s latest “worldwide best-seller,” Revival, I come across a review of The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. Howard Phillips Lovecraft (to his parents) grew up to become what King calls “The twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”

Although grew up may not be the right term. Reviewer Stefan Kanfer writes (and I excerpt):

“According to Leslie Klinger, editor of the elephantine New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (weighing in at five pounds), Howard the boy never developed into Howard the man. . . . 

Howard Phillips Lovecraft 
was the one who opened the crypt.

“Raised by his grandparents, Howard became a brilliant but sickly child who lived almost entirely in his head. As an adolescent he rejected religions of any kind, studied astronomy and chemistry on his own, and slowly worked out the mythologies of alien and malevolent spirits that were to characterize his oeuvre.

Some Ink for Saint Cecilia

Good for The Writer’s Almanac for leading off today’s feed with St. Cecilia!

The patron saint of musicians is featured in the stained-glass windows behind the organ loft in our church along with two other musical notables.

The other two are: King David, the psalmist, and Pope Gregory, from whom we get Gregorian chant.

The pieces in TWA are not necessarily Catholic or even religious, but they’re usually well researched. Like this snippet about St. C:

“It wasn't really until the 1400s that people began to celebrate her widely as the patron saint of music. Then, in the 1500s, people in Normandy held a large musical festival to honor her, and the trend made its way to England in the next century. Henry Purcell composed celebratory odes to honor her, and the painter Raphael created a piece called ‘The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia.’ Chaucer wrote about her in the Second Nonnes Tale, and Handel composed a score for a famous ode to her that John Dryden had written.”