Nancy Mairs's Book of Hours:

...In Arizona she and her husband bined, and Nancy and George became plane...

...What Mairs Christian culture toward emphasis on the in the kitchen...

...ALANE SALIERNO MASON is an editor at Harcourt Brace...

...A similar metaphor aphas done for the teachings of the church individual...

...The pres- scribes her position on (if not her past pracMairs and her husband decided to be- ence of others visibly committed to the tice of) marriage as "conservative," but that come Catholics is titled, "In Which I am faith, a lifelong exposure to the aesthetic may be all she's conservative about, and Not Struck Blind on the Road to Damas- richness of Catholic culture, a sense of so- her characterizations of the church hiercus...

...It suggests some vestigial depen- This she does in her work, and if the dence on authority (nonpatriarchal, per- whole of life includes some undigested Yet although Mairs prom- haps, but authority nonetheless) that chunks of abstract feminist theory and ises in her introduction doesn't quite go with the irreverence, the unsupported reflections on the evils of "to avoid the temptation hard-won independence, and the author- capitalism, so be it...

...This rather bold statement is not trol is hard to justify, as it is hard to fault dle-of-the-road line-toeing, brought to presented as a matter for discussion or de- Mairs for hewing too closely to feminist one's knees in admiration...

...The notion that she, whose own for us and God's call for us to love ourselves...

...of cruel nuns, degenerate priests, airless able...

...Under these conditionsas one learns in greater detail in her collections of essays, Plaintext (University of Arizona, 1986) and Carnal Acts (HarperCollins, 1990), Nancy Mairs almost did not survive...

...and the crippling progression housekeeper who never puts anything memoir of a life spent "against all princi- of multiple sclerosis-seems something back in quite the same place twice," or, ples of reason-in an uneasy and unre- of a miracle, if a miracle of the this-world- most beautifully: "Not an immutable enlenting state of religious faith...

...I can't particular) and expected to grow up to fit snugly into the role of "the little woman," never to utter a discouraging word or an impolite truth, never to discuss religion, politics, or sex...

...Mairs's Mairs takes these risks as boldly and as mental hospital and twenty-one rounds of view of God is more organic, and often knowingly as she does is one of the most electroconvulsive shock therapy...

...Her unassuming ally that "perhaps even Jesus was a father...

...Mairs is radically unpretentious...

...What she cares about is the emo- individual presence...

...That Nancy severe depression, six months in a state ject our nastier predilections...

...two sui- funnier: the "messy and absentminded refreshing pleasures of Ordinary Time, her cide attempts...

...the truths of our own experience...

...At times her approach might be too or on the Great Mysteries, her honesty and humor come liberally and impartially into play...

...occasionally toss in abstractions that are church as a hopelessly stubborn old rela- For those of us who grapple with a world political: patriarchy, capitalism, Western tive with failing eyesight whom we love view that is both secular and religious and thinking...

...in a Book discussed us over, creating and then testing our charnakedly self-revealing age, in This essay acters as in a recipe for personhood...

...If God is going to be presthough she does wonder what it would have Mairs is neither vain nor superstitious ent to me,' I recall reflecting one evening been like to have had female saints as role enough to suggest that God subjected her as George hunched in spasms over the pink models...

...She does not here as they challenge the church to live the gospel mesindulge treacle or cant, nor is she a mys- sage and as they claim their rightful role in it for themselves...

...Whatever skepticism as "the most complete and sophisticated tic"-seems a little rough...

...The most effective of incarnation...

...No it is self-revealing in all the Ordinary Time: Cycles in Mar- one, she insists, handed her multiple sclewrong ways...

...she'll simply have to pleasing both "God and Mama" with nicate God to us in her books...

...ticle of faith, one of a number that clot her she might never have found within her- In the "companion volume" to Ordinary otherwise lucid prose style with phrases self and her own life the makings of these Time, a memoir rich in sensory detail like "characteristic of patriarchally shaped books...

...There's a predictability and a glib- anyway and who may yet cough up bits who, rather than sacrifice one for the ness to the references to these Bad Guys of wisdom we might not have discovered other, are intent on muddling along in the (George Bush, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, on our own, the unrelieved portrait of it grey area in between, Nancy Mairs offers Star Wars...

...one-and there may, in the end, be only 0-87793-507-6 August 176 pages, $7.95 one-thing Nancy Mairs seems absolutely certain about, it is "the radical uncertainLOVING YOURSELF MORE ty of life...

