For the first time in my life, I am re-reading books. Twenty years ago, I was sitting on a hotel balcony in Hawaii reading Timequake, a novel/essay by an elderly Kurt Vonnegut. I was an imprudent young man back then, excited by Vonnegut’s transgressiveness and willingness to write truly crazy things. I adored him. I wanted to drive to Boston and take his creative writing class in the community college where he taught. I think Timequake was one of the last books of his I hadn’t read yet. It’s a book about how, in the year 2001, the universe had an existential crisis and reverted to the year 1991. Once there, it recovered its confidence and resumed expanding again. Everyone was forced to relive those 10 years exactly as they happened the first time.

Funny enough, it was right around the year 2001 when I sat on that balcony like a crazy person reading a book instead of playing in the water at the beach or slamming back mai-tais or whatever normal people do when in a tropical paradise. If that plot had happened to me, I would’ve gone from 21 years old, a newlywed young man, back to the age of 11. When I was 21, I was finally getting my life together, emerging from years of depression and emerging into a mature period of happiness and personal growth. When I was 11, I was playing roller hockey with my friends in the tennis courts behind my house. In between was a decade fraught with anxiety. Like most of us, my teenage years were filled with highs and lows. If I could live through them again, I could discover Meloncollie and the Infinite Sadness again. I could read Vonnegut for the first time again. I could also lay on the couch numb to the world again and wondering what the point of existence is. I could make all sorts of horrible mistakes again. I wouldn’t mind being timequaked to Hawaii again but I would not want to be timequaked to 1991. Life goes on, as they say, and as I consider my present-day life I can only think, as Vonnegut would say, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

My philosophy professor in grad school said that, once every 10 years it’s a good idea to re-read the same book. This book should be something important to you, something against which you can measure the progress of your life. It will be a moral reckoning, an accounting of the passage of time and how well you’ve attempted to live in your particular corner of existence. You’re not the same person when you re-read a book, and it’s interesting to see how the text changes as you read it as a different person. For my professor, Dr. Hare, it was the Nichomachean Ethics. For me, it is Catch-22.

I re-read Catch-22 the other day. It’s brilliant. It’s funny and absurd and so, so dark. I always wondered if those books we were forced to read in high school English class were actually good. Some I’m not so sure about anymore. Catch-22, though, is way better the second time around. This time, I understood the T.S. Eliot joke. Is it because I’m a smarter, better reader now? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just that I’m different. Or, having lived this crazy life a few decades longer, I’m more appreciative.

My plan is to timequake my way back through all of Vonnegut’s work. I’m hoping the fiction holds up as well as the essays. I don’t always agree with the man, but he was a hell of a writer. After that, I’m wondering if I’ll have the stamina to tackle Infinite Jest again. I used to be able to stay up late and read hundreds of pages at a sitting. Now, I fall asleep to re-runs of Cheers. Perhaps Infinite Jest is a project for a younger, more energetic version of myself. Maybe I should content myself with simply re-reading his essay about the time he went on a cruise and lost his mind. If this ends up being the case and I can no longer read for sustained periods of time, it will make clear to me that youth has its blessings, too. All I know is that, in about 10 years, I hope to re-read Catch-22.

Simone Weil was a woman of many afflictions. She was born a Jew in pre-World War 2 Europe with chronically poor health, eventually dying young of tuberculosis in an English sanatorium. She also seems to have had persistent bouts of anxiety. Weil was philosophically trained, a sensitive thinker, and also an agnostic. She nevertheless – like so many others – had a bracing run-in with the Church while visiting the monastery at Solesmes while listening to the monks chant.

Here are excerpts from a letter written in 1942 to her friend Father Perrin about what she considered a life-altering mystical experience. It traces a winding path from chronic migraines to monks to the English metaphysical poets:

In 1938 I spent ten days at Solesmes, from Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday, following all the liturgical services. I was suffering from splitting headaches; each sound hurt me like a blow; by an extreme effort of concentration I was able to rise above this wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all.

