Religion booknotes

...The one point he does insist on is this: most people who come to a tribunal seek forgiveness and reconciliation with the church and not (as ancient Roman law thinks) their status as marriageable or nonmarriageable...

...According to Boff, a French Catholic aristocrat, the Marquis de La Rochetulon, sent Pope Benedict XV a series of prayers for peace during the early period of World War I. One of those prayers was published in L'Osservatore Romano in December 1916...

...This current volume is a series of meditations on the famous and much anthologized "Prayer of Saint Francis" ("Lord, make me an instrument of your peace...

...Blasphemy, not slave trading, was the sin of which he accused himself...

...we should look for more from him...

...Arthur Biddle's exemplary edition of the letters exchanged between Thomas Merton and his Columbia University friend, Robert Lax, ends with a long interview with Lax, conducted on Patmos, the poet's home until ill health forced him back to the United States where he died last year...

...Behrens has a gift for vivid prose...

...This unfailingly interesting and wellwritten book ends with a bibliography and a usable index...

...After this explanatory opening, Boff takes the individual petitions of the prayer, writes brief reflections on them, and ends each reflection with a prayer...

...A little word play can go a long way, and reading these letters at a long stretch may daunt all but the most devoted readers of Merton...

...Memories of Grace: Portraits from the Monastery By James Stephen Behrens Ada, $12.95,156 pp...

...In Percy's words, the Christian story has a "wondrous message" and that message should be written about...

...Coriden takes up briefly the issue of marriage tribunals, a topic which deserves a book in its own right...

...Rather, it is that harmonious balance that holds in creative tension the local and the universal, the individual and the common good...

...He was a good parson, and I am happy to have been introduced to his life by such a reliable biographer...

...These friends shared a love for the style of James Joyce and, through that love, experienced a lifelong intoxication with words...

...From there, the prayer spread...

...A few years ago Bill Moyers did a documentary for PBS on the hymn "Amazing Grace...

...In a tough paragraph he calls the current procedures dealing with the validity of marriages awkward, cumbersome, and in many parts of the world, nonexistent...

...Percy called him up and invited him for lunch, and, in the course of conversation, strongly encouraged him to write...

...Most of all, Thomas Merton and Robert Lax were friends, as the ease and joy with which they write each other testify...

...In a series of 1772 letters, Newton developed a paradigm for how grace works that is not unlike the traditional Catholic understanding of the three stages of the spiritual life—a doctrine which has roots in the writings of Origen of Alexandria...

...In reading these letters, I was reminded of the opening lines of a treatise on friendship penned centuries ago by the Cistercian monk, Aelred of Rievaulx: "I recall now two friends, who, although they have passed from this present life, nevertheless live to me and always will so live...

...Both had a taste for gnomic, abstract verse—a taste that buds forth in these letters...

...Newton preached twice on Sunday while finding time not only to visit his flock regularly but also to conduct regular study groups and prayer circles...

...It is for that reason he insists that the canonist exercises a church ministry—a ministry that ramifies to everything from liturgical celebration to pastoral strategies of various kinds...

...In some of the early letters, Lax writes about his own conversion from Judaism to Christianity, and they both discuss how to make poetry into a prophetic vehicle...

...Merton, of course, has become a figure well known in the world while Lax, esteemed in Europe, is little known on this side of the Atlantic...

...I enjoyed reading these stories and can only hope that now Behrens will use his talents to speak from his monastic experience to us who are still in the world he remembers so well...

...I also learned that Newton lived in the midst of theological developments so complex that Hindmarsh supplies the reader with a schema to sort out the various eddies of theological dispute...

...the embedding of the word "heart" in "concord...

...Too many books are cited in the Portuguese and too many standard texts about Francis in English go unmentioned...

...He was a fine Anglican parish priest, an indefatigable preacher and well-known writer, and he had connections with the Wesleyan revival of the eighteenth century...

...If, for example, the canons say that every person has a fundamental right to hear the Word of God and receive the sacraments of the church, that right has a concrete bearing on the places where priests are not available to serve the people of God...

...One of the most attractive features of these meditations is Boff's sensitivity to words...

...The playful names they gave each other or the way in which they would sign their letters are worth a laugh in their own right...

...A week later, the French Catholic newspaper La Croix picked up the prayer and published it...

...What he has to say about the prayer's origins is completely new to me despite my having kept out an eye for solid information about it for some time...

...While visiting his parents in Louisiana he stopped by a bookshop and purchased a pile of works by Walker Percy...

...Although parts of the correspondence have appeared in other venues, Biddle has transcribed both sides of the total exchange of letters which dates back to the late 1930s and ends with a never-received letter Lax wrote to Merton two days before the latter's death in Bangkok on December 10,1968...

...In one piece, he describes how he became a writer...

...By "good order" he does not mean order only from the top down...

...The bookshop was staffed by Percy's wife, who evidently told her husband about the bookbuying priest...

...He ponders, for example, the relationship between symbolic and diabolic...

...John Newton underwent a conversion experience, gave up the sea, was ordained to the Anglican priesthood, and, until his death in 1807, served parishes in the English Midlands and London...

...Twenty years ago, someone traced the prayer to Germany but that, in fact, does not seem to be the case...

...I have seen his essays and sketches in various places over the years and now, in this brief little book, have had the chance to read a fuller selection of his writings...

