Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, et alia.

[Era Might]

So I was surprised to see the Pope mention Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day in his speech before Congress...strangely, I'm in the middle of a 4-person "biography" of Merton, Day, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy...it's an excellent book, I highly recommend it. It's called "The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage":

http://amzn.to/1WzCeHz

It's not an original biography but brings together other scholarship and weaves the lives together to tell a common story of pilgrimage. Three of the characters (Merton, Day, Percy) are converts...O'Connor is the only cradle Catholic, but I just got to the section where she begins to suffer from the Lupus that would eventually kill her at 39 years old, and the author suggests that this was the real beginning of her "imitation of Christ." Whereas the other characters have a long backstory of searching and sinning that culminates in a maturation and conversion, O'Connor suddenly, for the first time, is really confronted with the faith she has professed all her life, faced with the loss of the life and success she imagined she would have, and having to slowly live out her death within her vocation as a writer.

There's lots of great material in these lives. Another one is how Merton publishes his spiritual autobiography, "Seven Story Mountain," which becomes a huge bestseller. The book is kind of the synthesis of his long conversion story, but while the public is eating up his book, he's in a monastery dealing with the realities of being a Christian and a monk, which is neither perfect nor easy, and yet he's become imprisoned in this public image he created of himself...imagine seeing yourself on a stained glass window at your parish while you live your day to day life of sin and grace. I'm reminded of John Corapi...the lesson being, don't believe everything you see or everyone you hear...the spiritual life is complicated.

Dorothy Day is probably my favorite of the three figures...she faces the question of whether what Christians say they believe actually means anything if it is not real. If we are all brothers, if we all have a common father, then what does it matter to say so if people are starving and suffering around us. The Catholic Worker begins as a newspaper to sort of show people that the church has a social "plan," but Day realizes that it means nothing if they aren't doing anything about it...so the Catholic Worker arises almost accidentally, as a way to fill the needs right in front of you...feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc., not in an abstract way but doing it with the people right in front of you, the man asking for bread, the prostitute on the street, the unemployed father desperate for work.

And then there's Percy, the typical alienated modern man and doctor who discovers Catholicism as a framework for diagnosing man's illness and, going beyond diagnosis, as a method of healing him, which philosophy did not provide.

Anyway, read the book, if only because the Pope mentioned them. Or better, read their own writings.

http://amzn.to/1WzCeHz

 

[dUSt]

Fixed your Amazon link to make phatmass about 20 cents. lol

[Socrates]

I love Flannery O'Connor.  One of my all-time favorite fiction writers.  Though I only actually started reading her a few years ago.  Sad thing she died young; one wonders what else she might have given us had she lived to a ripe old age.