Memoirs by Louis Bouyer

Quite some time ago, I was reading something somewhere, and the writer said he (I am almost sure it was a man.) was reading Louis Bouyer's Memoirs, and highly recommended the book. For some reason, I think the somebody might have been Scott Hahn. So, as so frequently happens, I found it at a book sale, and brought it home to gather dust on my shelves.

Fr. Bouyer was born in Paris in 1913. His description of the people and places of his childhood is very charming in a very French sort of way. Although his young life took place during World War I, the war did not affect him very much at all. The areas where the Bouyers lived were safe, and although there were air raids, young Louis was not afraid. He was more amused by the air raids with their search lights and the boom boom of Big Bertha, although he was aware of his mother's fears.

The family moved more than once, but wherever they went, there were always gardens, and it was gardens that Louis loved, and described in his memoirs. He also loved to visit the shop of his uncle, who was also his godfather.

Even after years of visiting this pleasant shambles, I would not be able to recount everything to be found there, and still less what might not be unearthed. Dry goods, knick-knacks, stationery goods, perfume, hardware, newspapers (especially the most popular illustrated ones), all in an inextricable jumble, even for my aunt. But, in an emergency, all my uncle had to do in order to go straight to the desired object to satisfy the request of an imaginative client was to adjust his pince-nez with its black cord.

 The joyful childhood was brought to a sudden end with the unexpected death of Louis' mother in 1924 when he was 11. He was overwhelmed with grief, and when after a year or so, his father remarried in order to provide a new mother for him, it only made matters worse.

Increasingly absorbed in my reading and [writing] . . . I would soon arrive, under these conditions, at a veritable obsession that could well have turned into dementia praecox. I in fact came to doubt that there could be other consciousnesses than my own, that the idea of God or of other beings in the world was anything more than a projection of my own thinking.

 On the recommendation of a psychiatrist, he was sent to recuperate in Sancerre in the Loire Valley, and the peace and beauty of the place brought him healing. He began to receive religious instruction from a local pastor who introduced him to the Fathers of the Church. He spent many hours reading in the library of the home where he was staying with friends. There, he found the impetus for the rest of his life.

I believe that it was in Adolphe Monod that I found for the first time so clearly expressed the idea that God is love and that this love had its manifestation par excellence in the Cross of Christ: there I saw in all clarity what the heart of Christianity is . . .

I must also note that I was reading at that time, with personal satisfaction, a very subtle essay by Pastor Henri Monnier . . . on the redemption, which convinced me that the Cross of Christ saves us as a supreme act of solidarity with us. That presupposes, obviously, as he did not fail to point out, that it saved us, not by exempting us from suffering, but by making us capable of a suffering that is fruitful. 

 It was the next year at Sancerre that he discovered John Henry Newman. He read Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and some other works. This began a lifetime interest in Newman which culminated in his writing a biography of the Cardinal.

At some point, Bouyer entered the Protestant Theological Seminary in Paris. There are very few clues in the text as to exact dates, but he must have been there roughly between the ages of 14 to 17. While he was young, his family had attended whatever Protestant church was close to their homes in Paris, but he entered the seminary, which educated both Reformed and Lutheran seminarians, with the intention of being ordained a Lutheran minister.

All the while he was at seminary though, he was praying the Roman breviary, sneaking off to hear Étienne Gilson explain Thomas Aquinas, and becoming entranced with the orthodox liturgy of Russian émigrés. He had begun to see that the sacraments, and beautiful and appropriate liturgy were essential, but he also wanted to hold on to what he felt was true in protestantism, that is, "a passionate interest in the Bible as well as the totally personal character of the life of faith as the awareness of a grace that is effectively gratuitous to the highest degree." For a while, he and some friends had the idea that they might bring the fullness of the Eucharistic and the liturgy into the Lutheran church by bringing apostolic succession back into the church. I don't really understand exactly how they thought to do this--they were getting some very bad advice--but it had something to do with Bouyer receiving the sacraments in the orthodox church, which he did.