There was a young English Catholic there from whom I gained my first idea of the supernatural power of the sacraments because of the truly angelic radiance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to communion. Chance — for I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence — made of him a messenger to me. For he told me of the existence of those English poets of the seventeenth century who are named metaphysical. In reading them later on, I discovered the poem of which I read you what is unfortunately a very inadequate translation. It is called “Love”. I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me…Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.

Here’s the poem in question. It’s one of Herbert’s most famous, deservedly so, and if I remember correctly comes from The Temple.

LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning 5

If I lack’d anything.

‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’

Love said, ‘You shall be he.’

‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,

I cannot look on Thee.’ 10

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

‘Who made the eyes but I?’

‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.’

‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’ 15

‘My dear, then I will serve.’

‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’

So I did sit and eat.

Herbert’s poem is a picture of the overwhelming force of love, one that deeply affected Weil and became for her a sacred mantra. She then moved from memorizing and reciting Herbert’s poem to memorizing the Greek text of the Our Father:

Until last September I had never once prayed in all my life, at least not in the literal sense of the word. I had never said any words to God, either out loud or mentally.

Last summer, doing Greek with T-, I went through the Our Father word for word in Greek. We promised each other to learn it by heart. I do not think he ever did so, but some weeks later, as I was turning over the pages of the Gospel, I said to myself that since I had promised to do this thing and it was good, I ought to do it.

I did it. The infinite sweetness of this Greek text so took hold of me that for several days I could not stop myself from saying it over all the time. A week afterward I began the vine harvest I recited the Our Father in Greek every day before work, and I repeated it very often in the vineyard. Since that time I have made a practice of saying it through once each morning with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention wanders or goes to sleep, in the minutest degree, I begin again until I have once succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention.

Sometimes it comes about that I say it again out of sheer pleasure, but I only do it if I really feel the impulse. The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition. At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity to the second or sometimes the third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing this silence. Sometimes, also, during this recitation or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person, but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me.

Grace has no boundaries and it breaks through where it will. What I find so interesting, though, is that in the life of Weil a mystical experience was wont to break out through persistent attention to beauty – the plainchant of the monks, the poetry of Herbert, the power of the prose in The Lord’s Prayer. To those who are seeking truth, beauty helps us see more deeply. This is the power of art.

Guest post by Casie Dodd.

In some ways, looking back at my rigidly Baptist and unequivocally Protestant background, it is no longer surprising that I was meant to be Catholic. However, it still took a long time for me to be okay with it.

After a long process of giving up an evangelical past and living in spiritual limbo for several years in my twenties, I’ve gradually made my way back to the Church. For a while, it had already seemed inevitable to me that if I did, it would be toward Catholicism: my favorite authors are either devout or lapsed Catholics; my husband is Catholic; what little religious language I’ve continued to use is saturated with a Catholic perspective. Sacramentality was the only word that helped me explain to myself those years of wandering because I never felt particularly lost, only needing to be found by new sources of inspiration.

Still, by the time we actively decided it was time to return to a Christian community, I was not prepared for the level of anxiety I would experience. My pregnancy could not explain the tears that flowed throughout the first few masses we attended. Those early months of getting up and going to church week after week tore me up in ways that I’m not sure I’d felt since the year that my grandmother, a Southern Baptist matriarch, was slowly dying and I could not tell her I did not want the faith she had wanted for me. Each mass became a practice of acknowledging that pain and trying to offer it up to anyone who might be willing to take it; it was still too difficult then for me to think of Christ again in explicit terms.

This was most evident during the Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday. A whole new experience to me, it took all my effort to walk toward the front and halfheartedly tap the Cross with my hand, keeping the other firmly on my belly. Something broke inside while the baby kicked. I began to wonder if I was really cut out for this, if I wasn’t permanently cracked in some way that would leave me isolated from the Church for the rest of my life.

Then my son was born. There’s nothing original in that, but it was the most profound spiritual revelation I’ve ever had. Here was life in its most vulnerable form, and I had helped bring it into the world. The early newborn weeks were a whole new lesson in grace and brokenness for which no one fully prepares (or can prepare) you. When we baptized my son at three weeks old, I felt more able to be part of something than I had in many years. I tried to reframe my own baptism as a nine-year-old, remembering how my grandmothers watched in pride, thrilled to welcome me into the family in a new way. That experience, like many parts of my fragmented religious past, became redeemed.