...NO TREACLE, NO CANT, NO CERTAINTY Nancy Muirs's Book of Hours ALANE SALIERNO MASON spiritual autobiography is troller who creates and then saves us from not the most respectable of adversity, plants obstacles and then helps genres these days...

...she will not separate the Art and Story by physical and the spiritual realms in a way Mary Lou Sleevi Images bold in form, color and word capture the strength that would allow this to be so even in a and vulnerability of twelve gifted women of scripture in metaphorical or metaphysical sense...

...legs are prone to collapse beneath her 0-87793-513-0 August 128 pages, $5.95 without warning, moves in a world buttressed by certainties, would seem ludiSISTERS AND PROPHETS crous to her...

...U 24: 5 November 1993 Commonweal...

...Hers is the kind of faith that is Virginia Ann Froehle, RSM not taken for granted but chosen daily, even A woman's book...

...She lives in New York City...

...Yet in the moments In writing about facing death, she detional truth of the relationship between God of what seems like borrowed prose the scribes the task of "bringing the whole of and creation, and the nature of God as we membrane becomes opaque-behind it life to consciousness," including its sorcan conceive and approach God through one sees a book, and behind that another rows, pains, incongruities, and terrors...

...In uniforms, the rote recital of catechism (of Mairs might have gone the way of her introduction she writes of trying to write these, the lurid statues are the only part Shakespeare's hypothetical sister in Vir- Ordinary Time while her husband was in she might be sorry to have missed out on, ginia Woolf s A Room of One's Own...

...in their atheism, moving soundly and 0-87793-514-9 August 120 pages, illus., $12.95 thoughtlessly wherever their strong legs bear them, are more familiar with certainty Available from your local bookstore, or than she is in her faith...

...0-87793-510-6 July 184 pages, $8.95 ately wants is a cure for her illness, but what she is getting is a healing more radical and profound (if far messier) than any LISTENING TO THE MUSIC physical "cure" might provide...

...armingly direct-a voice both conversa- tales embody, in themselves, the mystery Clearly it doesn't matter to Mairs much tional and literary...

...anoma, for "God is another order of being, one is not in complete control of one's own upon whom we would do well not to profate, and is not meant to be...

...one leaves grateful to have spent orlife of originality into them...

...Mairs's work goes to the heart of what dinary time in that place, in the compaIn her notes on sources Mairs describes matters, to the elucidation of faith em- ny of an extraordinary woman with whom how she reads for an hour or two each day bodied in an everyday life-a life of dev- one is proud to share the family name before beginning to write, and I find my- astating illness, marital distances and "mortal...

...A convivial sharing of a warm shaken down their words for their essen- into error all the same...

...Mairs deversion...

...chemotherapy...

...At least she has the to withdraw into abstrac- ity of personal experience which charac- integrity to confess an inability to balance tions, whether intel- terize the rest of Mairs's prose and thought...

...Without them, Ordinary Time would The down-to-earthness of Mairs's spirconfessionals, lurid statues, itchy woolen most likely not have been written, and itual reflections is a continual surprise...

...Between the time of her first tity detached from time but a continual callSince Mairs, a convert to Catholicism, breakdown, in her early twenties, and the ing and coming into being...

...her belief, grounded on the whether he was or wasn't: she is hetero- moments in the book are those when one rock of her own being in the world, redox not to challenge the orthodox, but sim- feels, as if right on the other side of the veals itself as something miraculous, full ply because her reflections have led her membrane of the printed page, her very of grace...

...a checkbook on the same page as she oflectual, moral, or spiritual," she does For those of us who see the institutional fers her opinions on macroeconomics...

...Her closest approximation of a mys- 0-87793-509-2 July 208 pages, $9.95 tical experience comes when her multiple sclerosis is worsening by the day, and she begs God to heal her...

...Consistent with the earthiness of Mairs's AVE MARIA PRESS NOTRE DAME, INDIANA 46556 219.287.2831 approach is her route to Catholicism, In Canada: B. Broughton Co., Ltd...

...101 meditations that move women to dwell on the most basic of all Christian truths: God's love hourly...

...22: 5 November 1993 Commonweal scramble away from it up to some loftier politics...

...Among a number of other as patriarchal oppressor-and of Cath- evidence for just how fertile a place that quotes and references to liberation the- olicism as "of all the not-notably woman- can be...

...and satisfying brew is truly what reading tial reality (if there is one), reinterpreted There are the politics of the church, and Mairs's work, in its best moments, is them in more concrete terms, breathed the then there is the faith of the church...

