Do Not Go Gentle
Hood, Ann & Mathias, Anita
FEEL, THRILL, WEEP Do Not Go Gentle My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time Ann Hood Picador, USA, $23,256 pp. Anita Mathias__________ Teach us to care and not to care, Teach us to sit...
...This is tame stuff compared to The Seven Storey Mountain or Surprised by Joy, whose electrifying apprehension of the holy leaves us with a gasping hunger to follow...
...Hood gives us the history of each parent's family, and is especially deft in describing her abusive grandmother, revealing the petty verbal abuse that often lurks beneath the shiny exterior of the large happy family...
...With an irritating self-absorption, she seeks to base her faith on "spiritual stirrings," intuitions, flickers of emotion—private stars with a private light with little general significance...
...Funded by a book advance and glossy magazine work, Hood travels searching for evidence of miracles that might help her believe in God...
...Soon afterwards, the familiar twentieth-century miracle of finding a lost contact lens restores her longed-for faith...
...Eliot describes the perfection of faith...
...Lewis, Pascal, and Augustine dive from Scripture into the deep sea of God...
...Do Not Go Gentle evolves into a family memoir, a popular genre in an increasingly rootless and isolated America...
...She goes to El Santuario de Chimayo, in New Mexico, to pray that his tumor would vanish...
...Faith can then become a kind of wrestling, a desire to wrest Lazarus from the jaws of implacable fate by brute will...
...She describes her family with a quote from Rudolph Vecoli, "Italian Catholics are only nominally Catholic...
...Travel plunges I you into a new setting, filling you with fresh ideas...
...To my husband's despair, I took notes for future vacations...
...yet, since their quests begin by grappling with the story that culminates in the radiant figure of Christ, their journeys offer wisdom and illumination to anyone who wants to dive into the same sea...
...The present narrative is undermined by the attempt to inflate an essay into a book...
...29 (Continued from page 29) timidating black voters, doctoring absentee ballot applications in Seneca and Martin Counties, the reckless purging of voter rolls to reduce the number of black voters, and the stonewalling of the Florida secretary of state's office...
...The response of these writers to God is quirky and individual...
...It is a pleasure to read...
...These tactics are very effective, but they also damage the fabric of our system...
...She introduces us to much of the colorful efflorescence of Catholicism, including Guadalupe, where she sees the sun's rays form a cross, and Padre Pio's tomb...
...More than anything, the book is a testimony to the therapeutic and palliative 28 effects of time and travel...
...I remember reading the nucleus of this book as an article in Doubletake magazine...
...Seeking to be spiritually moved, Hood visits Joan of Arc's birthplace...
...In this new way of existence, the griefs of your old world seem less sharp and poignant...
...When her sixty-seven-year old father is diagnosed with lung cancer, Hood decided "to get him a miracle...
...Despite the Catholic church's protests, thousands of visitors pray to Little Audrey, rather than/or her...
...If Ann Hood sought comfort or light in the concentrated wisdom of Scripture at any point along her search, it does not show...
...When an old relative advises her in cliches—"You have to have faith for prayer and healing to work," and "Saint Anthony will help you find your way home"—she cries hard, feeling convicted...
...Do Not Go Gentle is a lively, gracefully written memoir, full of vivid descriptions of the beautiful places in which— possibly, not coincidentally—people have experienced miracles...
...It does, but then, in one of the bewildering twists not unfamiliar in the life of faith, her father dies of fungal pneumonia...
...don swift Erie, Pa...
...Theirs is a folk religion, a fusion of animism, polytheism, and sorcery, with the sacraments of the church thrown in...
...When, soon after the death of her father, Hood has a second miscarriage, the powerlessness of sheer grief plunges her into despair...
...In "Ash Wednesday," T.S...
...In Worcester, Massachusetts, she visits "Little Audrey," a teenage "victim's soul" in a coma, who lies surrounded by osmogenesia, the odor of roses, weeping statues, and Communion hosts flecked with blood...
...The shock of this apparently divine betrayal is amplified by the earlier death of her only brother who, following arguments with his estranged wife, and then his soon-to-be wife, drowns in a bathtub...
...Ann Hood calls this book "a spiritual odyssey...
...When a loved family member lies dying, that serene relinquishment is not easy to achieve...
...Anita Mathias__________ Teach us to care and not to care, Teach us to sit still Our peace in His will...
...and Mont Saint Michel in Normandy...
...Finally, Hood decides that, since she absorbed her faith unquestioningly from her Italian Catholic family, she might be able to resuscitate her faith by visiting her ancestral village in Italy...
...The loss of faith left her "deadened" by "dark numbness...
...I became immobilized by my sadness...
...Hood's is not the absolute faith of Job, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him," nor the rationalist creed of Thomas, "Unless I see and touch, I will not believe," but a narcissistic, emotional creed—"Unless I feel and thrill and weep, I will not believe...
...But finally I was more amused than inspired by the self-indulgence and emotionalism of this very American spiritual quest...
...Thomas Merton, C.S...
...She weeps before a veil of the Virgin in Chartres, "spiritually stirred" at last...
...The GOP chairperson of one Florida county told the New York Times that "our lives" were at stake...
...Gradually, time blunts the edge of Hood's sorrow and : she comes to accept a lonelier world ' "whose common theme is the death of fathers...
...He noted that it was anger that finally brought the party control of the presidency and both houses of Congress...
...After Bush became president-elect, Rush Limbaugh angrily dismissed suggestions that Republicans should turn away from an "orgy of hate" to seek conciliation and pursue moderation...
...This trip works...
...I believed in absolutely nothing at all...
...In cultural warfare, the stakes seem that great and call for extraordinary exertion that sometimes crosses the bounds of civility and lawfulness...
...Rocamadour in the Dordogne...
...Ann Hood's memoir Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time limns this exhausting odyssey...
...For a guide on my own "spiritual odyssey," I think I'll stick with Merton or Thomas a Kempis, and, even better, the Word that was in the beginning...
...In fact, Hood's own faith, with its reliance on symbolic dreams, omens, psychics, tarot cards, and healing candles strikes me as positioned somewhere between the Dark Ages and the New Age...
...Unfortunately, her story : ends where real spiritual adventure be- i gins: she decides that God exists, that God is benign, that there can be power in prayer...
Vol. 128 • January 2001 • No. 2
