Nun, A Memoir/Seminary, A Search
Miles, Jack
Searching for God-& adulthood NUN. A MEMOIR Mary Gilligan Wong Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $15.95, 390 pp. SEMINARY, A SEARCH Paul Hendrickson Summit, $14.95, 330 pp. Jack Miles MARY GILLIGAN...
...Is that it...
...When she left, she was more nearly the adult she now is than he was when he left...
...In that sense, Fr...
...Well, she who has no regrets does not really mean "revenge," but we know what she does mean, and we forgive her for using the wrong word...
...Only part of his book deals with seminary life itself...
...Her "Intimate Account of One Woman's Years in the Convent and Her Eventual Return to the World" is, as that jacket line suggests, straightforward narrative...
...I doubt that anything in the anti-Catholic fantasy literature of life behind monastery walls, anything anyone ever invented to mock or embarrass the Catholic clergy, could match it for power...
...According to the publisher, serial rights to Seminary have been sold to Playboy and Esquire...
...Glennon is a married man...
...He was a seminarian for seven years...
...Bertin Glennon, a country pastor in Kentucky who happens also to be chairman of the local transit authority, chairman of the zoning board, chairman of the Regional Capital Improvement Program, and vice-president of the Clay County Development Association, "Do you think about the seminary much...
...Though neither man ever touched the other, the story is erotically as shocking as anything I have ever read...
...Did that search begin with the memory of a terrible, bloody night when Hendrickson's mother, unassisted, gave birth in the upstairs bedroom of her snowbound farmhouse to a dead infant...
...I have already written about Hendrickson's book in the Los Angeles Times, and I would like to draw on that review in making my comparison here...
...Personal and institutional transformation overlap more in her story than in his...
...For much of it, we find him on the road, looking his classmates up, searching them out, and talking to them...
...Hendrickson -sexually explicit, even graphic, in telling a story that is painful in the first place to himself - deserves credit both as a writer and as a man...
...He came before we could even leave the house for the hospital and spent his first night nestled close to Mom, Dad, and his proud brother...
...That simple human quest, rather than the more paradoxical religious one, is what her book is really all about...
...Why not...
...with exactly the dry, wry tone I recall from my own seminary years: "Why did you want to be a priest...
...Last Thoughts," Wong says, "I have no regrets" and even lists a number of traits which she is grateful to have and which, as she sees it, she owes to her convent years...
...Most works in the broad genre of Catholic memoir are either confession or diatribe...
...In a brief concluding chapter...
...The trick was to deflate your own idealism preemptively, make a joke out of it before they did, and thus rescue it...
...Eleven years of sleeping alone in cold-sheeted narrow beds...
...While Hendrickson is not an ex-priest, Wong is an ex-nun...
...three men shared my bed and my love now - the revenge was ever so sweet...
...Despite Hendrickson's visits to his classmates, it is her book that, taken as a document of the period, is the more representative...
...The talk is good talk...
...Little bit of Crusader Rabbit, maybe...
...She worked in a ghetto, read Hans Kung at Fordham, joined an encounter group...
...It sounds right, and sometimes it also sounds a little like a late-night TV movie...
...Her tone is peaceful- settled rather than smug-and in this is more typical of ex-priests and ex-nuns than Hendrickson's is...
...When the narrative is over, so is most of the puzzling over it...
...Hendrickson presents this psychological alternative at full strength, offering his own life and, as it were, his own body in evidence...
...Hendrickson's search, by contrast, is still under way, and his book races on with the excitement and the pain of it...
...It w,as something I had to do, I guess, to get here...
...Seminary is the courtship stage in the priestly life...
...Her success in it explains why in the end Nun is so much more satisfying - and so much less disturbing - than Seminary.isturbing - than Seminary...
...Nineteen of Hendrickson's twenty classmates are now ex-seminarians or ex-priests...
...Unfortunately for the church, this kind of ironic and public offense was rarely a good private defense...
...The awkward girl who despaired of normalcy, who was convinced that "no matter how much I tried I would never be accepted among the red-blooded American girls of the world...
...Hendrickson asks his former roommate, now Fr...
...I can only guess that one of the portions sold is Hendrickson's account of the strange, sexualized relationship that he maintained, or endured, for six years with his seminary spiritual father...
...Nun is well-written, but the accident of its publication in the same season with Seminary has not served it well...
...Lawrence would likely have got it backwards...
...and the account itself has something crucial to do with his search...
...Wong, a talented amateur, has been forced to compete with a brilliant professional writer, twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize...
...has made it...
...On its own terms, however, which are those of a story rather than those of Hendrickson's "search," Nun is a work of great charm and strength...
...Most of it is a blur...
...Crusader Rabbit, not John XXIII or John Kennedy or John Wayne...
...She writes, "Raam Darian Wong was born February 19, 1980 as lightning flashed and thunder split the sky...
...Did he decide, some ten years later, to enter the seminary because the priesthood "suddenly began to represent to an eighth-grade boy an antiseptic and asexual sanctuary - a haven, a womb, for conflicts too large and jumbled to solve . . . about birth, death, intercourse...
...He talks instead about the priests who talked to him about God when he, just a boy of fourteen, wanted to be like them...
...Jack Miles MARY GILLIGAN WONG'S convent is more decisively behind her than Paul Hendrickson's seminary will ever be behind him...
...Hendrickson's story begins in thunder and parturition, Wong's ends there, and something important hangs on the difference...
...In either case, the reader feels that whatever search took place, it was over before the writing began...
...Was his love for them the mediated love of God, or was it a blend of eroticized hero-worship and flight from adulthood...
...They weren't the greatest years of my life, and they weren't the worst...
...Only for the single remaining priest among Hendrickson's seminary classmates does it seem to have evolved into something more lasting and more nearly adult...
...Having done that, he draws back, refusing the psychological alternative and yet not accepting the theological alternative either but only clinging to the question...
...Wong did more of her growing up while she was still under vows...
...Lawrence, could he have imagined it, would have loved to write it, but D.H...
...Hendrickson does not talk much about God...
...Beginning as he did at the age of fourteen, she was a member of her community for eleven years...
...Glennon answers him: "Truthfully, no, Paul...
...Hendrickson entered the seminary as a boy and left as an adolescent...
...Did you want to save souls...
...The story she tells goes past her time of formation several years into her life as a working, professed woman religious...
...During her last four years, however, 1965-1969, so much was going on in the church...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 10
