Books
cember 1934 it was not "experience" alone she needed, it was, as this biographer persuasively argues, because she had reached a theoretical impasse as to how the machine becomes a part...
...When Frank, the eldest son, confronts the father who is not his, when Paddy, that father, dies in a fire on Drogheda, when Father Ralph de Bricassart breaks his vows and finally makes love to Meggie, the only Cleary daughter among many sons, there are only slight ripples in the surface of the narrative...
...Manual labor righted an experiential balance to be sure, opening Simone Weil to the absolute correctness of certain of Marx...
...In addition, they have "out of the body" experiences in which a kind of non-corporeal duplicate of the meatier self hovers over the deathbed scene...
...Learning it she knew at last what working people have known and accepted, through faith, all their lives, including the ultimate residence of injustice...
...Lawrence is a perfect subject for the sensitive psychobiographer...
...Illich has told the story of a panicky attendant at a birth who tried to push the head of a baby being born back into the mother--the objection being that the baby could not be born until the doctor arrived, until the professional presence validated the moment of birth...
...it does not ask under what conditions the U.S.A...
...RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS Commonweal: 477...
...Ernest Becker's The Denial o/ Death (Free Press/Macmillan, $2.95) is one of the good death books...
...Ralph will never abandon his ambition, never leave the Church---and will eventually become a cardinal...
...That "us" sounds like the papal "we...
...thus, A Prince o~ Our Disorder is never "reductionistic"ma charge often leveled against psychobiography...
...In their different ways, both authors confront the church with the need to foster a ministry that is less controlled and more ready to listen to God than to human authorities...
...STEVEN r~OLL is a New York writer and critic presently working on a novel...
...When the Cieary family arrives from New Zealand, on their way to the sheep station Drogheda, this is what they see: "It was all...
...Some profit may come from the formulation of laws, but strictly speaking this would be a teaching function that provided guidance for Christians' prudential judgments lather than real legislation...
...22 luly 1977:472 What about the particular person, or the unpeaceful death...
...I wonder whether there isn't too much generalizing here...
...The Times' somewhat exercised commentator concluded that there was, after all, no sex in Plutarch's Lives yet his portraits "are among the world's more sophisticated...
...Death: The Final Stage of Growth (Prentice-Hall, $2.95) was edited by Dr...
...He offers ample documentation of what has been tried and is being tried in Europe and the Americas...
...The highly persOnal mode of leadership assumed by Lawrence towards those he "enabled" contains within it, Mack argues, a critique of traditional styles of military leadership and modes of heroism linked to an easy justification of killing and violence...
...The prose has a fullness about it, and a density of detail, that sometimes overwhelms...
...that structural factors act as constraints and catalysts to political movements and to social change...
...518) While affirming that the episcopacy as a group has a teaching authority deriving from "a privileged collegial witness" and that the bishop of Rome has "a special normative resonance with the orthodox laith of this episcopal college," Cooke insists that there seems to be no justification for grounding the truth of any statement made by pope or bishop in ecclesiastical jurisdiction...
...Kiibler-Ross...
...But her thought and her method have contributed to the possibility of professionalizing death...
...Could dying become similarly institutionalized7 This has been seriously recommended...
...Veatch has some important criticisms of the "death with dignity" movement, which, as he points out, might involve a contradiction in terms...
...Members of the Chlistian community "cannot be forced to believe, nor to live out the implications of that belief...
...There are several reasons why this is so and a comparison of the two books points to weaknesses in Mazlish's approach...
...After all, as a farmwoman said, All the intellectuals we knew put barriers between themselves and the peasants...
...Both in our personal lives and in the life of the community, there needs to be both continuity and change, conservatism and innovation, formality and intimacy, discipline and freedom...
...But is my comfort the sole thing at issue...
...Yet disagreeing with' Marx's belief in the "liberating powers of the revolution," even more with his theory of the "infinite development of the productive forces after the revolution"--as though either would uproot injustice...
...one of the million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever...
...But attempts at reassurance are something else again, and could lead us to believe that we can somehow control our deaths...
...Because I had agreed to do this composite review, I found myself reading Holmes light after finishing Cooke, and the juxtaposition was a happy one...
...And then there is all the information given, then repeated, then repeated again...
...It hardly survives a good night's sleep at this point, and it seems foolhardy to suppose that death will be easier...
...mbut there are problems with it, as with any orthodoxy, and as with any orthodoxy they come down to problems with structure and doctrine...
...There is the title metaphor of the thorn birds, of the bird that, from its first breath, searches for a thorn tree, impales itself upon the sharpest spine, and dying, "rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale...
