The Way of Heaven POETRY

...pressed to think of a theologian giving us a more powerful vision of those issues...

...with conical hats "To me a 'Catholic writer' is someone who uses the conthat shade their faces emerge cerns and/or traditions of the Catholic faith in his or her from the threadbare whiteness...

...The work goes much further than previous treatfor discussing larger issues is part of what makes ments of the subject, using wolf biology, Native American beL him so highly regarded as an author...

...the man's work...

...Melville's Moby He contemplates the patterns of rose Dick, Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat," and Thoreau's and chrysanthemum beginning Walden pose similar questions in the same way...

...Powers's priests, or discernible in the relentless purfrom a far-off country suit of the Christ in the most troubled and odd of us (Flannery O'Connor), or in the heartfelt urge to portray the very come to drink from a Holy Well...

...His themes are finally responsibility, community, grace, and love, and of these the greatest is love-as Saint Paul says...

...The treatment of Lopez uses natural history to broach questions about every- wolves serves as an especially notorious example: "Throughthing from living a virtuous life to responsibilities toward a out history man has externalized his bestial nature, finding community...

...when he feels uneasy, teaches him Barry is clearly a man of Catholic nature, says Doyle, "alto look for release ways trying to draw his fellow travelers and sufferers and when the way seems supplicants together in a community alert to its responsito narrow, and in the darkest hour bility to the least of God's creatures...

...Most na- liefs, and a story from the life of Saint Francis to examine ture writers address only ecological issues, but the attitude of humans toward nature...

...He has put his sacramental and incarnational than Barry Lopez," says Dou- sins of greed, lust, and deception on the wolf and put the glas Burton-Christie, associate professor of Christian spiri- wolf to death-in literature, in folklore, and in real life...

...His writing is filled with sacramentality: the idea with the wilderness in themselves, as Saint Francis sugthat ordinary physical things mediate the holy...

...The wolf liness in Early Christian Monasticism (1993...

...Michael Jewell Despite its Catholic qualities, Lopez's work has gained renown primarily as natural history, not religious literature...

...This Commonweal 16 March 24, 2000...

...tuality at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and Lopez sees this treatment of the wolf as a microcosm of author of The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Ho- mankind's treatment of the wilderness as a whole...

...a scapegoat upon which he could heap his sins and whose "It's hard for me to imagine a contemporary writer more sacrificial death would be his atonement...

...But where to wear thin at that section Thoreau and other Trancendentalists like Ralph Waldo of carpet upon which Emerson considered nature divine, Lopez considers it simhe tends to walk ply one manifestation of God's presence, though he admits to recognizing that presence more easily in nature than in most frequently...

...His 1978 book, Of Wolves and Men, won the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for nature writing and earned Lopez a reputation as one of the most promising young figures in opez's use of natural history as a springboard the field...

...work," says Brian Doyle, a friend of Lopez and the editor of They move closer the less he tries Portland Magazine, "either as setting and costumed character, to keep them in focus, pilgrims like J.F...

...I'd be hard- gested, and not simply project it onto something else...

...The Way of Heaven By addressing such issues in terms of landscape, Lopez follows a long tradition in American literature...

...Where fallen petals human society...

...The idea that the world of night they lead him toward is suffused with divine grace, that God is in everything (not their gleaming city, existing that God is everything, which is pantheism) and thus all beyond a range of seemingly things are precious and priceless and holy, is at the root of impenetrable mountains...

...His sense of the sacramental quality of nacover a surface of indeterminate ture, its ability to mediate between the human and the divine, depth, and acacia trees accounts for his work's resemblance to that of Catholic writcatch the wind, he sees men ers like Gerard Manley Hopkins...

...This violence toward the wolf and the wilderness it carnation, that God has taken human flesh in the form of represents will end only when human beings come to terms Christ...

...Catholic notion of an ocean of grace available to us in our Their presence helps to calm him brokenness and struggle (Andre Dubus...

...The way he stud- was trapped and killed because it epitomized the wilderies something carefully, intensively, and then articulates it so ness that settlers sought to tame and replace with farms and that a reader can feel its power reflects the mystery of the In- ranches...