Performative Authenticity and The Hack

“He said I wasn’t sincere enough. Me, the master. Mr. Sincerity.”

“Oh, but that’s silly.”

“Yes, isn’t it? But even that isn’t what strikes me as the most funny. What really tickles me every time I
think about it is that here I am, a leading spiritual hack –”

“You’re not a hack.” She reached forward to comfort him, but couldn’t seem to reach him.

“The hell I’m not. You don’t think I could do good stuff now, do you? After years of peddling crap –
anyway that’s beside the point….That’s it, a dedicated hack, a really good hack, and suddenly I can’t
make the Catholic Passenger. Christ, I couldn’t have aimed much lower, could I?”

I’m going to take a couple of days to talk about Wilfrid Sheed’s novel The Hack.

Sheed was the son of famed Catholic apologists Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. He was a wilfred-
sheednovelist of some note in the 60’s and 70’s – a favorite of my father’s, although I don’t remember
ever seeing this one on the shelves. I don’t think it would have interested him much, anyway.

This is the first and only Sheed novel I’ve read so far, and I’m going to spend time mulling over it in this
space for a couple of reasons. First, his burrowing into the minds and spirits of people with faith
questions is pertinent and authentic. Secondly, what he has to say about making a living via one’s faith is
very pertinent, and will give me an excuse to muse about various aspects of the current scene.

I don’t know what inspired the novel, and I don’t know to what extent, if any, Sheed remained a
practicing/believing Catholic, but it certainly reveals a familiarity with the business of religion and the
tensions and risks of making one’s living from it. It doesn’t matter what he believed. He gets the whole
landscape exactly right.

So, the gist: Bertram Flax is in his early 30’s, married with five children, living in New Jersey and making a
living writing pious twaddle for Catholic periodicals. He fell into it honestly, after making a bit of splash
writing some heartfelt poetry as a teen, encouraged by priests and nuns to go ahead and run with his
obviously God-given talent.
But by the time we meet Bert, he’s having a bit of a crisis. The Christmas poem and other related pieces
are due, and he just can’t enter into the spirit of the thing. He’s blocked, he’s not feeling anything, he’s
dried up.

His wife is Betty. She’s not Catholic, and while Bert doesn’t aggressively try to convert her, he certainly
would like his wife to become Catholic. She’s on the edges, having been raised by a briskly liberal
Protestant civic-minded mother to be suspicious of most organized religion, especially immigrant-laden
priestcraft. Nonetheless, there’s something about the whole business that keeps drawing her close – not
that she’s able to talk to her husband about it at all.

And so there’s your basic plot: Bert trying to find the thread again, wondering if he’s lost his faith, Betty
trying to figure out what’s wrong with Bert, how she can help him, and the-hack-sheedwhat this Catholic
business is really all about.

Also involved are both their mothers, a couple of priests and a couple of high school friends of Bert’s.

There’s a bit of meandering, a good deal of interior monologuing, but also a great deal of humor, sharp
characterization and spiritual insight.

What I want to focus on in this first post (I’ll get to the religion-for-pay business tomorrow) is Sheed’s
rendering of Betty’s encounters with Catholicism. I’m going to mostly just quote from the book, and I
think you’ll quickly see why.

First, Bert’s conflicted stance:

And above all, a wife who took a morbid interest in his churchgoing; who didn’t go herself, but who
would be obscurely dismayed if he gave it up – a wife (and this was really crazy) he would give what was
left of his soul to convert.
…”It isn’t so difficult. Pray for faith.” The words tasted like ashes. Betty could believe in anything she
wanted to, of course; her world was a great feast of possible beliefs. He hung to what he could, fingers
on a wet rock.

“Tell me about purgatory,” she asked.

“Some other time.” He smiled thinly. A man should be willing to tell his wife about purgatory. It was the
least he could do.

Now. Betty has fallen into the habit of popping into St. Jude’s, the parish church, just for a respite from
the outdoors – sometimes with all of her children in tow, sometimes by herself. She goes in to warm up,
cool off or simply find some quiet. She’s not quite comfortable there, she thinks much of what she sees is
quite odd, but she also knows there is something in there that is not to be found anywhere else.