...On the whole the trend has been healthier than the mentality which prevailed for years, and still hangs on in those doctors and relatives who refuse to tell dying patients the truth about this most important moment of their lives...
...Not that Dr...
...Can we take that risk...
...How the decision-makers at Harper & Row-the trade chief, the marketing director, the subsidiary rights director--took the manuscript home for the weekend and realized they had to go all out...
...Service to the People of God...
...His moving tale of a single man's life links the public and the private, the individual and the social, at every point...
...Whatever the words may say, the tension is missing from them and from the action...
...Bernard Cooke's magnum opus is a formidable challenge to read and almost impossible to summarize or critique adequately in this brief compass...
...Now, with The Thorn Birds approaching major bestsellerdom, the worm has turned...
...There is more than just a bit of the maverick in the wagon master...
...Ministr~ t o Word and Sacraments: B t s t o r g and Theology BERNARD COOKE Fortress, $25 Ministry and Imagination URBAN T. HOLMES, I I I Seabury, $10.95 KEVIN G. O'CONNELL Although these two works on ministry are very different in conception and format, they share a concern to free ministry in the modern church from patterns of thought and practice that limit the church's growth or distort its nature...
...One of Cooke's theses is that teaching authority and jurisdiction within the community have been improperly and harmfully brought together in the office of bishop and pope...
...It was the Church, on three memorable occasions (the Blessing of the Fleet in a poor village in Portugal, kneeling in Saint Francis's little chapel at Assisi, attending services from Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday at Solesmes), that righted a balance on another plane...
...Both sides of our brain, the rational and the intuitive, must be given room to develop...
...a plane that transcended the material while allowing her to see the connection between the two: A laborer (she wrote) burns up his own flesh and transforms it into energy like a machine burning coal...
...Well, as presented here it is in fact unscientific, and as to clerical dissent I can only say that most of the people who have recommended Moody's book to me (as well as her own work) are priests, nuns, and ministers, who find this kind of writing reassuring...
...If they had, of course, they could not have come back to tell the t a l e - - b u t this is part of my point...
...however, the process of tradition is not confined to any such agency (or group of agencies) but rather involves the complementary activity of the entire church...
...it is in fact basic to the doctriz/e being born here, a doctrine which shows up again in Death: The Final Stage of Growth, a title which looks for the silver lining if ever a title did...
...I am afraid that the same thing cannot be said about the books produeed by the Elizabeth Kiibler-Ross school...
...Here the Kiibler-Ross school claims unfolding of an analysis, which produces psychobiographies that genuinely enhance our understanding of human lives in history...
...But its precise form is not to be given preeminence over against the community nor is it to be made th~ norm against which other ministries are to be measured...
...My hope is confined to John the Evangelist's statement that "what we shall be hereafter has not been made known as yet...
...Nonetheless, Kilian conveys a sense of informed excitement that should give pause to those who have prematurely declared the parish dead...
...But not necessarily...
...Mack is well aware that there are shifting historic contexts and circumstances outside the control and domination of any person or group of persons...
...I men~tion this because of all the books published during the past few years which have hauled death out of the closet, but in the process felt the I need to dress death up a little, put him in a leisure suit or a doctor's white coat...
...To what extent has the historically conditioned role of episcopal authority (and papal authority) been accorded an absoluteness that is now detrimental to Christian life...
...He may just be ignorant: of the effects of certain drugs, the symptoms of schizophrenia, of the symbolic language suffering people use to get through to us when they cannot find the words, of his own limitations as a sympathetic person...
...The unrelenting emphasis on the sovereign-state system is at times unconvincing and leads to the conclusion that nothing of significance is possible this side of a "global juridical order" u i . e . , effective world government...
...Perhaps trivial to some but precious to us, this lesson...
...There were presuppositions hanging around the idea from the start, one of them being that death can be dealt with, and that the proper dealing-with depends upon a proper attitude and therefore with proper people...
...Also, because the historical chapters in the successive parts inevitably go over the same ground from perspectives that are only partially new, I found a sense of tedium arising at times...
...The historian who decides in favor of utilizing psychoanalytic theory faces several thorny theoretical and methodological considerations...
...It is that kind of care alone, not unlike the organic valuable and moving that you feel almost ogre-ish saying anything bad about it, especially because it is fast becoming an orthodoxy, one which travels under absolutely humane auspices (who can possibly object to making death easier...
...Holmes's work is less imposing, but no less challenging...
...22 guly 1977:474 is a brief affair on Matlock Island, and Meggie comes away with the only part of Ralph she can ever hope to have: his child...