In the end, however, he knew that he had to become Catholic, and so he was received into the Church at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Wandrille in 1939, and eventually became a priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri at the College of Juilly. In his time there, and indeed during the rest of his life, he found himself in conflict with those he worked with over his insistence on the importance of the Bible in the life of the Catholic, or the development of appropriate liturgy, and this led him to work and live in many places, although he never severed his connection with the Oratory.

Fr. Bouyer spent much of his life teaching, both in Europe and America. He taught Theology at Notre Dame, and Mount St. Mary Seminary. He wrote many books, not only theological texts, but also novels. He served on a preparatory Commission for Studies and Seminaries for Vatican II, and on the International Theological Commission which was responsible for the new liturgy. He was very unhappy with the results of both. In writing about his frustration with the council, he refers to Cardinal Ratzinger quoting St. Gregory Nazianzen about the Council of Constantinople.

To tell the truth, I am convinced that every assembly of bishops is to be avoided, for I have never experienced a happy ending to any council; not even the abolition of abuses . . . , but only ambition or wrangling about what was taking place. 

I have never been very interested in all the machinations involved behind the scenes of the council, but I found Fr. Bouyer's account of his disheartening experience interesting.

Much of this book is taken up by comments on people that Fr. Bouyer worked with and was friends with over his life, and that is a lot of people, most of whom I have never heard of before. Sometimes his commentary was funny and engaging, but often there were just a lot of facts that I found difficult to navigate. However, I was delighted by the friends whom he seemed to care about the most.

He first mentions visiting, ". . . that . . . beautiful house where Elizabeth Goudge, who was to become one of my best friends, had spent her youth and written her first stories." Elizabeth Goudge takes turns with J. R. R. Tolkien as my favorite writer, and was someone whom I would have loved to meet, so that is impressive. Then a few pages later, he mentions two other very close friends, T. S. Eliot, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Near the end of the book, he talks more about his close friendship with Goudge, and also with Julien Green, an author whose Each Man in His Darkness I recently read for the first time, and found very, very good. So, if a man is known by the company he keeps, I'd say this is all in his favor.

I also really enjoyed his descriptions of all the beautiful places where he has lived, and there were many. Both the natural settings and the rooms he inhabited make one long to visit them. My favorite passage about a room, though, is this one.

. . . I spent many weeks, if not months, in the very room where Newman died, among his own furniture, handling his papers at leisure, nearly all just where he had left them.

I will end with a quote that I think sums up the thinking of Fr. Bouyer very well.

I was suffering from having only a very reduced priestly ministry. While other priests with a theological vocation may be delighted to be able to devote all their time to study and teaching, I have never shared that view of things. And I believe I can say that the more or less outrageous fantasies spread about after the council as products of a new theology, but which have only brought chaos and hindered any renewal, are the typical products of those armchair theologians who leave the ministry to those they consider clerical plebians who cannot hold a candle to themselves. On the contrary, it seems to me, and it is obviously what Saint Tomas himself, just like the Fathers of the Church, thought about it, the revealed truth is revealed to us only in order to lead us to salvation and to lead others to it. As soon as it is made a mere subject of cogitations and discussions, one no longer knows what one is saying because one has begun no longer to have any knowledge of what one is talking about.

AMDG

Scars by Paul Murray, O. P.

Scars is one of the few books I've written about that I actually bought new. I heard Fr. Murray speak at a local church, and I was so impressed by his talk, that I wanted to read something he had written. I don't remember why I bought this particular book because the name puts me off. I'm not sure why, but I think it reminds me of something else, or maybe it is just a personal idiosyncrasy. He must have mentioned the book during the talk.

