I've discovered another new-to-me author that I'm enjoying: John L'Heureux. He was recommended by a priest I talked to at the conference back in February, but I just now remembered to check the library shelves for his books. First I read one of his more recent books, The Miracle, and then a collection of short stories called Family Affairs last week. Both brief, but thought provoking. The Miracle is about a priest struggling with his vocation who witnesses what could be a miracle that happens to an undeserving girl. As he struggles to understand the miracle, he also is struggling with his faith and what it means to love. I found myself both frustrated by and sympathetic to the main character, but the really attractive figure is an old priest who is dying of ALS. He seems to have figured out what it means to love, and all the while minor miracles are happening through him.
Family Affairs is a collection of short stories, most of which also are about priests and potential priests and lay people struggling with their vocations, written in the late 70s. I wasn't surprised then, that the author bio on the back cover asserts that L'Heureux was a Jesuit priest for 17 years. So many of these stories seem to be somewhat auto-biographical, and perhaps therapeutic attempts to explore vocation from the perspective of someone grasping to understand what it means to live a vocation. And since I sometimes find myself cogitating about the same puzzle, I read the book hungrily.
It's interesting that L'Heureux doesn't often show up on lists of Catholic writers that I come across on the more conservative sites that I sometimes visit. He, along with Lodge, must have been enthused by some of the potential changes to come with Vatican II, and then perhaps disappointed that more didn't change. Both the Lodge books (Souls and Bodies and Paradise News) and the 2 L'Heureux books I've read both seem to center around Catholics engaged in the struggle to love God and love other people, so they are very religious in subject matter. Have they been deemed too liberal by some listmakers because they seem to assert that love needs physical expression, which makes a celibate priesthood an extremely difficult vocation to support? (A gothic short story of L'Heureux's is here.)
*****
Yet another Catholic author exploring the conflicts between flesh and spirit is Julia Alvarez. I just finished How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Told in reverse chronological order, it left me with a feeling of loss, without much consolation. A Dominican Republic family comes to America and loses it's connection with the big extended familia. The four girls in the family have broken relationships and struggle to find themselves. Discontentment abounds. It's hard to reconcile the family dynamic at the end with the family in the beginning. I think of my own family: I removed myself and my children from the extended family compound. As my grandparents have passed away and my kids have grown older, and I've grown away, we come home less and less often. I often feel at loose ends trying to decide how to live because of the lack of connections to a past and priorities. But Alvarez's book remains at a surface level; we never really get to see a real spiritual struggle within the girls - they only seem to struggle with how to define themselves in relation to each other, which maybe is saying something about identity and loss. Perhaps the consolation is that the family does still cling to each other, the sisters still respect and honor their father, and they continue to come together in spite of opposition from outside and within their circle.
*****
Stepping away from the Catholic authors for a bit, I picked up David Denby's Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World while passing through the shelves. I ended up skimming the second half. It was written in 1996, when the dialogue about core programs (as opposed to Common Core) at colleges was getting some attention. Denby attended Columbia and goes back to class to attend Columbia's Contemporary Civilizations and Literature Humanities classes, the two courses required for graduation. At the time, many larger universities were doing away with graduation requirements - now Notre Dame is reevaluating its philosophy/theology requirements to allow more courses to be considered for fulfillment of the credits. Denby goes back to school in part to defend the core, but also to redefine himself in middle age (identifying a bit with Dante). He observes students wrestling with big topics and compares his past and present self in encounters with great authors, all the while crafting an argument in defense of the Core Curriculum without defending it against charges of exclusivity. All in all, I thought it was a very fair defense of maintaining an acquaintance with the thoughts of dead white males - along with some women and minorities. You can read his new preface in 2005 which is more politically charged than the original, but still maintains the importance of engaging with the great minds of the past in order to understand what makes us human.Denby references and quotes parts of two poems that resonated with me as I read them. I wasn't familiar with "Original Sequence" by Philip Booth, but now am intrigued to read more of this book on Google books. "Time was the apple Adam ate" it begins and ends with "[God] reached, and wound the clock" - a painful connection between original sin and time.
Denby closes with an excerpt from Whitman "Leaves of Grass":
5
Dead poets, philosophs, priests,
Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
Language-shapers on other shores,
Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left
wafted hither,
I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it,)
Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more
than it deserves,
Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,
I stand in my place with my own day here.
Here lands female and male,
Here the heir-ship and heiress-ship of the world, here the flame of
materials,
Here spirituality the translatress, the openly-avow'd,
The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms,
The satisfier, after due long-waiting now advancing,
Yes here comes my mistress the soul.
from Book II https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/1322-h.htm#link2H_4_0023
*****
Finally, the last book worth a mention was The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. This was an advanced copy I picked up from the Little Free Library. It was readable, but not as good as the first book The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. Calpurnia is a pre-teen living in Texas at the turn of the century. Her grandfather is an amateur scientist who introduces her to Darwin and his systematic observations and scientific method. The first book had charm and a unique subject matter. This second book is still appealing, but has less charm and more to take issue with. Maybe I was feeling more critical this time around, but I found the book too episodic without a real unifying theme - was the focus the relationship between Callie and her brother Travis, or her grandfather, or her cousin Aggie, a refugee after a hurricane in Galveston, or her developing sense of oppression because she is a girl? Two things bothered me above the others - first, she seems to have a real hatred for her brother Lamar. He is never shown to have any redeeming features, and they never reconcile. In fact, in the end Callie finds a way to get revenge on him and she isn't caught. While most middle grade readers might identify with the sibling strife, I didn't like that the author seems to glory in the act of revenge. I kept wondering if she had a really difficult brother and her personal revenge was writing this despicable character. And the second thing I didn't like is that Callie is encouraged to be secretive to her parents by older characters. The vet tells her not to tell her parents that she is helping him and Aggie asks her not to tell that she is running away. And Callie herself encourages Travis to keep his pets secret from their parents. So I have some moral issues with the book. I also didn't like that the grandfather takes a smaller role in this book - their relationship was what made the first book so appealing to me. Callie's father also is kept at arms' length once Callie discovers he doesn't think girls should go to college and he gives her less valuable gifts than he gives her brothers. So I can't really recommend this one very strongly, although I like the idea of a curious girl during that time of incredible technological progress.
