My children at sea
Houghton, William
us very close to what lectio should be, as Basil Pennington points out in his brief introduction to the book). This is a fine anthology that would be a welcome addition to anyone's personal...
...Now the water looked cold, deep, and frightening...
...What caught my attention was Gillian's head, bobbing thirty yards behind the Windsurfer...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 30 THE LAST WORD MY CHILDREN AT SEA William Houghton The wind was gusty, kicking up whitecaps...
...Such a case is obviously easier to make for figures like Herbert, Vaughan, Donne, Traherne, and moderns like Eliot and Thomas...
...When the wind thrashes and misbehaves, she grows anxious, shakes, and slips off the board...
...I sat on the pier with a beer, the paterfamilias, lord of all I surveyed...
...We went so fast we were airborne...
...Solanus Casey Edited by Michael Crosby Crossroad, $19.95,275 pp...
...The only peculiar side to his spiritual life was his lifelong devotion to the fourvolume The Mystical City of God by the seventeenth-century Poor Clare, Mary of Agreda—a work which for a time rested on the Index...
...while insisting that the Anglican biblical tradition, mediated by the Book of Common Prayer, provides a common ground...
...I don't think I was overly sensitive in hearing a touch of irritation in her voice...
...Last year I witnessed Rip Torn (whose early reputation was that of an actor who ate directors for breakfast) fit himself quite nicely into the Hartford Stage Company's production of Tennessee Williams's Camino Real...
...How the process of Solanus Casey fares (and every indication is that he was a person of great prayer and extraordinary self-giving) is not for us to say...
...Solanus Casey is a textbook example of the traditional candidate for beatification and canonization...
...Better a glimpse of glory than a ho-hum uniformity...
...At the same time, I wish he had included prose writers, since that tradition within Anglicanism 29 is so rich and too little studied...
...Tired from this play one day, I sailed back to the pier where my young adult children waited their turns...
...the bucking forces dumped me into the lake...
...When everything clicked—the sail at just the right angle, one arm cocked, the other straight as I leaned back (letting my weight do the work)—then the board took off like a rocket over the waves...
...Gabriel and I are figuring out the best way to pick me up...
...And I called back, "You guys are terrific...
...His sharply delineated focus is on the Christian life as seen in the tradition of English lyric poetry extending from post-Elizabethean writers to the twentieth-century poets W. H. Auden and Welsh priest R. S. Thomas...
...Gabriel, twenty-nine, is tall and muscular...
...Furthermore, Countryman's decision to focus on the lyric allows him only passing comments on Eliot whose "Four Quartets" is easily the greatest religious poem of the past century, though hardly a lyric poem...
...Sacred monsters don't always behave monstrously...
...You guys were sailing great," I called out diplomatically, and slowly paddled back to our dock...
...This is a fine anthology that would be a welcome addition to anyone's personal library...
...It was impossible to tell at that distance...
...God knows, my children have more serious decisions to make than how to handle a Windsurfer—where to go to school, what trips to take to other continents, which career to pursue, which partner to mate with...
...Best of all, of course, would be a star in a good production to which the star disciplines his talents...
...They grew on me, became a part of me...
...and a living tradition...
...Thousands attended his funeral and, after his death, his reputation grew as many people invoked his aid in their prayers...
...They started to make progress, but then went over again, like a flame extinguished...
...I had the brief experience of flight, only to have the wind shift and dump me again...
...And, if the productions are completely tailored to the sacred monsters who are known as stars, so what...
...I climbed back on the board and hauled up the sail for another go...
...The wind must have picked up, because the sail flipped over, hardly visible when it lies flat on the water like that...
...Michael Crosby's book on the American Capuchin friar Solanus Casey (1870-1957) gives those interested in saints and the saint-making process an inside look at the kind of dossier compiled for the canonization process...
...It blasted from the northwest, then shifted abruptly to the northeast, striking the sail from the opposite side and making it crackle like a volley of pistol shots...
...On a warm summer day, the sun beating down and heating the skin, these frequent spills are pleasant, and the water itself is a welcome bath, the primordial soup...
...they yelled...
...I was no expert on a wobbly Windsurfer...
...It is less clear in a poet like Blake where other factors enter in (for example, Swedenborg...
...But it is common practice in the world of opera for great talents to lend themselves to what Waffle calls "small venues...
...Then up it popped again...
...Rather than devote chapters to individual writers Countryman identifies four themes in four central chapters: the resources of image and language...
...But then there was a sudden shift in the weather: the sky darkened, the air cooled...
...The author wants to show that the poets he discusses have something classically Anglican about them, and to demonstrate to what degree the English lyric tradition addresses the present reality of Anglicanism, which is hardly defined by church life in the British Isles...
...As I did with my parents: not giving much thought to their feelings—truly I hadn't the energy to consider me and them at once...
...From my particular vantage point I saw the situation as dangerous...
...Whoops...
...I wondered if the wind was too strong for him to maneuver closer to her, or if he was teasing her...