On a different level, redemption also came through Flannery O’Connor. As we began to get our bearings on new parent life and our son became a little more predictable, we started reading O’Connor’s short stories aloud together every day. Throughout my life, art and literature have spoken to my experience of God most deeply; they have helped make sense of a lot of pain and confusion as I’ve tried to navigate this shift in religious traditions. Reading O’Connor with my son in my arms made visceral the need for love, mercy, and mystery in a world that struggles to make those truths a priority. Encountering her characters in such apparently hopeless situations made real a new awareness of a longing for something beyond my narrow and insular life. As Christ showed up cloaked in people and nature, as He does here now, faith started to seem a little less foreign to me again.

I needed O’Connor’s stories to remind me that, as a mother and soon-to-be Catholic, I could still experience grace and wonder even if the Church had hurt me like the Bible salesman who stole that woman’s leg or that con artist in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” I needed to confront the kind of rage that my religious baggage left behind through horrifying endings like in “A View of the Woods” or “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” As has so often been true of my experience of God and Truth, I hope to keep reading my way toward the light.

Casie Dodd’s work has appeared in This Land and The Worcester Journal. She has lived on Elysian Fields in New Orleans and in a Chicago soup kitchen but claims Oklahoma as her native home. She has a lot to say about grandmothers and Charles Olson. She is currently based on the North Side of Chicago.

Guest post by LeighAnna Schesser.

Flannery O’Connor’s short stories are, with justice, frequently held up as an archetype of Catholic fiction: her narratives get down deep in the nastiness of the sin-dulled human spirit and record the violence that sweeps through it in the wake of the passing of the Holy Ghost. O’Connor’s work is often fiercely beloved by its fans, and as equally firmly refused by those who cannot bring themselves to appreciate her style. However, there is a far too little appreciated English writer who, though Anglican rather than Catholic, merits to be  mentioned in the same breath as O’Connor, perhaps particularly to those who cannot bring themselves to love O’Connor’s style: Elizabeth Goudge.

Where O’Connor is dark, Goudge is light; where O’Connor is rough and unsettling, Goudge is tender and restful. Yet these two styles which seem so disparate are not opposites, but companions, working for and achieving the same end: to truly see, to know, a human soul, and – somehow – make visible to the reader the invisible action of grace within it.

Goudge’s novels are works that cut deeply to the bone of what literature is. As Chesterton to put it, “Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or the things on the retina of the eye, or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclopedias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.” When you read a Goudge novel, you enter into a family, blood and otherwise, of four-dimensional people to whom you are given immediate, intimate inner access. The drama of how each “works out his own salvation with fear and trembling” is stunning in its power, accumulating gravity with every page, yet nearly imperceptible until the full weight of the unfolded narrative, like an immense winged bird, seemingly weightless in the air, flies home to roost in the reader.

The stories of these people – it is difficult to think of them as only fictional, as mere characters – are set like jewels within the glory of place, including gorgeous and grounding description of nature, and the homes they build within it. Their temptations, shortcomings, sins, and triumphs rise and fall, grow and gather, against the backdrop of family, home, and what it means to reach out and grasp at salvation. Goudge treats with great grace, immense wisdom, and gentle humor the foibles and misunderstandings of men and women, the travails of marriage, mother and fatherhood, aging, childhood, the reality of self-sacrifice, questions of duty, justice, and theodicy.

The joyful overflow of all things beautiful in a Goudge novel is not an erasure, ignoring, or covering-up of pain, ugliness, and suffering. On the contrary: beauty stands out all the more clearly because of the intense, often interior, suffering of her characters. In the height of this suffering – such as in the climax of The Heart of the Family, or almost any page in Green Dolphin Street – beauty itself becomes so bright and sharp, so much itself, that it is a kind of suffering too, piercing the heart like a sword. But more even than that: when this sword pierces, the wound it deals the soul is the means of its healing. Healing is, after all, another word for salvation.