...The argument is frequently disjointed, excessively studded by citations, and lamentably devoid of ecumenical perspective...
...There is a dialectic movement " . . . it does seem that 'tradition' and allied notions such as 'apostolic .~uccession' must relate most basically to the Christian community as a whole...
...One is that these books simply do not make death less mysterious or frightening to me...
...He calls for a re-appropriation of the understanding that Jesus' priestly orientation "is accomplished essentially by his being the sacrament of his Father's self-gift to men and the sacrament of men's acceptance and reciprocal self-gift...
...and the doctrine extends itself dramatically in Life After Life...
...John the Evangelist, is the author of Time Toward Home: The American Experiment as Revelation...
...KiiblerRoss is pushing this notion...
...Both theologian and priest should be encouraged to exercise their ministries with responsible freedom, answerable to the community and its leaders, but without the structure of jurisdictional authority to contend with...
...Handsome, young, Father Ralph--in exile for insulting his bishop--is the district priest, and he falls in love with her the moment he sees her...
...This is strong stuff, and is reinforced over and over again, not merely in the theological leflection sections, but in the historical chapters as well...
...And then there is the question of the material...
...He may waste time in small talk, be indefinite in planning appointments, allow a hostile client to threaten him and manipulate his emotions...
...He is preparing a second volume on sexual problems...
...the paranoid who literally reeks of mistrust--who may be fascinated by ESP and mysticism--who has set his sights on a target whose reputation he is determined to destroy...
...The authors attempt first to show that this is the case, and then they try to indicate how that system can be left behind and a more human future opened up...
...Of course the love is thwarted...
...I have reservations about calling someone whose heart has...
...Kilian, who teaches at Fordham University, offers a helpful survey of Roman Catholic thought in this century with respect to both the theological status and the forms of the parish community...
...Up until now, selling fiction about Australia in America has been like trying to sell chocolate cake for breakfast...
...It is the sense of identity, handed clown through time . . . , which gives us the imagery and the security to think the new...
...the seductive hysteric who entertains the therapist with highly colored accounts of experiences which may not have occurred...
...I have a hunch that it will not involve the survival of whatever it is I think of as myself, and that my "self-image" (to use the current happy jargon) will be among the first things to flicker away...
...A deeply moral, troubled, introspective man of genius, "he left behind a vast record of achievement and failure...
...A human being" doesn't die, but I, or you...
...He is good at creative time-wasting...
...In Li/e A/ter Li/e (Bantam, $1.95) Raymond Moody, M.D., summarizes the experiences of approximately 150 people who either died (in the sense that their hearts stopped beating) or came very close to death...
...it /s beginning to be a school, even having its form of the old imprimaturwin this case, approval in the form of an introduction or recommendation by Dr...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 IN BRIEF TOWARD A HUMAN WORLD ORDER" BEYOND THE NATIONAL SECURITY STriP"r JACKET, by Gerald and Patricia Mische, Paulist Press, $9.95...
...But the rather breezy casualness of Mazlish's analysis, capped by a concluding chapter that poses a series of superficial historic "ifs" in ten dizzying pages, is neither convincing nor even particularly interesting...
...My reasons are mixed...
...The Thorn B i r d s COLLEEN McCULLOUGH Harper & Row, $9.95 STEVEN KROLL By now almost everyone will have heard of The Thorn Birds...
...103) Social Structures are good and necessary, but they also make the ministry of the transcendent very difficult...
...cember 1934 it was not "experience" alone she needed, it was, as this biographer persuasively argues, because she had reached a theoretical impasse as to how the machine becomes a part of this world's terrible oppression_9 Nine months and three factories later, burns, filth, cuts, infections, fatigue (but not fear) behind her, Simone Well knew there was a direct line of "reasoning" from our modern division and extreme specialization of labor (Taylorism) to the original separation of intellectual from manual labor Marx inveighed against when he saw it two thousand years earlier in her beloved classical Greece...
...He recently edited those lectures and is now writing a biography of F. O. Matthiessen...
...So far, so good (but I begin to see the hand of Woody Allen when Dr...
...Its special features are two: the special stress put on the "national security straitjacket" as the principal cause of all the ills that beset us, and a lengthy and valuable analysis of the importance of the religious dimensions and religious communities for the creation of a human world order...
...One strength of Mack's study is its meticulous grounding in the rich particularity of a single life lived in a historic time and place, enmeshed in a dense web of social relationships...
...Its encyclopedia-style format (677 large, double-columned pages) allows a certain leisurely breadth to the exposition...
...There are five major parts: "Ministry as Formation of Community...
...Ministry to God's Word...