What I appreciate about this is that it expresses something important, something that used to be a given
about Catholicism in this particular way: that it was a solid thing, always there in pretty much the same
way, there for you to encounter, to participate in as much as you chose, but that was – there. The quality
or nature of It wasn’t dependent on anyone’s talent or friendliness or strength of community. It was
there. For you.

St. Jude’s was barely awake. A thin flame in front of the altar, and one man rumpled in prayer….Father
Terwilliger was hard at work in and out of the shadows. Emptying the confessionals or something.
Anything could happen in a Catholic church. That was the part of it that Mr. O’Malley wouldn’t admit to;
and perhaps commonsense Bert didn’t know about it either, the craving to be a bit queer, now and then.
It was what kept religion in business…

….She had been doing this for about a week now. Really by elimination. To begin with, she had to get out
of the house. The children were snowed in and hyptertense, waiting for Christmas….There was nowhere
you could just go and sit and find quick, quick relief from the animated face and the metallic suburban
tongue. Except, of course, church…

….She tried her own first, All Souls. Just as she feared: Canon Flood intercepted her right off in the
American-Gothic doorway, and they had a distraught chat. People didn’t often come round in the
evenings and he seemed anxious to make the most of her.
He was a bit uneasy, though as if he couldn’t imagine why she’d come. Mrs. Forsythe (Betty’s mother)
had given him a lot of trouble over the years from one flank (not enough social teaching, too much
theology). Then Betty had gone and married a Catholic, so he hardly knew what to expect.

By the time she got to a pew she felt depressed and keyed up at the same time. Downtown Bloodbury
had a mixed and shifting population and the canon had become famous for his ecumenical footwork; he
was able to anticipate troubles she didn’t feel and make dextrous concessions she didn’t want–it was all
so strenuous and trivial. She just wanted a place to sit quietly, get some of this opium of the people, and
here she was met at the door by centuries of accumulated anxiety.

Her mother had really ruined All Souls for her by so manifestly not taking it seriously. Betty was
interested in religious experience and her mother said in effect, “not in church, dear.” She imagined it as
a kind of whale’s belly feeling, sense of beserkness somewhere, waters swishing and sluicing, stillness
somewhere else–it was pretty vague but religion was that or nothing. A church ought to know what it
was doing.

Well, if that was what she wanted, she knew where to go for it. A church where Mrs. Forsythes stayed
outside like devils. The place where (in spite of the Fords they always seemed to be raffling in front) they
kept the religion. She knew it was there because it made her so nervous at first. But later it got quite
comfy, in a sinister kind of way. She didn’t know how you went about believing in any of it, or how you
would know it when you did. But religion was supposed to be a “felt need” these days, and she certainly
felt the need of something. The art was unspeakable, but there was something correct about the
atmosphere.

There’s a scene in which Betty realizes that the subtext of the conversation between her husband and
mother is what they think is the possibility of her conversion – because her mother had spied her going
into St. Jude’s one day. The professional Catholic and WASPish mother-in-law start arguing. But.

How ridiculously, exasperatingly funny! They thought, because she liked to rest in St. Jude’s, that she
wanted to hear all about papal supremacy and, oh, unbaptized animals and crime rates and potato
famines, and all the things that seemed important to the cranks on both teams. As if these had anything
to do with the smell and taste of St. Jude’s anyway.
At Midnight Mass:

Monsignor Flanagan moved gravely to and from the big book. His hands worked with a kind of grace,
although he obviously had difficulty with them. There was, in his stance and the slope of his shoulders, a
tranquil certainty that it was all working well, whatever it was.

The Hack was published in 1963. It’s too bad no one implementing the post-Conciliar liturgical changes
took it to heart:

Because of St. Jude’s, the Catholic Church would always be the Church she associated with silence. When
they talked, they could be as foolish as anybody; but when they kept quiet, they were pretty good. They
knew it, they had confidence in their silence. They knew they weren’t boring anybody. No need to keep
singing and reciting and spinning out ingenuities, thinner and thinner and thinner – they could hold your
attention without constant nervous grabs at it.