“Authentic beauty,” said Pope Benedict XVI in a meeting with artists in November 2009, “unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond. If we acknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence, the Mystery of which we are part.”

In novels such as Green Dolphin Street, the Eliot trilogy (The Bird in the Tree, The Herb of Grace, The Heart of the Family), and The Scent of Water, among many others, Elizabeth Goudge shows what Pope Benedict’s articulation of beauty can look like in practice, and incredibly (to a surface view) it turns out to be another way of saying that it is only through suffering that we reach paradise. Beauty is a crucible all its own, familiar and yet utterly unlike any other kind of suffering.

Goudge deals with beauty directly, in the midst of its abundance, and Flannery O’Connor   with its lack, in the deep shadow of its privation. As unlikely as their pairing may seem at first glance – almost as unlikely as the relationship between the crucible of beauty and the scourge of evil – the juxtaposition of their works can teach us, as readers, writers, and Catholics, an enormous amount about literature, about grace, and especially those “conditions of the human spirit” to which the wounding beauty of the Divine Spirit may bring us.

LeighAnna Schesser is the author of Heartland (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016), a poetry chapbook that explores the convergence of landscape, identity, love, and faith. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Angelus, Dappled Things, Presence, and Peacock Journal. LeighAnna earned her B.A. at Benedictine College and M.F.A. at North Carolina State University. She lives in Kansas with her family. Find her online at https://www.acanticleforhomestead.com.

Guest post by Peter Moccia.

One of my greatest pleasures in life is reading.  Perhaps a close second (although it is ultimately not separate from the first) is discussing books with other people.  As such, when chatting with friends or even acquaintances for long enough, more often than not the topic of books comes up.  What have I read recently?  What have you read recently?  Although I’m a bibliophile, my most particular and intense love is for fiction, well-crafted narrative.  So I often share about a recent novel I’ve read and enjoyed.  As I get into my analysis, I’m often presented the question, “Wait, is this a real story?  Oh, it’s not.  Only a novel.  OK.  Well, I don’t have much time for novels.  I can only justify reading useful books.”

The emphasis or word choice might differ from person to person, but the implication is largely the same: reading works of fiction (i.e. fake stories) is at best a neutral filler for a life full of leisure and at worst a distraction from real life.  Novels are purely entertainment, and a serious person, and a serious Christian parent even more so, must limit these frivolities.  Unlike a self-help book, there’s no practical purpose of fiction.

A quick word about these friends.  They are well-meaning, hardworking, authentic Christian parents.  Their dedication to their faith and families are primary, and their attitude and actions selfless and often heroic.  Most have lots of children, lots of young children, and they have little time for any leisure.  They are understandably discerning in their use of time.

However, as used as I am to this eventual turn in the conversation, I’m nearly always disheartened.  My frustration is partly with my interlocutor ─ for disregarding the Catholic intellectual tradition on the topic, which runs entirely counter “Puritan” perspectives on art ─ but my frustration is also with my own self, for I have two very different, nearly opposite, avenues for response.  Since they are nearly contradictory arguments, each by itself feels somehow incomplete, false, or misleading ─ but how I can argue both at the same time?

Argument 1:  Yes, literature has no utilitarian purpose, like a self-help book, but that’s what places it in a higher category.  Art, like the human person, is an end in and of itself.  It needs no social or cultural justification of its usefulness.  (At this point, I’m assuming some level of distinction between good and bad stories, between art and something that may be just entertainment.  While defining these categories and distinctions is fraught with danger and linguistic subtleties, on a practical level it is easy to observe the difference between pornography as a form of narrative and a Terrence Malick film ─ between Fifty Shades of Grey and a Marilynne Robinson novel.  I have a few things to say on this subject, but later.)