...How Colieen McCullough wrote it at the rate of fifteen thousand words a night, once did thtrty thousand in a sitting, finally produced a manuscript of a thousand pages weighing ten pounds...
...Some of that intangible reward of the arduous journey is that he gets away from the expectations laid upon him by the city life...
...The method of Moody's book is extremely vague, a fact which is defended on the grounds that we are still cautiously making our way into this realm...
...It has a romantic view of the world that is often quite touching...
...Plutarch did not have available for his use what the twentieth century uniquely has to offer the historian, namely, a critical depth psychology...
...Grappling with these problems-especially when he is doing so in his spare time--even a good non-professional counselor will make mistakes...
...In the theology seminar the death professionals are already potentially present, ready to tell us how to feel, and when to...
...The problem is not that Mazlish is wrong that revolutionary ascetics are individuals who have "displaced libido" onto such abstract ideals as humanity, The Revolution, or The Rights of Man, and are therefore incapable of loving "real" people, including their own families...
...perhaps oxygen deprivation or the closing down of brain cells explains some of these things: I don't know (and I don't think anyone does), but in any case no strong conclusions can be drawn from Moody's book, which comes with a blurb from Richard Bach of Jonathan Livingston Seagull fame, and a foreword by Elizabeth Kiibler-Ross...
...The answer, unfortunately, is no...
...The author's statement that the dying people were teachers isn't entirely false, but like the statement that teachers learn from their students, it isn't entirely true either...
...The accounts of death here sound, frankly, a little corny and disappointing, like the grey world described by spiritualists who speak confidently of "the other side...
...If it is as thorough, practical, sensitive and balanced at this one it cannot come soon enough...
...but no one aspect or agency of the church can claim to be the priesthood...
...Ralph could have joined that group of distinguished fictional priests, from Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov through Father Urban in J.F...
...He must, first of all, defend why he believes an appreciation of the motives and purposes of historic actors, their private wellsprings of action and emotion, is important to a compelling historic account that aims at interpreting and understanding the complex intersection of a human life with others in history...
...He transforms his own flesh and blood into the fruits of his labor, food and wine . . . . Manual labor is either a degrading servitude or a sacrifice...
...Only the body dies...
...The self or spirit, or whatever you may wish to label it, is eternal...
...the depressed woman on the edge of suicide...
...The conclusion to On Death and Dying, in most ways a very decent book, is dreadfully sentimental...
...Though the book contains many useful insights, it is weak in three respects...
...He begins with a schematic, inadequately developed global "ideal type," the revolutionary ascetic, and then proceeds to "plug in" particular revolutionaries like Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin and Mao...
...But that alone cannot tell the tale...
...and "Patterns in Ministry" (with chapters on the Congregation, the Priest, and the World...
...JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIIq is a political theorist who has studied at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute...
...The doctrine is found in seedling form in the last chapter of On Death and Dying: "Watching the peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star...
...the totality of their Christian activity, individual or corporate, is rooted in their own free decision . . . . It appears, then, that there is no role for jurisdiction in the Christian community...
...519, emphasis added...
...Secondly, the book fails to take a hard look at what would be the necessary features of such an order...
...Although interconnected to some degree, each part could serve equally well as a separate monograph...
...How the Literary Guild snapped it up as their June selection and, in an incredible auction among paperback publishers, Avon Books paid a recordsetting $1.9 million for the paperback reprint rights...
...Within chapters, boldface and italicized headings appear interchangeable, and often a heading refers only to the first of several items coming before the next heading...
...A Pri~e of Our D4sorder: The L i f e o t T . E . L a ~ e JOHN E. MACK Little, Brown, $15 The Revolutionary A s e e t | e : Evolution o f a P o R t l e a l T l p e BRUCE MAZLISH Basic Books, $11.95 JEAN BETHKE EI~HTAIN Psychobiography, a species of history which deploys psychoanalytic concepts and insights to the study of human beings (usually 'great' human beings) in culture, remains a controversial enterprise...
...An editorialist in the New York Times recently criticized the "questionable wisdom of telling it all" and lambasted the enthusiasm for private revelations on public figures, a phenomenon the Times correspondent regards as synonymous with pandering to the reading public's baser instincts with the express aim of titillating them and, at the same time, filling the coffers of biographers with hard cash...
...Finally, I suppose the thanatology craze bothers me for the same reason a lot of pop psychology does...
...It's particularly interesting because the author is unknown--she's published one earlier novel, Tim, that didn't sell--and because both she and her book are Australian...
