First Things RSS Feed - Philip Zaleski

All Too Human

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Original Sin: A Cultural History

by Alan Jacobs

HarperOne, 304 pages, $24.95

The Saints of John Paul II

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Of the making of saints there is no end cries the modern Ecclesiastes, and with some justification. A thousand years ago—or even twenty-five years ago—the roster of canonized saints was severely circumscribed. From 1000 AD to 1978 AD, fewer than 450 men and women had been “raised to the altars” by the Catholic Church. The situation changed dramatically under the long pontificate of John Paul II. The vigorous pope—who was ordained on the Feast of All Saints—canonized, during his twenty-six-year reign, over 480 saints and beatified 1300 more, with a thousand additional candidates still wending their way through the labyrinthine juridical process. Some wag has christened this explosion of saints John Paul’s “canonization cannon.” Pope Benedict XVI has not yet canonized anyone, but there are good reasons for thinking that he intends to keep up the pace: not only his pronounced intention of sustaining the principles of John Paul’s papacy, but his own declaration, when asked about his predecessor’s penchant for saint-making, that “there cannot be too many saints.”

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Seeking Signs and Wonders

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The Miracle Detective
by Randall Sullivan
Atlantic Monthly, 448 pages, $25

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The Love of Saint Thérèse

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

The Pope leaned toward her, so that “their faces nearly touched,” and Thérèse hurriedly whispered her desire (despite her bishop’s opposition) to become a Carmelite nun. Leo, flustered by this breach of protocol, first ventured a conventional response: “Ah well, my child, do what the superiors say.” When Thérèse continued to argue, he appealed to God, enunciating each syllable like a patient schoolmaster: “Go . . . Go . . . you will enter if God wills it.” But Thérèse refused to budge, clutching the Pope’s legs more tightly still; finally papal guards intervened, lifting and dragging the now-sobbing girl to the exit. “In the bottom of my heart I felt a great peace,” Thérèse recalled some years later, “[but] bitterness filled my soul, for Jesus was silent.”

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In Defense of Jabez

Mon, 01 Oct 2001 00:00:00 -0400

“Read not the times, read the eternities,” said Henry David Thoreau. It isn’t often that the two realms intersect, but they have this year”and not only in the New York Times , but in news media across America”with the runaway success of Bruce Wilkinson’s The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life (Multnomah, 2000). The Prayer of Jabez , as almost everyone knows by now, proclaims the blessings that derive from reciting an obscure prayer buried in a genealogical litany of, well, biblical proportions in the driest book in scripture, 1 Chronicles. The pertinent text, in the New King James Version favored by Wilkinson, reads:

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The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms' Magic Fairy Tales

Mon, 01 Jan 2001 00:00:00 -0500

There’s no escaping the Brothers Grimm. Their masterwork, Kinder und Hausmarchen (1812-1822), usually translated as Grimm’s Fairy Tales , still reigns unchallenged as the greatest folk tale collection of them all. Millions of children have listened, spellbound, as parent or schoolteacher initiates them into its primeval mysteries of baked witches and shape-changing wolves, of gallant princes and dreaming damsels. Thousands more have been initiated through Disney’s sweetened (but still, to a tot, terrifying) film adaptations.

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A Paradoxical Genius

Tue, 01 Jun 1999 00:00:00 -0400

Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures.
By Richard West.
Carroll & Graf. 427 pp. $26.

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The Strange Shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe

Mon, 01 May 1995 00:00:00 -0400

Two or three years ago, the first cold winds of middle age came knocking at my door. My muscles ached after an hour of softball and my mind turned to mush by ten o’clock every night. But I resolved to fight back. The decision is commonplace enough; we all know graying men who seek the fountain of youth with hot-air balloons or low-slung sportscars. I chose a more moderate and productive course. I snuggled down with a cup of hot chocolate, a woolen blanket, and a plan: to reread the beloved classics of children’s literature. Whether this was a coward’s flight from the hard facts of aging or a heroic attempt to keep my youth intact, I still do not know. I do know that it was magic.

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Dear James

Mon, 01 Aug 1994 00:00:00 -0400

Some writers capture national headlines; others capture local hearts. This observation was brought delightfully home to me a few months ago, when I dropped a small pile of books on the checkout desk at my neighborhood public library. The librarian working the computer screen, a small, quiet woman of monastic disposition, usually goes about her chores without uttering a word. This time, however, she accepted my stack, glanced at the top book, and burst into a smile broad enough to launch a moon rocket. “Jon Hassler!” she yelped. The smiled widened as she saw that, in fact, my entire selection that day consisted of Hassler novels. “Isn’t he just great!” she said. “I wish there were more like him. A writer that makes you glad to be alive.”

Who, you might wonder, is this man who gladdens the hearts of young librarians, middle-aged professors, and, I am told, droves of retirees? The author of seven novels, beginning in 1977 with Staggerford (the imaginary Minnesota town where most of his stories unfold), Hassler is a writer-in-residence and English teacher at St. John’s University, Minnesota. In a recent interview, he confesses that the writing takes precedence: “My teaching is always in the late afternoon or evening. The students get me when my mind is shot!” a decision that even his students must applaud considering the literary fruit that results, lately in his newest novel, Dear James .