 The first question that Fr. Murray asks in the book is how we can talk to someone who is undergoing great affliction, or whether we can really have anything to say to them at all. We are all familiar with this situation. Some person whom we care about is going through some terrible thing, and they seem to be in another place that we can't reach. Anything we think of to say sounds inadequate. I'm not sure how much of an answer this book gives. For one thing, every person and every situation is so different. The exact thing one person needs could be the very thing that upsets someone else.

Part One of the book, Impossible Words is subtitled Essays on affliction. The first essay is The fourth friend: Poetry in a time of affliction. Fr. Murray talks about how after 9/11 poems began to appear all over New York City. He quotes the New York Times:

In the weeks since the terrorist attacks, people have been consoling themselves--and one another--in an almost unprecedented manner. Almost immediately after the event, improvised memorials often conceived around poems sprang up all over the city, in store windows, at bus stops, in Washington Square Park, Brooklyn Heights and elsewhere. And poems flew through cyberspace across the country in e-mails from friend to friend.

He calls poetry the fourth friend after Elihu, who after Job's three friends have spoken, appears to defend God to Job and his comforters. Fr. Murray references Fr. Victor White, O. P., who calls Elihu, "something of an intuitive, a poet." But then asks, "But should the poet, in a time affliction presume to speak at all? .  . . how, confronted by the enormous affliction of an individual or of a people, can the words of a poet be said to bring consolation?"

In the rest of this section, Fr. Murray gives examples of poetry written both by and to people who are in great affliction. The most beautiful example, though, is about the poetry of music. He quotes a letter that Mendelssohn wrote to Handel:

She [Dorothea] told me that, when she lost her last child, Beethoven was at first unable to come to her house any more. Finally, he invited her to come to him, and when she came he sat at the piano and merely said: 'We will now converse in music,' and played for over an hour and, as she expressed it, 'He said everything to me, and also finally gave me consolation.'

The remainder of Part One contains reflections on affliction in sickness and in prison, and on the martyrs of the last 100 years. He then writes about his friend Sister Joan and the conversations they had after she was diagnosed with an incurable blood disorder that took her life two months later.

Part Two, The dark hours; Songs for the afflicted is a collection of poems written by Fr. Murray. There is a great deal of poetry that I really love, and still more that I like quite a bit, and I recognize it as good poetry. However, I don't consider myself a really good judge of poetry, and I might not always be able to see that a poem is good. That said, I do not think that much of this is really poetry. I'm not saying there is no merit to what Fr. Murray writes, but that it is more like prose formatted like poetry. But, maybe I am wrong. Here a couple of the ones that I like.

               The Cry

When I awoke, the room was dark
and the rain was beating
against the window pane,
it was the room that faces out to sea,
the room in which I was born.

And from my bed I thought I saw
the dark curtains lifting
and moving, and thought I heard
far out at sea
a lone seabird crying in the storm.

But, as I listened, there leaned
against my heart
- and it made me tremble - the memory
of that other dream,
the same dream, that other night.

And I thought to myself: Is it
possible, then, I am
not awake at all, and the rain
is not now beating
against the window pane,

and there is no seabird crying
in the storm
but that instead, once
more, this stark, isolated cry
is, perhaps, my own? 

               A Reading

The text opens like a river
in full spate. Or it's like a window
opening with a sudden gust of wind.
And it's as if an archangel
had entered the room. And everybody
has to stop what they're doing.
And the air is a river of divine words.
And all of a sudden you see
 - and with a start -
that an archangel has entered,
and your heart is in your mouth,
And you feel you are drowning
in a river of divine words, and hear
yourself saying, over and over,
'How can this be?'

 Part Three, The scars of God: Meditations on the seven last words is, as it says meditations on the seven last "words" of Jesus from the cross. If you are not familiar with this terminology, these are not just seven solitary words, but sentences that Jesus said, or prayed, as He was dying.

I did not read through these all at once, but prayed with one each day for seven days. Some of them were helpful, and some were not, and maybe I don't really know which was which. That's a very personal thing, and you might benefit from some that I didn't and vice versa.