...Each joins a series of historical discussions on the New Testament evidence and the AnteNicene, Patristic, Medieval, Reformation and Modern church developments (separate chapters in all but part three, where the five periods are combined into three chapters) with a complementary chapter of theological reflections on the particular topic...
...Cooke, Ministry to Word and Sacraments between the structured world and the structured church, on the one side, and the "outside," the unstructured, on the other...
...He is not marching to that 'drum.' He is not in a hurry and he reads the signs...
...When pope or bishops go beyond the expression of their collegial witness and "engage in other teaching or theological reflection or prudential judging, their authority is as great as their understanding and no special weight attaches to their teaching because o~ Commonweal: 475 oSicial position...
...The contemporary historic biographer must take a stand, therefore, on whether or not he considers a treatment of individual psychology an essential and constituent feature in the analysis of historic figures or an inessential and trivial dimension...
...JAMES F. MCCUE ON BECOMING k COUNSELOR: A BASIC GUIDE FOR NoN-PROFESSIONAL COUNSELORS, by Eugene Kennedy, Seabury, $12.95...
...stopped and then started again dead, in any meaningful sense, and the fact that none of these subjects experienced brain death (which is increasingly the clinically accepted standard) is certainly important...
...Urban T. Holmes's book is a different piece of work, drawing extensively on many modern authors from a variety of disciplines, but also issuing a challenge to the chu-ch and its ministers to let ministry develop anew or more effectively the role of bridge between structure and anti-structure, between the order of the city and the chaos where the frightening otherness of God confronts us and challenges us to new growth...
...In a detailed and comprehensive way, Cooke's treatise is a call to the church to let go of many structures that have proven inadequate or harmful, and to embark anew on the venture of being C.hrist to the world...
...but this witness functions as truth to shape men's consciousness and not as positive law to control their behavior...
...Ivan Illieh has had a lot of good things to say about the dangers of professionalism, especially the sort which attends the most basic and sacred moments of birth and death...
...While Cooke's historical chapters are followed by relatively extensive sets of notes, the theological chapters have only brief selected bibliographies...
...There is no space to discuss here in detail Cooke's treatment of ministerial priesthood as a developing concept over the centuries, but he sees the notion of "jurisdiction, the progressive hierarchizing of ecclesiastical structures and the growing emphasis on proper ritual as all making their contribution...
...Mack moves from the particular to the universal carefully, defending each step along the way, and thus never loses DEATH AND THERAPY JOHN GARVEY A few people I know say they are actually looking forward to death...
...Going on too long too often, becoming monotonous and slack, not creating dramatic peaks or valleys, these are the book's principal failings...
...Thirdly, the book assumes that great numbers of people want a "just world order," and are impeded in achieving this by the "national security straitjackets...
...Only the shadows of what might been are there...
...It has been widely reviewed, and Becker's belief that virtually every human activity is a response to our continual need to evade the fact of dying is an important one, to say the least...
...it's the scenes within that suffer and produce the yawns...
...In fact at the beginning of On Death and Dying she speaks of the death of a farmer in his own home, with his family and friends nearby, in a completely healthy, non-professional manner: this is a good death, she says, and rightly...
...But at least there 0 0 0 0 0 0 000 REVIEWERS JOHN G~VEV, an editor with Templegate, just published Saints /or Confused Times (Thomas More Press...
...Although a brief gesture is made toward the larger historical eontext, Kilian clearly believes the 20th Century is the time of most creative experimentation toward bringing ecclesiological theory into closer accord with the social reality of the eucharistic community...
...I know others who fear death because they think of it (not, after all, unreasonably) as the end, obliteration...
...FATHER KEVIN G. O'CONNELL, S.J., is o n the faculty at Westun School of Theology in Massachusetts where he specializes in the Old Testament...
...Mack's A Prince of Our Disorder and Mazlish's own earlier work on James and John Stuart Mill embody the prodigious labors of many years...
...And how can the church, all of us, move toward a more 22 July 1977:476 helpfully Christian form of church life in the present and for the future...
...Mack defends his enterprise with skill, elegance, and genuine modesty...
...What about the truth...
...Mazlish, however, does the opposite...
...640) and finds expression in all it is and does...
...McCullough's inability to recognize what might have been sharpened and what left out...
...The winter wheat was already turned a fawnish silver by the glaring sun, miles upon miles of it rippling and bending in the wind, broken only by strands of thin, spindling, blue-leafed trees and dusty clumps of tired grey bushes . . . . " But even the descriptions of the land tend to go on too long too often, and to break down into lists...
...There has been an avalanche of death books, some of them very good...
...And Meggie's only real importance seems to lie in her ability to survive...
