A Tremor of Bliss, edited by Paul Elie:

...In admiring and sheltering words, Kathleen Norris writes about the gallant girl martyrs, who, giving themselves up for slaughter during the persecutions that racked the church in the third and fourth centuries, rebelled against the constraints of family and society...

...He had tried fervently to convert them to his faith: he squirreled food away, doling it out to the deserving...

...In no other food," she divulged, was she "ever to find pleasure...

...But, Wolff cautions, "I believe that this disgust is the greatest spiritual problem of our time...

...If all things are true, then what particular thing is worth living for, let alone dying for...

...By conforming to Christ, Saint Catherine believed she was saved and participated directly in the salvation of the world...

...her creative accomplishments were astonishing (she authored The Dialogue, one of the most important spiritual writings of the Middle Ages...

...In one of the best essays in this collection, Tobias Wolff does neither...

...the saint's apostolic fervor had helped to ensure the annihilation of the lives and the culture of the people whose souls he had come to save...

...She needed no instruction in the lives of the saints to realize the transformative power of physical pain, twisting a vise on her fingers and pressing ice to her tongue, reveling as the blood oozed out (blood lingered in the mouth of the other Catherine when she received the host...

...And there is the occasional infusion of a patronizing tone, a chiding inflection, as if the saint should have known better, as we moderns do (in Bruce Bawer's essay on Saint Francis, for example...

...Novelist Kathryn Harrison interweaves her own story of loss and redemption with the life of Saint Catherine of Siena...

...Years of inflicting "toe crushing" pain on others had leached Fernandez of his confidence, wreaked havoc in his professional life, and spawned potentially dire consequences (Fernandez is a Latin music journalist who frequents salsa clubs, where being "deft, smooth, sharp, suave," is de rigueur...

...Fernandez delivers a perfect balance of solemnity and levity, so familiar from the lives of the saints...

...The other man kept brushing until the crawler stopped, looked up again, and said, 'If you don't stop, I'm going to stand up and fuck you up...

...Back in New York and several puddle splashes later, Fernandez realized to whom and for whom he should have offered his prayers: "That was Saint Lazarus...

...Among the teeming crowd, Fernandez saw an able-bodied man crawling on bloodied knees, his small, naked, club-footed boy saddled on his back...

...Striving for candor, David Plante's essay on Saint John of the Cross reeks of vainglory...

...she abjured sleep and sought to transmute an unruly body into one that mirrored her mother's fashion-honed expectations: she stopped eating...

...There are captivating parallels in the lives of Saint Catherine and Kathryn Harrison, but the saint's discipline was saturated in dazzling theology: "it is by such suffering that we become conformed to Christ crucified," she wrote...

...Joining a procession of "walkers," "genuflectors," and slitherers, the doubting but determined dyslexic journeyed several miles outside Havana to the rural shrine of Saint Lazarus to voice his particular plea: "Saint Lazarus, Babalu-Aye, please help me walk straight without tripping, stumbling, twisting my ankle, stepping on feet, or splashing in puddles...

...Harrison freed herself of her body's constraints...

...Wolff asks...

...This is a timely and necessary essay...

...pampers and the color pink," ponders pregnancy as transubstantiation and empathizes with Saint Joseph, patron of harried fathers, whose "consternation over his wife's seeming procreative autonomy is the consternation of every-man...

...his nose was their Paradise...

...he hectored, cajoled, and ridiculed...

...Wolff is both chastened and appalled by Saint Jean, a man "of unbending principle" whose faith in his God was unwavering and ferocious and whose missionary zeal is testimony to the terror of brilliant certainty...

...Anna Harrison Amazing in their variety, as the seventeen essays that editor Paul Elie has gathered together in A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints illustrate, the lives of the saints express startlingly disparate ways of imitating Christ...

...this after all, was our gentle Savior's food...

...Saint Jean de Brebeuf has frequently been dismissed as barbaric or embraced with pernicious sentimentality...

...In a soulful and sassy meditation, Commonweal's associate editor Paul Baumann, awash in "plastic and polyester...