My thoughts and feelings about this book are very mixed. When I first read part of the book (I'm not sure I even finished Part One.) I really liked it. Then, it got put aside somehow, and when I came back to it a couple of weeks ago, I didn't like it much at all. Only parts seemed good to me. This probably says more about me than about the book, but maybe it also had something to do with having just heard Father speak, and being more in tune with the way he thinks and expresses himself. If you would like to see for yourself, I'd be glad to give you the book.

AMDG

The White Fathers by Glenn D. Kittler

For eight years, I worked at a protestant seminary, and there were frequently piles of books being given away: sometimes by the spouse of someone who had died, sometimes the library was giving away discards, and sometimes they were donated by someone who was just cleaning off their shelves.  Being one of the very few Catholics around, I was able to pick up a lot of Catholic books that no one else was interested in. The White Fathers had belonged to one of the professors at the seminary professors. The date 72-73 is written on the title page, so I assume that is when he read it. It is full of underlining and notes (frequently illegible), which made reading the book even more interesting.

This book was not on the shelf of books that I am reading, although it would have ended up there eventually. It was on a shelf that is next to the chair where I sit when I pray in the morning. I usually do a bit of spiritual reading, or reading about the saints every morning, so when I finished the last book I was reading, I pulled this one off the shelf, and had been reading about ten pages a day--until it got so interesting that I just kept reading.

When Bishop Charles Martial Allemand-Lavigerie was appointed Bishop of Algiers in 1867, he already had a heart for the missions. He had previously been the chairman of L'Oeuvre d'Orient  which was organized to erect Christian schools in the Middle East. Although Bishop Lavigerie was almost always opposed by the French government, who wanted him only to minister to the French in Algiers, he had a vision for Africa, and he worked tirelessly for the vision all his life.

The fact that Lavigerie was not allowed to evangelize the Arabs did not slow him down at all. He knew that the Arabs would not be open to evangelization until they lost their deep suspicion of Christians. He decided to organize an order of missionary priests who would live as Arabs--would be Arabs as much as possible without violating their Catholic faith. They would dress, and eat like Arabs, and of course, be proficient in Arabic, and eventually many African languages. Most important to Lavigerie was that they be men of prayer. Their first work would be to provide medical assistance to the Arabs, and then education for children, and agricultural help.

The White Fathers in their habit which consists of a white, traditional Arab gondoura
or robe, and a red fez.

It took a long time for the bishop to find men for the Missionaries of Africa, or White Fathers as they came to be known because of their white habits. Many men did not persevere through the noviate, and even this first three recruits, one of whom had become superior of the order, never made it into active ministry. Time and again, Lavigerie thought that the end had come, but something always came through, and in time they established many missions in Northern Africa.

The next goal of the missionaries was to send caravans to set up a series of missions through the Sahara, and eventually to reach Central Africa. The three priests in the first caravan were murdered, but more caravans followed. Eventually, they reached Uganda, and their work there and the tragedies that followed make up a large part of the book. If you are not familiar with Charles Lwanga and the Martyrs of Uganda, you can read a bit more about them on my other blog, in a post written by my friend Paul.

Kittler also writes about the life of one former student of the White Fathers' schools, and two of the priests of the order. The first gives an idea of the quality of education the students in the schools received; and the second shows the kind of work the priests were doing, and also the very different types of men who belong to the order.

Bishop, eventually Cardinal Archbishop Lavigerie's vision can be seen in this passage:

It was . . . Lavigerie's idea that his missionaries should always remember that they were in Africa for the sake of the African. He was stern in his instructions not to Europeanize the African, believing that in time the African could decide for himself what there might be in Europe he wished to make his own. 

This practice of not trying to change the culture of the Africans was very contrary to what most governments, and in truth most missionaries of the time considered appropriate. Lavigerie was also very constant in asserting the missionaries they were working toward the day when Africans could assume leadership of their own countries.