...Ktibler-Ross's On Death and Dying (Macmillan, $2.45) is one of those breakthrough books, the kind of writing which makes a major difference in the ordinary regard people have for a common but mysterious thing, which death certainly is...
...He argues strongly that the "power of jurisdiction," while proper to human society because it is not a community freely chosen by its members, has no place in the free society that is the church...
...Certain agencies, for example, the epiacopacy, may have a specific function relative to the preservation, development, and transmission of Christian faith...
...This surely begs the question...
...Almost without exception they found the experience reassuring, and time and time again they speak of such things as a "being of light" who is there as a beneficent presence, along with dead friends and relatives who welcome them...
...He easily accepts the need for structure in church life and in the ministay, but insists that the proper role of the minister is not just to maintain structures, but also to go outside them and to lead the community outside them, so that the God who is not confined to any structure can be encountered where he is most likely to meet us...
...RAYMOND A, ~HIROTH THEOLOGICAL MODELS FOR THE PARISH, by Sabbas I. Kilian, OFM, Alba House, $5.9...
...Does it really merit all this attention and money...
...140) Even the stories we tell are often used as means of control, rather than as ways of opening ourselves to the new...
...The dying people were there to teach people who tend to talk about death far too easily...
...Tara, after all, has more built-in drama than a two-story yellow sandhouse surrounded by gardens, dust, and flies...
...And the Civil War and the burning of Atlanta are going, quite naturally, to be more sensational than years of drought and a fire spreading over acres of bare land...
...This sentimentality is not accidental...
...239) Throughout Holmes's book, there are repeated efforts to bring alive the creative dimension of Christian life and ministry...
...RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS, pastor of the Lutheran Church of St...
...There have been the Patrick Whites, the Thomas Keneallys, the Sumner Locke to find evidence, or at least strong hints...
...The role of the priest is to serve this dialectic, and m particular to experience and enable others to experience the wilderness outside our control...
...we shall see him, then, as he is...
...He may talk too much, try to "cheer up" the depressed person or the mourner rather than deal with his feelinp...
...and the USSR might be expected to turn over to it military sovereignty...
...The thesis of this book could almost be inferred from its title: all the major problems confronting us are rendered unmanageable by the world system of sovereign nation-states...
...I don't...
...In other words, ';vith professionals, or with people whose professional training makes them professionally sensitive...
...John E. Mack's painstakingly researched, exhaustive study of the life of T.E...
...When Mary Carson leaves her fortune and Drogheda to the Church to further Ralph's career and Paddy agrees to stay on as manager instead 0f owner and Ralph leaves the area to fuel his ambition, the love remains...
...Which is not to say that the book is a total failure...
...But in the end we are told, "There is no need to be afraid of death...
...Better than speaking of people who "pass," like kidney stones, "from this world to the next...
...Perhaps it has something to do with Ms...
...It is as if you die and find, not heaven, but Peoria...
...FATHER RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., is associate editor of Commonweal...
...Toward a Contemporary Piety" (with chapters on He Who Images, the Place of Imaging, Dying to Image, and Image and Story...
...At least this is one danger...
...All of this is enough to send any aspiring writer straight to the typewriter...
...He considers Lawfence a paradigmatic example of the "enabler," the person who enables ~thers to see possibilities they would not otherwise have seen and to dare deeds they would not otherwise have dared...
...Mazlish's analysis fails to be as compelling as it might in part because he has molded his "evidence" too neatly into his three-part model of the revolutionary ascetic, a model he claims to derive from a rather mechanical "synthesis" of Max Weber and Sigmund Freud...
...How extraordinary these two could have been...
...I don't want to make light of what is in many ways an important achievement...
...Would the Socrates of Crito find it reassuring to be told about the "being of light...
...Best of all there is the feeling for the land, and for the Australian landscape...
...Veatch handles a number of extremely difficult questions with extraordinary sensitivity, and his chapters on the choice not to prolong dying and the right to refuse treatment are espeI cially strong...
...So much of her approach is Commonweal: 471 sight of his subject...
...Commonweat: 473 Elliotts, but even when they've been appreciated critically, the books have not begun to sell big...
...640) The priesthood of the entire Christian community is "the fundamental dynamism and purposefulness of its being" (p...
...Powers' Morte D'Urban, but we learn virtually nothing about him beyond his endless frustration and his Norman and Irish ancestry...
...The Buddha and Socrates and Jesus all saw something deeply significant in the dread we have of death...
...My other criticism is an esthetic one...
...The corporate charism of apostolic witness "has its own special authority in the church's life of faith...
...But we know that when he comes we shall be like him...
...brown and grey, even the trees...