...Francis Bernard O'Connor, CSC Voices of Catholic women around the globe are captured up their meaning one day...

...book...

...These instances are is more the rule than the exception, and it skipping over the introduction to that relatively few (and often leavened by becomes easy to forget that modern fem- book to entering a house through the back humor), but where they do appear they inism grew out of the bias of Judeo- door and sitting down to a cup of coffee seem borrowed, undigested...

...Certainly the one might have had about liberation theand enduring form of totalitarianism which particular intransigence of the church on ology or potluck Catholicism, one is, with human social consciousness has yet de- issues like women priests and birth con- one's stereotypes and arrogance and midvised...

...Others moments of their most profound contact with God...

...I profess each week to believe in `the resurrection of the dead and the life Introducing .. . of the world to come.' I figure it's all right to repeat these words, a venial lie, anyway, since I might well believe them if I LIKE BREAD, had any idea what they meant and maybe THEIR VOICES RISE1 sheer reiteration will force them to yield Sr...

...Here is a good bate or justification, but instead as an ar- theory when one realizes that without it woman...

...Not was not brought up in the church, she es- publication of her first book, feminism transcendence, that orgy of self-alienation capes the cliches of many of the Catholic came into its own and antidepressant drugs beloved of the fathers, but immanence: God contributions to memoir: the descriptions and psychotherapy became widely avail- working out Godself in every thing...

...like...

...tic...

...When the three ENNEAGRAM COMPANIONS Suzanne Zuercher, OSB words "But I am" are articulated in her con- The newest voice in the realm of enneagram literature sciousness, she realizes that she is asking discusses its potential for understanding the centered fife for the wrong thing: what she so desper- - so useful to those in spiritual direction relationships...

...That she did survive-despite attacks of agoraphobia so acute they at one point confined her not only to her house but to one corner of her living room couch...

...This is a woman who grasps the ologian Leonardo Boff, Mairs approv- friendly forms of Christianity...

...She writes of "practical expertise," discovered a Catholic community where Catholics...

...2105 Danforth Ave., Toronto, ON M4C 1K1 which was at least partly through left-wing Commonweal 5 November 1993: 23 "nontraditional" for some whom it might self wishing she would just plunge in and infidelities, the rebellion of children, deotherwise have reached...

...OF THE SPIRIT Some in the secular world insist that the The Art of Discernment one thing all religious people cling to, that David Lonsdale, SJ Examines how the regular practice of discernment helps secularists are adult enough to do with- us in the choices we make, placing us more in harmony out, is the notion of certainty...

...there...

...The chapter describing how fields, in the camps, in the jails...

...she does wade through the mess chemotherapy is unruly behavior (protosexual behavior in not see God as the kind of supreme con- currently making in our lives...

...Yet within the world of contem- called Remembering the Bone House consciousness" and "(re)productive and/or porary American Catholicism, this view (HarperCollins, 1989), Mairs compares consumptive markers...

...Yet if there's with God and one another...

...One risks looking ridiculous, riage, Faith, and Renewal, by rosis and her husband a cancerous melsounding irrational, confessing a sense that Nancy Mairr, Beacon Press, $20, 238 pp...

...and that though a church dom- plies at the end of Plaintext, where she fathers she does not seem to have done for inated by women might not fall into iden- invites the reader to come by for a cup of those of her more contemporary mentors: tical kinds of error, it would no doubt fall almond tea...

...cial justice, an attraction to the concept of archy and its views are decidedly irrevWhether her sights are trained on herself grace-somehow these elements com- erent...

...She calls God save her reading for the end of the day, so bilitating depression, and caring for dif"she," has no use for the concept of Mary's she wouldn't have less felicitous voices ficult strangers (including the welfare virginity (an outlook many of us must se- in her head as she writes to interrupt her mother and the emotionally disturbed cretly share), and, in evoking God's own eloquent writing voice, which is lean, teen-ager who, at different times, move parental feelings towards us, notes casu- agile, surprising, both graceful and dis- into the Mairs's home...

...ly kind...

...Instead, she was raised a prop- to these travails and then brought her plastic basin that accompanied us home er Yankee Congregationalist, fearful of dis- through them so that she could commu- from the hospital...

...the most word of God and embodies it in her own ingly quotes his description of capitalism radically and intransigently misogynis- very human life...

...Certainly it was not out of any "the homeliness of the holy," "the pro- nuns in tennis shoes "spent their summer attraction to the institutional stability and tracted process I've come to know as con- vacations with the farm workers, in the dogmatic rigors of the church...