...Saint Catherine rejected ordinary food but sought expiation for all souls and found sustenance by imbibing the pus from the cancerous breast of a callous-but soon contrite-companion...

...Harrison's emaciated look produced a crop of bones, newly emerged "angles and hollows," but the bait with which she had hoped to entice her mother became her own greatest temptation: "I loved my transformed self...

...One doesn't have to be Catholic or even religious (and a number of these authors are neither) to become charmed or inspired by saints' lives, their stark confessions and acute spiritual insights, and, sometimes, their endearingly comedic stories...

...But Harrison mistakes her patron's zest for extravagant self-abasement with a rejection of life, and it is not clear if she recognizes the enormous differences between her own willful feats of endurance and the saint's imitatio Christi...

...Hansen recoils in disapproval from Ignatius's penchant for penitential asceticism, and few of these essayists appreciate the way in which so many of the saints chose suffering not in order to punish their bodies, but because to do so was to merge with the body of their Savior, whose suffering saved...

...From the militant and humbler Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Ron Hansen hopes no less than to "figure out how to live magnificently...

...Francine Prose lingers over the life and writings of the towering Saint Teresa of Avila, who explodes conventional ideas of what it means to be female...

...they elicit anger and praise...

...In 1629, Saint Jean, a young aristocrat from Normandy, landed in what is now Quebec...

...Harrison's is a mesmerizing essay, raw and powerful...

...And yet, "everything he did, he did with the best of intentions...

...Tossed into the prayerful crowd was a pious penitent clearing the way by brushing the path for "the crawler," who announced that he wanted to feel the pebbles, the pain...

...In an effort to win the love of an intractable mother, a young Harrison tried desperately to harness the experience of rapture, first attained through the healing hands of a Christian Science practitioner after a bloody car accident...

...The saints-the cranky, the gregarious, the sensual, the neurotic, the intellectual, the stubborn, the sweet-break into the lives of these writers, disturbing, illuminating, and provoking...

...Her emersion into God thrust the holy woman into affairs of the state and of the church, and into the lives of countless souls...

...they perplex and disgust and enthrall.ust and enthrall...

...Enrique Fernandez writes a rip-roaring, thigh-slapping, soul-searching, and spirit-rousing essay, featuring Saint Lazarus and the author, who, having traveled to Cuba to report on the daily lives of the citizens of his mother country, became a skeptical but eager supplicant to the patron of the crippled and the feet impaired, hoping that this holy amalgam of Christian saint and Yoruban deity might cure his "foot dyslexia...

...It is an unmuffled proclamation that the hold of the holy dead is tenacious: they continue to tease the imagination, inflame the passions, and provoke the conscience of women and men...

...I know I am not alone," he writes, "in my disgust with the flaccidity of spirit that comes upon us as the consequence of trying always to accommodate the justice in each claim on our sympathy and understanding...

...straining for profundity, it is tedious and banal...

...He was a missionary to the Hurons, a people for whose rituals and beliefs, healers and feasts, he had an unfettered disdain...

...As Wolff points out, there is much to admire about Saint Jean...

...A quarter century after Saint Jean arrived to preach among the Huron, their population was decimated...

...Yet Saint Jean weathered famine and disease, violent winters and lonely solitude, and offered his life for the Hurons...

...The martyr is seductive and attractive, particularly perhaps for those who fear that under the cloak of multiculturalism, moral relativity and a feebleness of will threaten to triumph...

...Still, A Tremor of Bliss is enormous fun and instructive, too...

...Harrison's fashion-conscious mother marveled at Saint Catherine's dietary propriety: "she lived for years on one lettuce leaf...

...In a disarmingly confessional essay, Jesuit Avery Dulles writes about Saint Robert Bellarmine, another fiercely loyal Jesuit theologian (but not a somber one: Saint Bellarmine refused to brush flies away from his face...

...She raises important questions about what may motivate the appetite for renunciation: Saint Catherine "ate" and "savored" the souls of her sisters and brothers...

...These essays are liberally peppered with delightful and disturbing anecdotes, but there are disappointments...