Finally, a couple of longish passages in which Betty’s experience of church as a place where she
experiences something through the atmosphere, the symbols related to suffering and even flawed
human effort – is refracted through her sense of Bert’s Catholicism reflected in his writing: a smoothly-
running ship, perfectly reflecting the perfection of God here on earth and filled with sweet smiling
statues and the scent of roses.

St. Jude’s happened to be the only place of its kind she had found in Bloodbury, the only place where
what was “out there” made itself felt, even a little bit. She wished she could be more decisive about
it….All the symbols in St. Jude’s were about trouble and the relief of trouble; scourging, falling, rising —
curiously comforting. But whether any of it had actually happened, she was much too confused to say.

She talked to the statue (which was really the more reasonable way around, anyway) and said, “I hope
Bert gets a good rest and comes back to his old self.” She looked at the statue and it didn’t smile. She
couldn’t even smell roses. “And I hope….” She supposed she still hadn’t “got faith,” whatever that meant
— maybe she wasn’t the type. Anything Betty Forsythe believed was suspect right there. But she enjoyed
talking to the statues.
Without warning, a high female voice at the back of the church began, like a great organ pipe, to exude
the “Adeste Fidelis.” A man’s voice, two octaves deeper, joined hesitatingly in, straggled to a halt, tried
again. Only two people, and they couldn’t get started at the same time. Not very good for a House and
Garden parish. Perhaps the smart clothes were just a blind; perhaps they were floundering like
everybody else.

The two invisible songsters cranked somehow through the first verse, only to come to real grief with the
chorus, where the voices have to get gradually louder. The man hadn’t foreseen this and was already
going much too loud: he fairly had to bellow the last line and his voice cracked. Drawing a fast, grinding
breath, he launched himself at the third verse. The woman began, with audible severity, on the second.

You weren’t supposed to be attracted by the inadequacy. Probably the only inefficient Catholic church in
America, and she had to be stuck with it. She just couldn’t help it. She was moved by all the wrong
things, she just wasn’t the religious type at all.

His walk took him past the Columbia buildings, which had their own kind of Sunday. Professors’ wives,
interfaith groups, good taste; mild, high domed parsons drafting thoughtful sermons and mimeographing
them in their rimless spectacles. It was an import-export thing. Bavarian theologians threshed out the
latest subtleties, came grunting with them out of the Black Forest – they were behind the whole thing,
kept it going. Then the parsons distilled it and wrapped it in cellophane and the professors’ wives took it
home and gave it to the cat. Protestants were our brothers now, but you couldn’t help laughing.

Here we go, finally.

Is this minor novel really worth all this time and space? Sure, why not? I’m interested, it’s my blog, so
here we are.

To recap: this is part three of a series of posts on Wilfrid Sheed’s 1963 novel, The Hack. It’s about a
married, father-of-five writer for sentimental Catholic periodicals. It’s about the toll this work has taken
on his emotional life, his writing skills and his faith. It’s about his non-Catholic wife’s faith.

Part 1 – about his wife Betty’s faith and interactions with Catholic things.
Part 2 – about Bert’s struggles with faith and creativity.

the-hack-sheedAnd what will part 3 be about? I’m not quite sure.

On Sunday, I toyed for a time with the idea of tying whatever was left to talk about with the reaction to
the Covington Catholic “situation,” but after a few seconds of reflection concluded that would be way
too much work.

So here we are. The easy way in, I suppose, would be with a quote from the novel. Let’s find one. Here’s
Betty near the end of the novel, thinking about an incident that had happened at Midnight Mass the
night before – quite simply and shockingly, Bert had not gone to Communion.

