Gospel Commentary in Stories
The One Ring, Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien (Public Domain).
WRITTEN BY:
Rev Gerard Boyce
READ TIME:
5 mins
Discovering the wonders of Catholic literature.
Years ago when in Form 1 I somehow came across a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce. It is a long and large book and I merely read the first lines:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown,ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: - Introibo ad altare Dei.
and then put it aside.
My mother translated the Latin and told me it was the beginning of the psalm that the priest said at the start of the old Latin Mass: "I will go in unto the altar of God." This impressed me, but she also said that Joyce was a Catholic who had left the church, which was not as impressive. The Irish nun at school, thinking my surname Joyce, had, prior to this, declared him “Very Wicked.”
Catholic or not, wicked or not, years later at university a flatmate’s girlfriend would tell me these lines were all a parody of the Mass. The bowl of lather was the chalice, the dressing gown was the priest’s chasuble, the razor suggested the pain the church had caused and causes, and the mirror was a sign of a self-absorbed, narcissistic church in Ireland.
Despite Joyce’s commentary on the church in Ireland, when my ordination approached in 2003 I chose the Latin from Ulysses to appear on my ordination card. I liked the line, and the truth the words announced, and made them my own on ordination day.
These days, when asked about a literature that is Catholic, my thoughts begin here with Ulysses and the Latin of the Mass.
But these thoughts go elsewhere too. The Prologue of John’s Gospel should also be considered: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (Jn 1:14, RSV). However battered and baffled we may be, the assurance is that the Father’s saving Word, his Son, is near to us. We Catholics live in, and out of, an incarnational view of the world. If God has entered human history as a man then everything must flow from that.
Still attending to the Gospels there is the account of finding the boy Jesus in the Temple (Lk 2: 41-52), recently heard for the Feast of the Holy Family. If we think in symbols, the doctors in the temple represent the mind of Israel. Christ is beginning with the mind, appealing to the intellect, appealing for a conversion at that level. Christ the youth allows himself to be noticed and engages with the thinkers.
And then there is an old friend, Evelyn Waugh, and Brideshead Revisited where there is this exchange between Charles the not-yet-Catholic agnostic, and Sebastian, the tormented Catholic,
C: I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense
S: Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.
C: But my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.
S: Can’t I?
C: I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.
S: Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.
C: But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.
S: But I do. That’s how I believe.
I take this as a remark about the beauty and the loveliness of our faith. Years ago, when I was a Jesuit novice in Australia, I remember Fr Peter Steele SJ, academic and poet, urging us all to be better and more telling celebrants of the loveliness and beauty of the faith.
So, the parodic Mass of Ulysses, which so affected me, the incarnation, the life of the mind, and the loveliness and celebratory nature of our existence: I offer these as the co-ordinates of a literature that is Catholic.
To put it more simply, a literature in this vein, is, like the lives of the saints, a commentary on the Gospels.
Lists are necessary, and so are word limits and strict editors, so the reader might find the following helpful.
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings trilogy, needing no introduction.
Flannery O’Connor - two novels, many short stories, and a volume of her correspondence. Her work is often unsettling. She said of her own efforts: “I have found, in short, that my subject is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.” Insightful commentary on her writing by Stephen Sparrow, a Kiwi, and others, can be found at flanneryoconnor.com/on.html
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited and his Sword of Honour trilogy.
In Brideshead, watch for Cordelia Flyte, the youngest family member, who I believe is the key to the novel. Do watch the 1981 mini-series, but avoid at all costs the 2008 film adaption. Sword of Honour explores the idea that God has created each of us for a specific purpose
Graham Greene - The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter, Brighton Rock and, on a lighter note, Monsignor Quixote. A convert and a strange sort of Catholic, his works, often adapted to film, are a compelling chronicle of sin and grace and hope and despair.
Sigrid Undset - Catholic convert and Nobel Prize winner: her Kristen Lavransdatter trilogy is set in fourteenth-century pre-Reformation Norway, and tells the story of the life of a daughter, wife and mother, and much pain, prayer and pilgrimage. (The Tiina Nunnally translation is more accessible.)
Katherine Hulme - The Nun’s Story. A novel about interiority. Hard to get, and beautifully adapted to film by Fred Zinnemann in 1959, starring Audrey Hepburn.
Alessandro Manzoni - The Betrothed: in seventeenth-century Lombardy, Renzo and Lucia are in love and wish to marry, despite many obstacles. Flannery O’Connor called this the great Catholic novel.
G. K. Chesterton - anything of his, but the novice could begin with his Father Brown stories.
Honourable mentions:
Robert Hugh Benson - The Lord of the World and Come Rack! Come Rope!
Willa Cather - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Georges Bernanos - Diary of a Country Priest and Under the Son of Satan
J. F. Powers - many short stories, and two novels. Lots of priests.
John Henry Newman - Loss and Gain
Gerard Manley Hopkins - poetry
dappledthings.org - Catholic art and literature in a world thirsting for beauty
leavenmagazine.ie - from Ireland, intelligent Catholic commentary on everything
thelampmagazine.com - the same, but from the USA
reidsreader.blogspot.com - Nicholas Reid, reviewer, historian, bibliophile, Catholic, local. Not always, or even often, on Catholic themes, but very good when the need arises.
And do read this from 2013:
danagioia.com/essays/writing-and-reading/the-catholic-writer-today/