Argument 2:  But reading fiction does have a practical purpose!  Throughout history, art has consistently questioned the status quo, drawing attention to injustices we find difficult to see in our own worlds, but whose reality is more recognizable in and through stories.  Art also opens for us the clearest window in the experiences of another human person, whether that person lived a thousand years ago or is still alive.  While humans are social animals, we are quite literally trapped in our own selves, unable to see the world but through our own eyes and mind.  Art, and in particular narrative art, gives a window into another’s lived experience, a snapshot not just of a different opinion on a political or cultural subject, but a window into the very experiences that led to these different opinions.  In short, art provides us with empathy.  Furthermore, art provides solace in our grief, refinement in our joy, peace in our confusion, and wisdom in our ignorance.  Art can change us.

When faced with the statement that a serious Christian doesn’t have time for a novel, I’ve flip-flopped over the years, early in my adult life focusing on the usefulness of art, then the uselessness ─ then back again to art’s engagement in the real work. In real conversations, though, I usually didn’t pursue either argument.  Instead, I fumed on the inside, wishing we were all better read in the Catholic intellectual tradition.  But if I’m being perfectly honest, I usually didn’t respond in any extended fashion simply because I couldn’t balance the two opposing tensions in the two separate argument.

It was through my reading of Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basic of Culture that I found a working model through which to synthesize my two opposing responses.  For Pieper, our contemporary focus on social and cultural productivity and utility is, interestingly, a win for Marxism, or a Marxist view of the world.  In the Marxist perspective, the value of a thing is based on its utility.  Time is well spent when there is a practical, even measurable output.  How do we use our free time?  Let us make sure it passes the utilitarian test: Is the output worth the time put in?  Even if we consider things with no practical output, like a “useless” vacation, we’re usually justifying it by its long-term use: Spending seven days not thinking about work at all will make us better workers when we return from vacation.

But Pieper shows us how this is very different from the ancient wisdom of the Greek and Medieval thinkers.  They saw leisure as the heart and mark of a civilization.  Use of time for reflection (not mindless reflection, but true philosophical pursuits) were the highest goods of a culture.  Now, Pieper recognizes that these pursuits do have some practical results but that they shouldn’t be justified by these ends.  Leisure is an end in itself and should not be justified by some utilitarian model, which ultimately makes it a means to an end.

Let’s look at prayer in more detail.  Does prayer have practical results?  Yes.  Often prayer makes us more at peace; it often makes us better persons.  But do we pray because of these results?  Pieper says, emphatically, no.  We pray because we should pray.  We pray because it is our duty to pray.  We pray because we become more of who we are through our prayer.  Does life become “easier” through our prayer?  Maybe sometimes, in the sense that we might find it easier after prayer to accept God’s will in our lives instead of constantly complaining about and fighting the whirlwind of our circumstances.  But should we pray because it might make life easier?  No.  In fact, prayer has good effects because it is a good in and of itself ─ not the other way around (as in “it is good because it has good effects”).

In short, prayer is an end in and of itself, and it shouldn’t be judged according to a utilitarian model.  This doesn’t relegate prayer to a frivolous activity, and it doesn’t even mean that prayer doesn’t have practical outcomes; it simply means that the outcomes are an effect of the goodness of prayer, not the goodness of prayer an effect of its good outcomes.

Art, in its creation and consumption, is an end in and of itself.  Art is one of the central ways man participates in the ever-present and continuous creative act of God.  Art instigates and develops the communion between individuals that is our truest reality but is often overshadowed by our egoism and fallen nature.  Art is our most sublime expression of what man is, who God is, what human relationships means ─ what beauty is.  Art does not need to have a practical outcome to give us a reason for partaking in it, for art is an end in and of itself.

But this doesn’t mean that art doesn’t have good practical results.  I like to say that every good book offers us the possibility of making us better people.  Many a time have I been struck by the beauty of a book ─ beauty sometimes in what the book depicts, and sometimes beauty simply in a book’s language or structure ─ and my mind has been raised to contemplate the beauty of the world, and God.  Many times I have honed the tools of ethical analysis through an evaluation of a novel’s moral dilemma ─ tools ultimately used to better reflect upon and judge myself, as I, like most of us, don’t see my own faults too well directly.  Other times, I have found myself better understanding a person or group of people better because of my encounter with a person in a book.  Too often I have been cut to the core by seeing my own weaknesses so thoroughly portrayed in other characters, mentally cringing as I force myself to read on.  Often I have been emotionally and psychologically awed by the heroism of a character, or a single heroic act of an unheroic character; and this has given me models against which to define and seek to change myself.