She found herself daydreaming about what had really happened last night, when his head was buried in
his hands and he wouldn’t let her see it. Maybe he couldn’t get it to look right for church any more. For
so long, he had been forcing his nerves to work, to curse, to pray, as if there was nothing you couldn’t
ask nerves to do; and suddenly the crazy, mutilated nerves had said, That’s enough of that, but look at
this, our own special dance; and God he was scared, he was sick, half mad with fear…

He suddenly knew what was wrong, she decided in her dream, he knew it right there in church. He was
sick, he wanted to call it off, he wanted Betty to call it off. (It was like someone trying devil-worship for a
gag and finding it actually worked.) Playing with sacred things, was what Chubb called it and – leaving
aside Chubb’s list – you might say your emotions were sacred things, your tears and rages were sacred,
he suddenly realized that you didn’t turn them on for kicks, or for money; your talent was a sacred thing;
and your faith in God was sacred you didn’t pretend it was a whit stronger than it was, even for the sake
of example; and oh, there were miles and miles of sacred things, and Bert knew he had certainly
blasphemed every last one of them….

Anyway, indications were that he was back at peace: no more responsibility, no more appearances to
keep up. Not being able to “feel” appropriately wouldn’t be held against him now. ..

…The funny things was, she supposed that none of this would have been necessary if he had just been a
plain uncomplicated windbag like the other inspirationists: he could have gone to his grave with his
round tones, his relaxed manner and the untroubled face of a child.
But Bert wasn’t an uncomplicated windbag. He wasn’t even a natural hack. He was conned into it by
public request. He wanted to do first-rate work, but he had trouble with it, and he did so much good the
other way…The worst of it was you couldn’t even blame the Church. The Church hadn’t asked him to
write anything, wouldn’t care if he stopped. Every institution kept up a froth of chatter these days; it
didn’t much matter who did the actual frothing. A million tons of stupid words had to be manufactured
by somebody; but getting mad at those was like getting mad at New Jersey, as Bert used to say.

As Eve Tushnet said in her post discussing this novel, it’s not just about religion writing or being paid for
church work. It’s about any lost passion, any aspect of life that you plunged into thinking, I love this, I’m
good at it – and hey, they are paying me! So great! – and here you are ten, twenty years later – trapped,
bored or worse.

You got into this with the best of intentions, but what has happened is that you and The Thing are no
longer aligned – one or both of you have moved on, out or just beyond, things don’t fit,and the worst of
it is that your service to The Thing has shaped you in a way that renders this part of you useless away
from it.

As I said, it’s not just about the religion biz. It’s a sad – but maybe a little hopeful – sketch of people
moving in and out of relationships with emotional truth, not really understanding or expressing what’s
deepest within, all out of fear.

But of course, being that I spend a lot of time observing pop culture spirituality, and have for decades
now, I can’t help but relate the landscape of pious publishing fifty years ago to the present scene. In a
way, it’s uncanny – a million tons of stupid words had to be manufactured by somebody.

Only now it’s not so much print of course – I’m sure almost every Catholic print publication could
disappear tomorrow and hardly anyone would care – but what we are all spewing out online.

I suppose what I am left with is the suggestion that The Hack be read as a caution. A caution to all of us
engaged in spiritual writing as any kind of a job for any kind of pay including simply exposure, and a
caution to all of those who pay to read spiritually-themed writing, even if the payment you’re offering is
simply your time and attention.

And the caution offered by The Hack is this: that kind of writing and the demands of its audience has the
power to shape your faith, and perhaps not in a positive way. Bert and his audience are caught in a
circuitous pattern of generating and being comforted by pious platitudes. Bert’s loss of faith isn’t due to
him grappling with and then being bested by existential questions and profound theological mysteries –
it’s due to him avoiding them, allowing the platitudes and sentiment to dominate his spirit because
that’s where his energy has gone – and then when that dissipates and disappears, he has nothing left.

In a way, it’s analogous to another corner of contemporary religion, which is emotion-dominated youth
and young adult ministry, on “faith” built on feelings of high-intensity community and singing breathy
songs to Boyfriend Jesus.

But then, back to the writing, it’s a trap, isn’t it? Bert thinks he could write deeper – but can he? Have his
writing reflexes been so bent that this sentiment is all he can produce now? And what about the
audience? It seems to be moving on, but you know, you’re always going to have that cohort – the kind
that, in the novel, invites Bert to come speak and nods chummily at his words about Communism – that
will rise up if anything different is offered them.