...A model Franciscan religious whose academic deficiencies were such that he was ordained to the priesthood but was not given faculties for solemn preaching or hearing confessions—a so-called sacerdos simplex—Casey exercised his ministry as a doorkeeper at various religious houses in Detroit...
...Now I must aspire to the talent of benign neglect...
...His strategy is to admit the protean nature of Anglicanism (he says that what is unique about Anglicanism is its lack of uniqueness...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...but who's to say...
...William Countryman's The Poetic Imagination is part of a series edited by Philip Sheldrake under the general title "Traditions of Christian Spirituality...
...What is interesting in this volume is the rhetorical tone that is adopted to make its case...
...Be that as it may, the importance of this volume is Countryman's emphasis on the little-explored topic of poetry as a locus for shaping a vision of the Christian life...
...When I got there, I called out and offered my help...
...He had an extraordinary reputation for his spiritual counseling, the power of his prayer, his generosity to the poor, and his work as a healer...
...All a father can do is call it as he sees it, and have the courage of his mistakes...
...It's like the fierce play of lion cubs: no skin broken...
...Kenneth Woodward's Making Saints (1990) provides an authoritative and highly readable account of the process of canonization in the Catholic church...
...Human offspring need this risky exploration to test their bodies, to truly inhabit them, and to relish their sturdiness...
...At that distance, their bodies were tiny commas, the sail the only way to spot them...
...The point of my children's ruthless sport is to ward off concern that might be unreal, excessive, phony togetherness, in order to reach what is genuine...
...I jumped in the old aluminum canoe and paddled as fast as I could across the lake—no small feat...
...He never requested that his status be changed even though he was obviously average in intelligence, and his deficiencies were largely because of the bad academic training he got in a seminary where the texts were in Latin and the lectures in German...
...I don't need any help," she said...
...I have seen her shriek in protest, and then stop it when she seriously objects...
...What was a father to do, a father who has spent decades looking out for his three children...
...the dialectic of presence and absence (of God...
...From their point of view, of course, my love must be felt as suffocating, unreal, sucking them back into dependency...
...As these pages make clear, Casey derived his spirituality from the traditional sources set forth for every consecrated religious in his day: the Mass, the Office, devotional practices of the rosary, and visits to the Blessed Sacrament...
...My problem is that I can't completely separate myself from their destinies...
...On a rush of wind, Gabriel and Gillian sailed up stylishly, doing a final curlicue before splashing down...
...Having just reread Boswell's Life of Johnson, I wonder if anyone (other than the writers of the collects of the Book of Common Prayer) has ever written more moving and deeply felt prayers and meditations...
...There is no evidence in Casey's writings—consisting of his spiritual notebooks and his many letters—that he was in any way heterodox...
...Like me, she is learning...
...He falters when he attempts to wring out something specifically Anglican from poets (such as the Romantics) whose connection to church tradition was nominal and whose wellsprings of imagination derived from other sources...
...How Casey came across this strange work and why he read it all his life "on his knees" and encouraged others to read it is not clear although, in that period, there was a rather widespread taste for other rococo spiritual writers like Grignion de Montfort...
...The editor, Michael Crosby, has also written a good biography of Casey titled Thank God Ahead of Time (1998) that knits together more cohesively the story told here...
...He easily wrestles the wind, driving the board forward on long charges, raising a rooster tail, as we applaud from the shore...
...Coleridge would be the textbook case and nobody, I think, would wish to make a case for the late work of Wordsworth (for example, the ecclesiastical sonnets) when the poet was pretty much running on empty...
...Without risk and wrong there's no choice or mastery...
...William Houghton practices psychiatry in Milwaukee...
...It deserves room on the shelf of any retreat house or other place where prayer is taken seriously...
...It was wonderful to reread some of the great poetry of the seventeenth century handled so sensitively...
...The Poetic Imagination: An Anglican Spiritual Tradition By William Countryman Orbis, $15,214 pp...
...Gillian, twenty-two, is also athletic, but not so muscular or practiced...
...I tied up the canoe and settled back in my familiar easy chair on the pier...
...life under grace...
...In sport and in real life, they must be ruthless in cutting me off at times, to escape my control and go about their business...
...So when her big brother offered to give her a ride—he standing behind the sail as she lay belly down on the rear of the board—she was delighted and jumped on, the two of them wearing life vests...
...So they test what is real anger and real togetherness...
...Michael Wilson's production had a glamour of its own which meshed with Torn's star power...
...then he is simply not an operatic star, though he may be a singing star in concert and on recordings...
...Even if Gabriel were teasing Gillian, that's a game two can play...
...Countryman does not intend to provide a global view of writers and movements that have flourished under the aegis of the Anglican communion...
...Gabriel tacked the board in a circle around her, but didn't come near to picking her up...
...Gillian was cheerful enough bobbing in the water...
...Sometimes I'm right—I think— to get mixed up in their problems, sometimes not...
...Given the task Countryman has set himself, he has done a credible job...
...I watched my children with a heavy heart, as, across the lake—three-quarters of a mile away—they crawled against the tree line...
Vol. 128 • June 2001 • No. 11
