As the journalist and biographer of Pope Francis, Paul Vallely noted in an article for the Church Times, the process of canonization in the contemporary era has been made more complicated because we know so much more in our promiscuous information age about any potential candidates, giving the Devil's Advocate an advantage in hindering any Promoter's efforts (let alone the reluctance of expert authorities especially medical ones to adduce a requsite miracle in our materialistic age).
Thus, though Harry Oldmeadow suggests that none of his cloud of witnesses are saints in certain of his Catholic and Orthodox exemplars, only time will tell, as the wheels can move exceedingly slowly, St Charles de Foucauld, who might have been a fitting companion here, required more than a century to elapse before his election.
Be that as it may, this is a compelling collection of essays on Christians in the twentieth and our own century who have aspired after holiness and who have reflected deeply on what such holiness might look like in a contemporary world inclined either to apparent indifference or hostility.
Each essay carefully selects certain pertinent themes within the body of their life and works that strike the author as most relevant to his theme, and that particularly resonate with him. This makes for highly engaging explorations of his subjects, their relevance, and whether they are known to you or not, adds to your enjoyment and discovery. The themes range widely from prayer to the recovery of the Christian mystical tradition in the Twentieth century, from the pseudo-myth of progress to the real struggle of love in the non-violent witness to change.
None of his subjects in any ordinary sense are 'comfortable', how could they be? Since they are so profoundly counter-cultural and are inviting you, each in their own, overlapping ways, to the central quest of becoming human, which, at its heart, is the invitation to be disclosed as made after God's image and likeness, to be invited to holiness, to allow oneself to be transformed into a saint.
Nor yet comfortable because that quest that is at the heart of all true civilization has been in our three provincial centuries, to quote Yeats, obscured from us by patterns of thought and practice that in the ideas and experience of all our witnesses have brought us to this our most benighted of centuries. For none of them, nor the author, are bedazzled by the cult of 'Progress' or the temptations of 'Mammon', whatever particular, and provisional, improvements might have been forthcoming. What does it profit a person to win the whole world, and yet lose eternity?
Interestingly, many of our witnesses, though deeply faithful to eternity, could not be described as wholly comfortable within the institutional frameworks of their respective Christian traditions. There is Simone Weil, famously refusing baptism into the Catholic Church for its failure to be genuinely inclusive in practice, yet even from within, we have Father Bede Griffiths writing fulminations in The Tablet against his own institution (whose editor, I know, had to tone down) and aimed at the then Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, one Cardinal Ratzinger, soon to be Pope Benedict! Phillip Sherrard was translating the core texts of Orthodox spirituality, the Philokalia, as a devout convert, yet raising theological eyebrows amongst his brethren for being a perennialist, committed to the thinking of Guenon, Schoun et al, as is the author himself.
This frame is important because one of the tantalising questions underlying all these essays is would their own journeys in holiness and their critiques of the modern world been deepened and better enabled had they had a deeper familiarity with this particular, rigorous metaphysical way of understanding; and, I think the author, pointing to two of his subjects, certainly Huston Smith and arguably Phillip Sherrard, would answer in the affirmative. The Christian traditions have lost their metaphysical edge and their mystical cores, and are adrift in the sea of secular modernity, rather than a transforming anchor in the sea of faith. Though I am more on the phenomenological side of the spectrum and, thus, more reserved in my judgment on any particular framing, I would here tend to agree.
Like any good set of essays featuring specific people, each one opens up a world of either new or renewed exploration. I was, for example, convinced I should read Marilynne Robinson, whose Calvinism had formerly proved a disincentive!
Finally, on a personal note, the author had met three of his subjects in person, as I had an overlapping but differing three, but we shared Dom Bede Griffiths, the English Benedictine monk, who traveled to India midway through life's passage to discover the other half of his soul and become an exemplar of West-East dialogue and engagement. We both recognised his holiness. For me, he was a regular correspondent, mentor, and friend, whom I met for the last time on his last visit to England after one of his transformative strokes.
Over lunch, with Fr. Laurence Freeman, we discussed imprisonment and prisoners, as he was the patron of the Prison Phoenix Trust that teaches yoga and meditation to those in prison, of which I was the co-founder, and for whom Bede had a deep and compassionate regard, often writing to people in prison, and maintaining them in prayer always.
After lunch, we simply sat in silence, the afternoon sun filtering into the room, dancing in the light of the swaying trees in the garden, and all my questions melted away in the quietness of his presence, transparent to grace, blessing me always.
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