...It is not the end of the physical body which should worry us . . . . Death is the final stage of growth in this life...
...The experience of God and the transformation of consciousness cannot be an individualistic affair, but must lead to creative action in the world...
...Ministering to God's Judgment" and "Ministry to the Church's Sacramentality...
...I must be somewhere in between...
...She could not agree with him, nor could additional manual labor convince her that injustice was exterior to man, rooted in material conditions alone...
...the student who has just lost a parent or who himself is about to die...
...Does it really measure up...
...I found this a stimulating book, easier to manage than Cooke's volume, but equally interesting and complementary...
...With all its scope and shifting scenery-from New Zealand and Australia to Rome and London--The Thorn Birds lacks any real dimension...
...To take the problem of structure first: the interviews in On Death and Dying occurred in the context of a seminar in which dying patients were invited to talk to theology students, for the benefit of the latter...
...This was the most difficult lesson of all...
...Holmes uses the images of "manaperson," clown, storyteller, and wagon master to give meaning to this role...
...On Death and Dying grew from Dr...
...One can and should prepare for death, and its constant reminder that we are contingent beings is necessary to any wisdom...
...And at Drogheda the endless Wet and Dry periods (one drought lasts almost ten years) become monotonous in the extreme...
...Bruce Mazlish's The Revolutionary Ascetic is a less successful book than Mack's Lawrence...
...Her overall structure is sound...
...When Paddy's mean-spirited older sister, Mary Carson, invites him to Drogheda to be her head stockman and eventual heir, Meggie is ten years old, with fascinating gray eyes and red-gold hair...
...Even MGM could do it better...
...It is not only in matters of teaching authority that the concept of jurisdictional authority is questioned by Cooke, but also in regard to sacramental absolution and the witnessing of marriages...
...who therefore reject their social ties and their own pasts and thereby come to represent to others a new "ego ideal...
...This is not a reiection of structures for Holmes, but a pilgrimage that allows us to return to the familiar structures without being imprisoned by them...
...A fairly long introduction gives some semblance of unity to the entire work, but the lack of any concluding summary left me with a feeling of disunity at the end...
...thus "history is often the result of individual choice and motive, and of human responsibility, both individual and collective...
...Certainly more research will be done in this area, and it might be reassuring to some people to know that a. peaceful death may not be as dreadful as they thought...
...It is a long way downhill, morally and intellectually, from Crito to this...
...JAMES F. MCCUE teaches at the School of Religion, University of Iowa...
...Not that there is anything deceptive or false about Moody, but what he has found---or at least his interpretation of his findings--makes him credulous at times, as he is, for example, in discussing the later stages of death described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, "which none of my subjects has gone so far as to experience...
...This makes it difficult to outline the chapters or even to g~'asp their development on a first reading...
...When Meggie marries a stockman for his gall and moves to North Queensland to work as a household maid while her husband cuts sugar cane, Ralph must seek her out...
...I have that hope, and have no idea what dying will be like...
...The book has all the earmarks of a rushed job...
...A more recent book, more limited in focus than Becker but essential for anyone interested in the ethical implications of the new awareness of death and dying, is Robert M. Veatch's Death, Dying, and The Biological Revolution (Yale, $12.95...
...Father Kennedy's guide is meant to rescue us from this ignorance and these mistakes, and to make us realize-through study and an awareness of our own emotional responses--what we can and cannot do when people come to us for help...
...GEORGE ABBOTT WHrrE was a Visiting Lecturer at MIT in 1975 where he organized a lecture series and seminar on Simone Weil...
...You may interpret this in any way which makes you comfortable...
...This is reassuring only as long as all you need is reassurance...
...From one perspective after another, Holmes puts flesh on the challenges to new creativity and risk that were implicit in Cooke's extensive analyses...
...Within the context of modern pressures on the constricting structures of church authority, Cooke's historical studies lead him to deny the value and the validity of episcopal governance as it is now exercised in the Roman church...
...Not if the characters are strong enough...
...Mazlish's psychological evidence and account of the lives of his revolutionaries relies heavily on secondary sources and is anecdotal and nonspecific...
...Veatch's book is subtitled "Our Last Quest for Responsibility," and it is hard to imagine a more responsible treatment...
...Control is necessary for human life, but we also need to open the door to the imagination with its ambiguity and risk, or there is no place for God in our life...
...Mack argues convincingly that Lawrence's heroism, coupled as it was with critical self-restraint, a unique capacity to empathize with others, and an inability to justify killing with facile appeals to the "national interest" provide us with a model of the anguished (because self-aware and critical) contemporary hero, the "man with a load on his mind...