But I need not prove these results in order to justify my reading of novels.  These things are true ─ or can be true ─ only because art is a good in and of itself already.  To return to the original response by my friend, I might venture to say that the highest human activities are those which make us more ourselves ─ those that help us discover a little bit more who we are, how we are loved by God, and how to better love others with whom with have an indissoluble bond.  By no means an exhaustive list, I might begin a sketch of these inherently good and human activities with prayer, friendship, marriage, art, and philosophical pursuit.  Asking the question, “What utility does the reading of this novel provide me today?” is like asking, “So what utility does such-and-such friendship provide me?  I’d like to spend time with this person tonight, but can I justify this time spent by a measurable outcome?”

What I am not saying is that we should spend all our free time reading novels.  But we also shouldn’t spend all our free time praying either.  We have practical duties, obligations given to us by God and our vocations; and these must be attended to with our full selves.  But just as we must “carve out time” in our busy lives to spend enough moments on our knees in prayer, so much we find time to partake in other of the most human activities, like spending time with friends, reading a good book, and training our mind to understand theological truths.

At this point, someone may pose the question, But are all novels art?  One way of approaching this topic is to pose a related question, Are all novels artful?  This seems an easier question: no, not all novels are artful.  But I’d like to say a little more on the topic.  I think we intuitively understand the difference between Dante, Agatha Christie, and a poorly crafted romance novel.  I don’t intend to spell out this difference.  We don’t need to have an unassailable definition of each category in order to see the differences and act accordingly.  Instead, I’ll point quickly to two texts that speak to or assume important ideas on the topic.  I’ll begin first, again, with Pieper’s Leisure.

Pieper claims that philosophical pursuit is an attempt to see reality as it is; it isn’t an active task, but one of reception.  Analogously, good art, good narrative, is that which allows us to see the reality of the world around us better.  Art often works this way by making readers more attune to a sacramental vision of reality, which stands in direct opposition to the materialistic, militant scientism that accompanies most other “descriptions” of reality.  Narratives often let us see the connections between actions, between characters, between ideas, connections that are often difficult to see in real life.  Second, Pieper links leisure with festival and joy.  Analogously, good art, good narrative, expands our capacity for joy.  This doesn’t denigrate sad stories, but rather judges them against the ultimate criterion of joy.  Reading Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night poignantly and painfully makes me more aware of the joy of my own life as well as the dangers of ignoring this facet of human dignity.

Second, I suggest C.S. Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism, an extended essay in which he proposes that we judge a book not by the book itself (its content or its style) but rather by the type of reading it allows for or promotes.  So if a novel affords us the possibility to see the world anew or increases our capacity for joy, then it is a good book.  In this way, we need not turn our noses down on literature we might consider second-rate but which others gain much from.

I’ll end by considering a central “function” of art, particularly narrative art, that is close to my own heart.  A novel, through the evolution of its narrative voice and perspective, opens up the possibility of revealing to its readers the emotional and spiritual ─ I may go as far as saying transcendent ─ connections between people.  Just as God does not exist in isolation, through the eternal love between the Persons of the Trinity, so do we exist, always, in relationship with others.  Whether through sin or our contemporary culture’s focus on hyper-individualism, this relational aspect of the human person is often muddied.  A novel can be an antidote to this crushing sense of alienation in two ways.

First, as we read, we gain access to another human’s consciousness: to their fears, motivations, psychology, conscience, and memories.  Novels can make us understand other human persons in ways that hardly anything else in this world can ─ and this can happen, ironically, in complete isolation!  We can be curled up, alone, in our favorite corner of our favorite couch, the rest of the house asleep, and we can begin to see, through the perspective of the narrative voice and empathy, the sacramental ties that connect all of us.