Dear James brings back characters from Hassler’s earlier ventures, most notably Miss Agatha McGee, the elementary school principal who loomed so large in Staggerford and A Green Journey (1985). Agatha, now seventy, radiates that quality that used to be called “spine”: moral rectitude, dogged courage, and a trap- door mind fused into a backbone strong enough to shoulder the problems of half of Staggerford. She has her faults, too; having “always striven to be predictable,” she finds herself adrift after the closing of her beloved St. Isidore’s Elementary, an event symptomatic, in her worried eyes, of the shutting down of Christendom. Around Agatha’s moral axis revolve, frequently in erratic orbit, the members of Staggerford’s closely knit Catholic community: French Lopat, the Vietnam vet who scratches out a living as a fake Indian for the tourist trade; Lillian, Agatha’s best friend, who gets her news from supermarket tabloids; Imogene, Lillian’s daughter, a liar and backstabber; Sister Judith, a New Age nun who imagines the Creation as God laying a giant egg.

In this constellation of superbly drawn comic characters, the brightest star is the one farthest away: Father James O’Hannon, an Irish parish priest in Ballybegs, Ireland, with whom Agatha has carried on a correspondence blossoming into platonic love for years. Thus the salutation of the title; its irony lies in James’ failure, for the first several years of their relationship, to inform Agatha of his clerical status. After she discovered the truth during their only face-to-face encounter (a debacle recounted in A Green Journey ) the correspondence entered a new phase. As Dear James opens, Agatha continues to write long, revelatory letters to James, and then instantly tears them up. Meanwhile, James’ undammed stream of letters to her stagnates in her desk.

Despite their estrangement, Agatha thinks constantly of James, and he of her. Their relationship is platonic in more than the conventional sense; these two traditionalists share a respect for ideas and a belief in Ideas, even in the Logos. Similarly, their correspondence is more than epistolary; their lives run along parallel tracks, in religion, intellect, and morals. The joy of the book lies in watching these lines converge into a happy ending despite the obstacles of age, location, and vocation. Before this dignified conclusion, however, Agatha and James must not only reconcile with one another, but atone for the past by surrendering a grudge: he against the British who killed his father sixty years ago; she against Imogene, the acid-tongued gossip who makes public her correspondence with James. In local communities, Hassler suggests, ancient truths abide: words retain their power to save or ruin lives, good and evil can yet be distinguished, people remain accountable for their acts, and sin, penance, and absolution are still valid coin of the realm.

Remarkably this is where Hassler parts company with almost all other American novelists religion is the means whereby these small-town transformations take place. In Dear James , the catalyst is not only the teachings of the Church but its sacred places as well. Agatha and James heal their breach in the Vatican (she is there on a New Year’s tour of Italy), a small town that is a universal city. They deepen their accord in Assisi, another small town whose essence Hassler captures as well as any writer before him. Most strikingly of all, James renews his priestly mission during a papal audience at the Vatican. The critical moment comes when John Paul II, working his way down the center aisle, halts in front of James (who is standing on a chair for a better view), gazes into his eyes for “a full five seconds,” and then gestures him forward.

James lowered himself carefully to the floor, and the crowd made room for him at the barrier. John Paul stepped forward, took James’ face in his hands, turned it to the left and spoke briefly into his ear. Then he bent forward and touched his forehead to James’ forehead, his hands still cupping James’ face like a precious vessel. Then he moved on.

To find out what the Pope whispered, read the book. Suffice it here to repeat Agatha’s assessment that “we’ve just witnessed a miracle,” not in the sense of an impossible happening, but in the sense of a revelation of the eternal sacred moral order in the temporal fallen human order.

These Staggerfordian trials and redemptions add up to more than a series of Sunday School lessons. One feels a great moral force surging through this novel, a sense that lives do indeed matter, that God oversees the comedy and that fiction is the right means to get this message across. As James puts it, “Stories can move people, Agatha. I learned that in the pulpit. You can preach till the cows come home and not awaken a single soul, but the right story, well told, goes straight to the heart.” It brings to mind a passage from John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction , an important, vilified, and now forgotten book of the 1970s. “The traditional view,” Gardner writes, “is that art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not to debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us.”

Gardner’s definition of traditional art describes perfectly Hassler’s novels: creations as admirable for their benevolence as for their architecture. Here is an author who embraces every character his imagination conjures up, whether heroine, fool, heretic, or shrew. He is fulfilling Chekhov’s dictum that “it is the writer’s business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.” Agatha, James, and nearly all of Hassler’s figures suffer chastisement or worse for their failures, and nearly all are championed in this splendid work, testimony to God’s tender mercies.

Philip Zaleski teaches literature at Wesleyan University and religion at Smith College.

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A Peculiar Little Test

Tue, 01 Feb 1994 00:00:00 -0500

Every two or three years, at a small, elite New England university, I offer a graduate-level course on “Nature Writing.” The students, as you might guess, exhibit a keen interest in birds, blossoms, bugs, and bears. Despite shared tastes, the composition of the class is impressively diverse, a patchwork of amateur entomologists, high school science instructors, budding Thoreaus, Lake Poets manqué. Participants show little mercy towards environmental degradation (strip mining, whale-hunting, and the felling of the rain forest are anathema), but, thankfully, no more than one or two Earth-Firsters—fanatics who applaud Edward Abbey’s bitter saying that “I’m a humanist, I’d rather kill a man than a snake”—sign up each year. As our classroom discussions make clear, the students also have in common a keen religious sense, directed, it is true, more towards the awe induced by a streaking meteor or a rutting moose than, say, that of the Resurrection of Christ or the Parinirvana of Buddha. In sum, my students are, by and large, a representative sampling of post-1960s educated America.

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