Betty goes through Bert’s mail and tells him he has an invitation to speak to the Catholic women of
Paramus. It makes him shudder.

“They’ll come and pick you up.”

A horrible thought in itself. He shut his eyes. And then, there was the pile of half-witted mail in front of
his wife. You could tell it was half-witted by the way they put on the stamps.

Perhaps all the (a few years ago) bloggers and (now) Instagram Christian writers aren’t quite there yet.
Perhaps they’re still feeling what they communicate: the dependable pattern of their mini-essays: 1)
Description of some family or personal situation 2) Lightbulb moment 3) Resolution centering around
acceptance of the messiness of life and myself as I am.

All under a carefully framed and filtered photograph.

Followed by scores of comments complimenting the Christian influencer on her (and it is usually a her)
authenticity. And perhaps complimenting her appearance.

You’re beautiful!
Links to whatever I’ve packaged from my life for you to buy in profile.

About a year ago, I had the odd experience of speaking to two Catholic writers within a period of a few
weeks, and both said the same thing to me: If I could write what I really want to write – it would be this.

And what held them back? Some financial pressures – as with Bert – and some hesitancy of reader
reaction. No one was wishing they could write a Catholic Portnoy’s but they were wondering what their
audience would think, and in the case of one, anticipating slightly different objections – the type of
resentful, misunderstanding reactions that seemed to emerge whenever she wrote on this topic, near
and dear to her. Was it worth the potential hassle? Could she shape what she wanted to say in a way
that was authentic but averted the objections, as much as possible, of the nagging, easily offended
readers?

***

What we produce – what we write – can shape us in a myriad of ways, can’t it? Bert’s faith was diluted
and shrunk because his writing demanded that he see it, interpret it, and communicate it in shallow,
sentimental framework.

But spiritual writing – and ministry, period – can impact the shape of our faith in other ways, too.

One of the greatest pitfalls is the construction and maintenance of the persona. This might be built on
personality, it might be built on specialization. The Friendly Priest. The Quirky Catholic. The Funky
Homeschooler. The Charmingly Frazzled Mom. The Apologist.

Persona, platform, what have you. What happens is that the platform becomes a pedestal and the
persona becomes a prison. The cute kids grow older and really, really don’t want to be in the center of
your online hustle any more. Apologetics goes out of fashion. Your marriage starts to suck a little, and
you aren’t sure if you should feature it any more. You, yourself, like Bert, just get – tired.

He was so tired of all that, didn’t want to argue. If you could just give it up for a year, you might get
excited again. But you weren’t allowed to give it up for so much as a week. It got in your teeth and hair.
And meanwhile, the whole thing was getting to be more and more like New Jersey.
And then there’s pride. Always, pride. As a person evolves into some kind of spiritual guru, or good
example – this is not Bert’s problem, because he does not put himself in the center of his writing, but
the refrain “he’s doing so much good” still echoes, functioning, as a barrier to the truth.

He was so hell-bent on edification that truth had no claims on him anymore.

But it can do that – any kind of ministry, including spiritual writing. Constantly focusing on yourself, on
packaging yourself as a spiritual model, even if you continually brush that off and say all for Jesus or
something – putting yourself out there, making your carefully composed faux-messiness a daily
destination for those seeking insight and comfort, making yourself a thought-leader whose opinions on
everything must be posted as quickly as possible – it all has the power to form one’s own faith in ways
that are subtly prideful and do indeed, put the focus on us.

As I’ve tried to say, this is nothing new. Read Acts 14:

When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they cried out in Lycaonian, “The gods have come down to us
in human form.”

It happens all the time. It’s a constant temptation. The challenge is to be honest about what we’re doing
and look out for those temptations, and if necessary, take the hard, brutal step back.