...We forget that "the content of faith is love, and it is this that grounds the belief of man in God and in his relation to bim...
...Ktibler-Ross reassures us that "one of our patients had died during an interview...
...22 July 1977:470 Mack accords Lawrence sympathetic understanding and respect but not uncritical adulation...
...The book does not confront the possibility that an unjust world order may be in the "interests" of large numbers of people, and that national sovereignty may be a means for asserting those interests...
...Mack recognizes that individual psychology (and thus individual intentions, motivations and purposes) operates in and on history...
...But what of this fat family saga, this tale of tribulation on a huge sheep station in the Australian outback between 1915 and 1969, this giant novel called The Thorn Birds...
...One superlative song, existence the price...
...the resistant client who laughs at everything or throws up a screen of intellectual talk between himself and the counselor...
...the antisocial personality who cons the unwary priest with promises of reform...
...It is only when the self does not demand self-understanding in the name of control and predictability, but is willing to admit the mystery of its own being and surrender itself to this mystery, that God is able to be seen...
...There is no total death...
...In Meggie Cleary and Father Ralph de Bricassart, Colleen McCullough had the chance to create characters of real substance and she did not...
...Who can object to making death a permissible word...
...The book has three parts: "The Context of Ministry" (with chapters on the City, the Meaning, and the Mystery...
...Jesus's weeping at Lazarus's death and his dread at Gethsemane have more to do with what death is and will remain for human beings than the less than honest counsel to "interpret this in any way that makes you comfortable...
...Given the reciprocal relationship between private motivations, fears, and fantasies and public action, a psychological understanding of an "individual 'public' figure who characteristically lives out elements of his inner life in the public arena can . . . provide yet another valuable source of information about the psychology of action...
...It takes questions which have moved philosophers, poets~ and prophets to real depths, and reduces them all to questions of therapy...
...Lawrence stands out as exemplary: one of the finest works of the genre...
...Dare we not take it...
...Within the course of a year, every conscientious priest, teacher, lawyeru or friend--who may not be a trained psychologist will confront a good many of the wounded persons in this extremely valuable book: the passive-aggressive faculty member who always comes late to meetings and suddenly votes against a motion he had once supported...
...For Holmes, the God we hope to follow is easily lost from view when we settle comfortably into the structures of life in the church and in the world...
...This may all be true...
...We have to accept the a priori statements of the authors that the self is eternal, and so forth, and that for this reason there i-s no need to fear...
...In addition, he deals with such issues as the pros and cons of the "living will," legal definitions of death, the responsibility of doctors, the rights of patients, and public policy considerations...
...641) The ministry of liturgical leadership has a special relationship to the community's priesthood, bringing it to its fullest sacramental expression, and is requirec by the church's sacramental nature...
...The capital fact is not the suffering but the humiliation," she wrote, agreeing with Marx that the liberation of the workers must be accomplished in the work itself, and that the work, in order to become that of a free man, must be pervaded by thought, invention, and judgment...
...They feel sure that it will be wonderful, presumably because their faith presents them with a belief in an afterlife which is much better than this life, or because their current existence is miserable enough to make death seem a relief, whatever it invalves...
...And so they have to be left behind somehow on one's spiritual journey, not to be abandoned, but to be re-entered after we have been freed to imagine and to meet the uncontrollable...
...74) He contrasts faith, one's open expectancy toward God, with belief, the substance of what one understands to be the meaning of that relationship...
...He overstates his case at times, and his theological reflections have exercised some influence on the supposedly prior historical investigations, but his challenge cannot go unheard...
...Part of me is agnostic about what happens at death, but another part hopes at least for something more interesting than this...
...The work has much in common with some other world order literature, perhaps especially with the work of Richard Falk and the World Order Models Project...
...Kiibler-Ross and includes several good essays on the institutional, religious, and psychological aspects of dying...
...Simone Weil threw down these barriers and put herself on our level...
...Klibler-Ross hails Li/e Alter Li/e as a "courageous" book, and braces Moody to prepare for criticism from clergy, who will, she says, resent his explorations into a subject which they believe to be taboo, and from scientists who will call his work "unscientific...
...at the same time, he will not make anti-euthanasia fundamentalists happy...
...And therefore, "everything about the church--all its activities, all its institutions, all its ministries, all its memb e r s - a r e marked with a priestly character...
...Kiibler-Ross's experience with dying people, who were asked to speak freely about what they were going through, and her detailing of the stages of the dying person's response to impending death has since become classic...
...Death still is the ultimate helplessness, the thing before which we are absolutely powerless...
...All through Meggie's childhood their love continues to grow...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 15