...Alas, the bibliography at the end of the book did not receive adequate attention...

...When Prophecy Still Had a Voice: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax Edited by Arthur W. Biddle University of Kentucky, $39.95, 472 pp...

...On my next visit to London this unreconstructed papist will pay honors to Newton's tomb at Saint Mary Woolnoth...

...One companion in his parish at Olney was the poet-writer William Cowper who, despite intermittent fits of madness, was author and collaborator with Newton of the anthology Olney Hymns...

...I especially liked the long description of Newton's parochial life at Olney, where he labored for thirty-five years (1764-79...

...Here, as elsewhere, Coriden notes the tension between the roots of the canons in Roman law and a more recent desire to highlight their connection to the imperatives of the gospel life...

...The range of those strategies is such that one would only hope that the author will use his considerable knowledge of the field to advance some further considerations...

...Newton had a Calvinist orientation...

...Commonweal 28 August 17,2001 In the introductory pages, Boff provides a reasonable explanation of who wrote the prayer and under what conditions...

...Merton called himself "Pope Lozenge the Fifteenth" or "Homer T" or "Luther Burbank" while Lax would address Merton as "O Harry" or "Chet" or by the exclamation "Hoy" or, more simply, "Merton...

...which, of course, is ascribed to but was not written by Saint Francis...

...Without going into detail, he argues for some alternative strategies that might be used to deal with the huge problem of divorce and remarriage...

...He often looks behind these everyday tales to discover hidden truths in the manner of those, like Georges Bernanos's unnamed priest, who find grace everywhere...

...Father Behrens was a diocesan priest in Newark, New Jersey, prior to his decision to enter the Trappist monastery Commonweal 29 August 17,2001 in Conyers, Georgia, where he now lives and writes...

...His 1984 biography of the saint reflected a close acquaintance with the standard scholarship, which is vast...

...From that program I learned that the composer was the captain of a slave ship that made the triangular voyage from England to Africa to the Caribbean...

...John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition By D. Bruce Hindmarsh Eerdmans, $30, 366 pp...

...The brief chapters that make up this volume are vignettes of Behrens's life outside the monastery: sketches of his family, his neighborhood, his ministry, and his life in urban America...

...Given both writers' epistolary styles and wide-ranging use of foreign phrases, transcription alone must have presented a formidable editorial task...

...Always there is talk of poetry itself, their own and that of their vast circle of friends...

...Like most Protestants of the time, Newton had very little contact with or knowledge of Catholicism although, as Hindmarsh notes, he had read a bit in the Jansenist literature coming from France...

...Sometimes Behrens recalls these stories from the vantage point of the monastic cloister...

...Many readers, not professionally concerned with theology, might find this book a bit slow where Hindmarsh disentangles the various strands of English theological work in the eighteenth century, but apart from those somewhat dense pages, his detailed study of Newton is crisply presented...

...One hopes that Coriden will continue to write from his learned vantage point as a canonist who also has a deep sympathy for the ordinary Catholic...

...Those who read these letters will have to do so with a certain taste for word play, odd spellings, nicknames, puns, and elaborate literary constructions...

...Both had powerful contemplative instincts, which led one to a Trappist monastery and the other, after a stint at the Neiv Yorker, to a life of pilgrimage, solitude, and dedication to poetry...

...The Prayer of Saint Francis By Leonardo Boff Orbis, $12,118 pp...

...I do not think we need monastic piety from him (enough monks supply that need) but, rather, a view of this grace-filled world from a somewhat different perspective...

...The posture of seeing canon law as ministry explains why Coriden frequently reverts to the parish to explain how one or another facet of law impinges on the lives of ordinary communicants...

...Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...the concept of "Master" when applied to Christ...

...In these writings he would have found a kind of Augustinianism congenial to his own Calvinist leanings...

...Commonweal 30 August 17,2001...

...It was only decades later, mainly under the impulse of reformers like Wilberforce, that he came to some sound convictions about the dismal trafficking which had been part of his youth...

...In fact, he criticizes John Paul II for modifying two canons in 1998 without due consultation, an exercise Coriden calls a scandalous abuse of papal authority...

...Fitting for someone who spent many years in the Franciscan Order, Leonardo Boff, the Brazlian theologian, has had an abiding interest in Saint Francis...

...Each reflection is only a few pages, but there is much to be learned from each...

...The second task of canon law, Coriden asserts, is to sustain "good order...

...Nonetheless, if one perseveres by cutting through the linguistic underbrush there are wonderful passages from both men about the nature of prayer, their mutual interest in mystical literature, the character of art (they were close friends of the abstract expressionist painter, Ad Reinhardt), the follies of politics, both ecclesiastical and civil...

...The prayer gained further currency when a French Franciscan put the text—now described as a "Prayer for Peace by Saint Francis"—on a poster for the use of Third Order Franciscans...

...I mention that right since the closing of parishes for lack of a priest involves not just prudential judgments and theological truths (the essential mark of catholicity is full celebration of the sacraments) but rights in law as well...

...What I discovered in Bruce Hindmarsh's learned biography was that Newton became a convert not because of his disgust for the slave trade, but because of his horror at the dissolute life he had led...

...As the letters reveal, both Merton and Lax were shaped by the literary modernism regnant at Columbia University in the late 1930s...