Finding Fault:
Baumann, Paul
PLAYING FOR KEEPS FINDING FAULT Michael O. Garvey Thomas More Press, $10.95 paper, 200 pp. Paul Baumann After reading Michael O. Garvey one hesitates to imagine what the other six redoubtable...
...Won't Give It Back," "Vatican II: The Second and Improved Coming of Christ," and "U.S...
...liberation and duties...
...That joy was the reward of risk...
...Garvey never lets us off without a laugh, and he can turn a phrase with agility and grace...
...Sitting in his back yard on a hot summer afternoon watching his kids romp in the plastic pool, he moves effortlessly from domestic particulars to theology...
...Updating Opus Dei's Penance Rites" is a glorious spoof and rebuke of those orthodox pruderies that confuse asexuality with celibacy and holiness, and kinky asceticisms with spiritual achievement...
...It takes the life and spirit, not to mention the fun, out of things...
...There's sloth, envy, pride-and then there's always failure...
...He is a courageous patriot of the kitchen, the playroom, and the back yard sprinkler...
...policy and murder in El Salvador...
...But for most of us the transubstantiation of the ordinary is not, alas, as reliable as ex opere operato...
...Curing cancer...
...He knows that reducing religion to ethics is like limiting the study of novels to an explication of grammar...
...In short, he possesses "an understandable longing for the days when Catholics used to paint mustaches on the face of the Zeitgeist instead of taking it so seriously...
...necessity becomes blessing...
...Then I read his recent column demurring from the reform agenda of a widely publicized petition sponsored by Chicago's Call to Action...
...At last, I sighed, here is a man after my own cramped and stony heart...
...He has a sound Catholic horror of homilies and he even, bless him, hates cats...
...He writes brilliantly for this magazine...
...I found it immensely congenial...
...To pay the rent he runs interference for America's number-one football team, hi other words, he works in the public relations department at Notre Dame...
...Garvey rightly celebrates the transcendental virtues of family life...
...love, sex, and children...
...He can make distinctions: between therapy and liturgy...
...He also can make connections: between faith and sanity...
...Garvey has a sharp eye for what he calls fuzzyism, and a deep suspicion of those Catholic reformers who confuse alterations of the symbolic architecture of faith with the imperative to good works...
...Caring for Mother Teresa...
...But that is a minor reservation...
...Eats Third World for Lunch...
...Quarterbacking for the Chicago Bears...
...Garvey suffers mightily-sinning against charity in the process-fulminating about the "barely trained airhead with a master's in divinity who will require your attendance at a week's worth of evening slide shows about waterfalls and wheat...
...Like most columnists, Garvey is a miniaturist...
...At the author's encouragement, however, let me be captious for a moment...
...He is not fooled by antiquarianism or Ratzinger's tone-deaf spiels on American decadence, but neither is he seduced by the myth of progress or the infallibility of American virtue...
...Babysitting becomes magic...
...Garvey does many things well...
...It's one of the gifts of marriage: costly fidelity yields up invaluable fruit...
...dissent and real courage...
...Unlike most, he really looks at the small, seemingly insignificant things around him...
...There is much to praise in this collection...
...Certain games have to be played hard, if they're to be played at all," Sheed wrote...
...He is wholly happy, and his hands are as dirty as his children's...
...An edgy and especially subtle piece about a reunion with old prep school friends in New York City has Hoosier Garvey sniffing suspiciously at the shallow cosmopolitanism around him...
...Piloting the space shuttle...
...His deepest instincts may prove unintelligible, or even somewhat smug, to the uninitiated or the skeptical...
...the New York Times (our "breezily secular magisterium") and the truth...
...The more hirsute, and seemingly less abstemious, Michael writes a column for the National Catholic Reporter...
...It is a welcome and needed voice...
...Finding Fault, with its insinuating title, further confirmed this view...
...Do not misunderstand...
...Our incontinent wills, as well as the world, are made of less tractable stuff...
...As the resume indicates, he's good at juggling the sacred and the profane...
...His stubborn, cagey Catholicism is reminiscent of Wilfrid Sheed's description of the "freakish religiosity" of his youth...
...Adveniat Regnum Tuum" achieves an almost Chestertonian sense of the connections between the Christian story and all romance and adventure...
...In Sheed's evangelical home, Catholicism was something to take delight and joy in, not merely to pray over...
...So I've often missed Garvey the Younger in his unnatural habitat at the NCR...
...Finding Fault is a collection of Garvey's most recent and more provocative essays...
...Truth be told, I have difficulty wading through a newspaper whose headlines run something like: "Pope Steals Eucharist...
...We know what Michael's older, more Orthodox brother John does...
...Doing advance work for Mario Cuomo's presidential campaign...
...lay ministry and beer parties...
...But he is, thank God, a believer...
...More important, Garvey conveys a rare sense of faith as a gift safeguarded and handed down from one generation to the next, and as something he takes great delight in helping his own children unwrap...
...Michael O. Garvey plays hard.arvey plays hard...
...Paul Baumann After reading Michael O. Garvey one hesitates to imagine what the other six redoubtable Garvey siblings are up to...
...duty becomes joy-" What was it Mother Garvey mixed with the Wheaties to create such an attentive son, such a prize spouse...
...There [is] a great deal more to Christian life than being the kind of character Michael Landon always plays on television," Garvey writes in guardedly acknowledging the legitimacy of some of Cardinal Ratzinger's worries...
...Garvey is no Pollyanna...
Vol. 117 • August 1990 • No. 14