Glenn D. Kittler's obituary in the New York Times says that he had at one time studied for the priesthood, and that he was a contributing editor of Guideposts (an inspirational Christian magazine founded by Norman Vincent Peale). One gathers from this that he isn't exactly impartial toward his subject (which is true), and that the book is not written in an academic manner (which is also true). The professor who formerly owned the book complained more than once about a lack of documentation. There was a real problem with dates in the book--years, not months and days--that might have been as much attributable to bad copyreading as to any error on Kittler's part. Given that, it is still a very readable narrative of the beginning of an order which is still at work in Africa today. In fact Kittler's obituary stated "Mr. Kittler wrote ''The White Fathers'' in 1957. The New York Times called it ''a magnificently comprehensive historical introduction to the last hundred years of Christian Africa.''

You can hear a bit about the current ministry of the Missionaries of Africa here:

AMDG

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

When I woke up this morning, I had read about 50 pages of The Violent Bear It Away. About halfway through the book, if you had asked me what it was about, I would have told you that I wasn't really sure what I was reading, but I couldn't stop reading it. By 3:30 this afternoon, I had finished the book.

This book is about the God of grace and mercy, but it's not easy grace, and it's not the mercy that droppeth as a gentle rain from heaven. It's about the God who is a consuming fire. The title of the book comes from Matthew 11:12, "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away."

Mason Tarwater is one of those who bear it away. He is a prophet (and bootlegger) who lives on a secluded farm, and who is raising his great-nephew, Francis Marion Tarwater (called Tarwater), whom he kidnapped from his legal guardian, his uncle George Rayber. Old Tarwater is preparing his great-nephew to be his successor. He already tried this once with his nephew George, whom he kidnapped for four days when George was seven, but this attempt backfired.

If you have read much about prophets, you know that they are not particularly comfortable to be around and that some of them might even be regarded as out of their minds, and the Tarwaters certainly fit the bill. I wondered what tarwater or tar water was, and looking around the internet I find that it is made from a cold infusion of pine resin in water, and is used for healing and to get rid of spirits, the latter being more appropriate to our story.

Old Tarwarter has charged Tarwater with two tasks to accomplish after his death. One is to bury him with a cross at his head, so he can be found at the last day. The other is to baptize George's son, Bishop. This book is about Baptism, and water, and Baptism by water, but maybe even more about Baptism by fire.

I am not going to say any more about the story because if you read it in a summary, you will completely lose the power that is behind O'Connors masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece--maybe I should say tour de force.

In a letter to a friend written on November 14, 1959, shortly before publication of her novel in January, 1960, O'Connor said;

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial. I'm afraid it will just be dammed and dropped, genteelly sneered at, a few superior kicks from one or two and that  will be that. . . . Well, we will have to wait and see. I expect the worst. At least this is an individual book. I can't think of anybody else's that it might remind you of. Nobody would have been found dead writing it but me . . .

The Violent Bear It Away did get a lot of bad reviews, but it has stood the test of time. O'Connor spoke to at least a couple of friends about a sequel to the novel, but I guess she ran out of time. It took her a long time to write a novel, she was talking about this one as early as 1954, and she died about four and a half years after it was published.

I recommend this book very highly, but I would strongly suggest you not read it unless you are already fairly familiar with O'Connor, because it takes most people a while to see what she is doing in her work. In this case, I would suggest that you begin with a few short stories: Revelation, A Temple of the Holy Ghost, and A Good Man is Hard to Find. (It was while reading Revelation that I first got O'Connor. Then you might read The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters, and maybe Mystery and Manners, a collection of talks and essays.

UPDATE: There have been a lot of new visitors here in the past 24 hours, and I would like to welcome you all. I would love to hear any thoughts you have about the post, or even how you got here.

If you are curious about what I'm trying to do on this blog, you can find that information here.

Please come again.

AMDG