Religion must sometimes mean just keeping quiet, not trying to coin phrases, or drum up “thoughts”’
Bert once wrote a thing about keeping quiet, about the silence of Christ, and it chimed with something
she felt herself. She had said, “yes, yes, that’s it. He understands.” But even that was just talk. He had no
intention of imitating Christ’s silence himself. All he had left was the words, and he was calling on them
now for a final assault on the Christmas bills.

He was so hell-bent on edification that truth had no claims on him anymore.

This might take three posts. We’ll see.

Yesterday, I shared some of the passages from the novel related to the faith experience of The Hack’s
wife, Betty. Today, we’ll move on to the Hack himself, the Catholic writer with issues.

Bert Flax got his start in writing Catholic things as a teenager.

It had started way back in high school (poets mature early) when religiosity came as easily as breathing.
They told you to think of Our Lady whenever you had an impure thought, and this led him into some
rather tense poetry. Sister Melody, the visiting the-hack-sheedLaureate from Iowa, got excited and said
that he had a genuine lyric gift…He had struck just the right note for the magazines when he was sixteen,
and the magazines were not about to change as he got older…He was just getting out of college by then,
with a lot of very vague plans, none of which included the role of spiritual hack. Little did he know.

And so here he his, a few years later, married with five children, eking out a living writing little
inspirational stories and poems for a variety of pious Catholic periodicals. This year, right as he’s being
called upon to produce his Christmas material as per usual:

It was the season to rub his hands and be genial for the Passenger; moisten his eyeballs and be tender
for the Catholic Woman; roll up his trousers and be childish for the Tiny Messenger.

…but he’s coming up dry. Very dry.

He can’t hold on to anything solid to believe in – it just seems to him to all be so many words, the same
words, over and over – and he basically wants a break from it. He’s worn out. But how can you take a
break when your work is about faith?

“The Catholic mother” – he was so damned tired. He couldn’t keep this going much longer. With five
wonderful kids you needed so much money. If he could just drop the whole thing, tiptoe away. Stop
trying to sustain this mood. But there were the bills, and there was pride.

He was so tired of all that, didn’t want to argue. If you could just give it up for a year, you might get
excited again. But you weren’t allowed to give it up for so much as a week. It got in your teeth and hair.
And meanwhile, the whole thing was getting to be more and more like New Jersey.

Betty senses something is wrong:

She had a hunch he wanted to change his style, develop a little more depth; but with the cost of living
and all, he kept putting it off from issue to issue. She was naturally optimistic and sure he would work it
out; meanwhile, he was doing so much good….
That’s a phrase that recurs again and again…his hack writing is of the lowest common denominator, and
everyone around him knows it…but he was doing so much good. He believes that he’s somewhat of a
fraud…but he was doing so much good…his writing might even be doing him spiritual harm…but he was
doing so much good.

He’s trapped.

He wonders what to do about it. He thinks confronting doubters and skeptics in the person of an old
high school friend – might light the fire again, so he goes looking for fights in that regard. He remembers
the nuns’ admonitions about purity and grace, so he keeps trying to go to Confession, and either doesn’t
go, or makes a garbled, confusing confession to a puzzled priest.

He remembers that it used to flow, and it seemed natural. What he wrote at first expressed something
real:

If only he hadn’t dragged it around for so long, like a dead cat…

…One thing was sure, if he didn’t get the feeling back soon, he was out of work.

The truth was, he needed that feeling. Funny, if you wanted a funny side, that the good feeling he had
known that day should have become his bread and butter. It would never have occurred to him at the
time. The pleasant ease of the church, the seat turning cool on his face – that that in turn should become
a kind of agony, was funny. God, to feel the ease again. And to be able to pay his bills with it.

As Eve Tushnet points out in her post on this novel, this doesn’t have to be only about how working in
the religion biz can put your faith at risk in a zillion different ways. It’s about any of us, in any area of life,
initially excited and buzzed, fully engaged – losing it. Feeling lost. Wondering where it went – and if it
was real at all.