Second, when we read good books, we want to talk with other people about these books!  I’ve suggested books to people I wasn’t entirely sure they would like, simply so I had someone to talk to about them.  In fact, I think I can safely say that the two most common thoughts I have after finishing a particularly powerful book is, first, when will I read this again, and second, with whom can I talk about this book?  There is something inherent about the nature of stories that, even in the case of the most private of storytelling, the novel, we feel compelled to reach out to other people.  Perhaps it is part of the wonder of the story that, in highlighting the connections between people with its sacramental narrative, we are drawn out of ourselves and into the relationships that remind us that we exist not in isolation but in continual relationship to the other.

Peter is a high school English teacher and adjunct professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He spends his time with his wife and three children, reading and writing, and browsing online for new recipes.

After the Great War, writers began grappling with the reality of a Europe that had been torn to pieces, leaving a gaping, shell-shocked hole in the veneer that had for centuries been stretched over the bones of what turned out to be a rotting structure. The dream of Christendom was dead – it had probably died long before, betrayed by the Reformation – but the Great War was the final, inescapable death rattle. Virginia Woolf responded with To the Lighthouse. T.S. Eliot with The Wasteland. Ford Madox Ford declared that we are at Parade’s End.

These novels all strike a new, sinister tone that perhaps had not been so noticeably present in English literature prior. The weariness of the authors bleeds into the work, as all three of the examples I mention experiment with form and narration. Parade’s End, which I recently read, is a series of four novels, each one an amazingly labyrinthine and convoluted examination of varied human motivations for why we do the things we do. Christopher Tietjens, the protagonist, is the incarnation of noblesse oblige, trapped in a loveless marriage but unwilling to divorce his Catholic wife and dishonor her. He is the last Tory, a dying breed, the last man of honor in England. He is unwilling to compromise on his principles, a fact which eventually sees him lose his mind in the trenches and give his ancestral estate away to his wife and her son who may-or-may-not-be his own. Tietjens is misunderstood, hated for his generosity, taken advantage of by all, used, and abused. The War and its anti-cultural progeny destroys men like him.

I cannot help but notice a dramatic resemblance to one of the other great post-war novels, albeit one that came a bit later, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour. We know that Waugh read and admired Ford. He is reported to have told a friend, “I find Ford M. Ford’s war books take my mind off my distresses. Very good and puzzling.” This was in the early 1950s, Parade’s End was published thirty years prior in the 1920s.

There are a number of intriguing connections. Both are black comedies about men whose marriages are doomed but whose honor will not allow them to end it. Both authors fought in a war as older men. Both were converts to Catholicism. In Parade’s End, Christopher Tietjens has a weak-willed friend named McMaster who writes a book about Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was the subject of Waugh’s first book, written in 1928. In the end, neither book strikes a redemptive note. For Waugh, the world is inherited by the Hoopers, grasping, unimaginative men. For Ford, the ancient tree at the Tietjen’s estate is cut down and the estate rented by crass Americans.

Did Ford influence Waugh? It seems so, and I’m sure there are more deeply researched scholarly articles out there that might make the case with absolute certainty. All I know is that textually, the two are so closely related in theme that I cannot help but think that Waugh was at least unconsciously influenced by the work of Ford Madox Ford.

Jean Paul Lemieux, The Ursuline Nuns, 1951

If it’s true, as the philosophers say, that eternity is the experience of all time at once, then surely writing about history is one way to practice for heaven. I’ve seemingly lived a good chunk of my recent life in the eighteenth century, and I can now expound upon everything from the process of producing indigo dye to the sanitation system (or lack thereof) at Versailles. This week, I’ve had the fun of researching life among the cloistered teaching orders of religious sisters in revolutionary France. The book I’m reading is A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime by Elizabeth Rapley.* This kind of research is its own special sort of entrée into eternity because the women in this book are my sisters in Christ. I might get to meet them someday, outside of this time. And that’s an exciting prospect because many of them were completely badass.

What’s not exciting to read about is the Church in eighteenth century France, either before or after the revolution. Before, you find an absolute muddle of a Church that answers to both the pope and the king, a political minefield of power-hungry clerics and money-grabbing statesmen who are frequently engaged in non-violent but very real wars against each other, with little or no regard for either the public welfare or the spiritual health of the kingdom. It’s enough to make ordinary people want to grab their muskets and revolt against them both…

After the 1789 revolution, however, it’s fair to say that Hell broke loose. Even before The Terror imprisoned and massacred thousands of priests and nuns, the government seized all Church property. Then, the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy required all clergy to swear an oath of allegiance to the government, thereby denying all papal authority. But of course, not everyone did:

On 9 April 1791, the town [of Saint-Sever] prepared to receive its new constitutional bishop, Jean-Pierre Saurine, with full honours. At four in the afternoon, the cannon sounded and the bells rang out as planned—all except those of the Ursuline convent. Immediately several armed men went to the convent and demanded that the bells be rung. When the nuns replied that they could not do so in good conscience, the soldiers began to chop down the door. Thereupon Reverend Mother capitulated—after a fashion: “We are not going to ring them, but since you want it done, come in and ring them yourselves.” By this time the troop had swollen in numbers, and the community waited anxiously as the men tramped through the building and rang the bell. They left peaceably enough, but war had been joined, and the nuns knew it.

Next morning the new bishop—“the intruder,” as the nuns persisted in calling him—departed, leaving orders for the convent to conform to the new laws. Several hours later, the bishop’s delegate, accompanied by the mayor, the syndic, another notable, and an “ex-Capuchin” arrived at the grille. The syndic read out an official order installing the ex-Capuchin as the monastery’s director and forbidding the nuns to hear Mass from anyone else. Then the delegate began to speak with charm and benevolence, only to be cut short by the Reverend Mother: “Permit me to speak from my heart and that of my community. We will not recognize any bishop other than the one to whom we have vowed obedience. We cannot accept Mr. Saurine; we will not obey any order from him, and we will never communicate with any priest sent by him. These are the sentiments of the Ursulines of Saint-Sever. They cannot be false to the promises they made at the foot of the altar on the day of their profession; to be faithful to those promises, they will bear every thing and joyfully suffer even death itself.” The delegate asked if he could have this in writing. The nuns assented, the whole community signing the statement.

Those nuns held firm, refusing even to take possession of letters sent to them by would-be Bishop Saurine. They endured months without a priest or access to the sacraments, being forced out of their own church before, surprisingly, winning it back in 1791 when “local authorities were forced to acknowledge the law passed by the National Assembly that ‘freedom of worship is implicit in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.’” For the moment, the Ursulines had won.

Also in 1790, an inquest took place in which all nuns were offered the opportunity (in the name of liberté) to renounce their vows and assume a secular life. The number who chose to accept was “infinitely small.” Rapley does not cite a national total, but in the cases she does cite, the average is a fraction of one percent.

The Catholic Church of late eighteenth century France was in many ways a diseased political swamp, which then became a government-sponsored anti-Church. All but four bishops refused the oath of allegiance, but some fifty-five percent of priests swore their faith to Mammon. Certainly, some nuns did, too. But it is always in the greatest trials that heroes are born, and this was an age of martyrs. Many heroes remained hidden away in French monasteries, their names and deeds often lost to history. But their quiet, steadfast adherence to the Truth in Jesus Christ will be written large in heaven.

The official’s interrogation of the old lady, an ex-Ursuline, who had been discovered running a small clandestine school, occurred in the Year V.** Here is a part of the interview as it survived in local tradition: (Q) “What doctrine are you teaching your pupils?” (A) “The faith of our fathers.” (Q) “And if our fathers were mad, would we have to follow them?” (A) “Citizen, I knew your father; he was a good Catholic and a man of sense and character. He would not have spoken to me as you are doing.” The official’s reply is not recorded. He did not have spiritual descendants to commemorate his words and deeds. The old nun did.

*This book is out of print, but several used copies are available online. I’m waiting for my second copy to arrive because the first was missing twenty pages!

**Year V refers to the French Republican Calendar, which makes me roll my eyes every time I see it. Year V began on September 22, 1796. The woman in this story is an “ex-Ursuline” because by this time, all monasteries had been forcibly closed.