But there’s a lot in The Hack for non-Christians as well. It’s about how we accept shoddy work and
emotional dishonesty, both from ourselves and from others: because we think it’s good-enough, or it’s
all that we’re capable of, or it’s what other people really want. Bert is forced to perform his trinkety faith
in order to feed his family, but then, all of us end up faking the best parts of ourselves sometimes, in
order to set a good example or maintain familial harmony or because we don’t know what else to do.
And none of us are adequate to our ideals; even our ideals aren’t adequate to the love, hope, truth, or
justice of which the ideals are merely chintzy mental effigies.

Whose fault is it though? How did Bert get to this point?

His wife and a priest-editor have it out on this score. Father Chubb has been sending back Bert’s work for
the first time ever, which isn’t helping the current crisis. Out of Bert’s hearing, Betty and Father Chubb
argue:

“For heavensake, Father, don’t you understand anything? Who can Bert write for now? Who is going to
buy his late Victorian junk now? You people bring a boy up on James Whitcomb Riley and Joyce Kilmer –”

“I doubt it anyone did that.”

“And then you praise him by your own nutty standards until he doesn’t know good from bad, up from
down. And then, and then¸ you have to go an change your magazine, so that he hasn’t got any place to
write for. How dare you change your magazine like that?…”

****

Father Chubb begins here:

“But then I don’t think that Bert ever had the faintest idea what the Church was really about, do you?”

“How would I know?” She said sharply. “He was the only Catholic I ever had to go on.”

“True – but even you must have felt that the things that exercised him were pretty trivial for a grown
man. Seat money and dirty movies, you say, and where angels go in the winter, such childish concerns –
he seemed to have had no sense of the sacramental, of sacred places and things, of liturgy and initiation
into mystery.”
“I never saw anything like that in the Passenger, either,” was what Betty felt like saying to this…The things
he had described as trivial sounded like the table of contents of his magazine.

*****

Now. Let’s extrapolate. Let’s apply.

There are a lot of directions this can take us in, aren’t there?

Well, I’m definitely returning to this tomorrow. I’ve given myself until noon to work on this post, and it’s
11:53 – after which I’m going to hit the short story again and then it’s off for an afternoon of doctor’s
appointment, jazz lesson and basketball practice.

(The older one is off at the March for Life.)

You may be reading this and wondering…hmmmm…are you personally identifying with this, Amy?

In a way yes, but not, perhaps in the way you think. This book resonated very strongly with me partly
because any book that seriously grapples with faith is going to do that. You throw in the Professional
Religionist, explored from a knowing perspective, even more so.

But no, I’m not coming up dry like Bert Flax, not suffering that block. But I have grappled, over the years,
with the way in which certain styles of writing in which I’ve specialized, if you will, has impacted my
writing capability, such as it is, in various ways – and it’s been frustrating.

So for years, I wrote columns. For years, most of my regular writing was 700-800 word columns in the
Catholic press. And then 150-200 word devotionals. As I moved into books, I struggled – I was only able
to think in 800-word chunks. That is: Present the idea, usually in an anecdote, rise to a certain pitch,
perhaps involving ambiguity and conflict – and then resolve the ambiguities. Wistfully, perhaps.

(Basically every inspirational Instagram mini-blog you find right now.)

The good part was that it became easy and natural. The bad part is that my brain had been wired to
write in those chunks, and learning to write with a longer end-game in sight was hard. And still is,
sometimes.

Ah, it’s 12:01. More tomorrow. Much more.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book are hints thrown off in passing which show that
attention to the study of archetypes could benefit the Church in some of the acute pastoral problems
she faces today. In discussing the prevalent laps of Catholics brought up in Catholic homes and
educated in Catholic schools, Fr. White observes that this is very likely a failure of our sacred images
to sustain an adequate idea of what they are supposed to represent. The images absorbed in
childhood are retained by the sould throughout life. In medieval times, the child viewed the same
images as his elders, and these were images adequate to the realities they stood for. He formed his
images of the Lord from, for example, the stern and majestic Pantacrator, not from a smiling Jesus
with a bleeding heart. When childhood was over, the image was still valid and was able to hold up
under the assaults to belief. Today the idea of religion of large numbers of Catholics remains trapped
at the magical stage by static and superficial images which neither mind nor stomach can any longer
take.