The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage Book

What a herculean task this was: writing about the lives of four great writers. Four great American Catholic writers. Their common faith defined their lives and their works. They are all dead now but for many years in our recent history they had all been living and looking at the same world. I enumerate them here in the same sequence they had passed away:

1. Flannery O'Connor
2. Thomas Merton
3. Dorothy Day
4. Walker Percy

O'Connor was just 39 when she died of lupus, Day was 84. Percy died of cancer, Merton just had a bath (after delivering a lecture), slipped, held an electric fan wire with his wet hands, and was electrocuted. He was in his early 50's.

It is not my habit to take down notes while reading books so I may be mistaken here on one or two points. But as far as I recall, except for Day who refused to read Percy's books (this was at the time when she was already in her 70's and felt she's too old to read anything new, contented as she was with rereading her favorites by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens and Silone), these four read and admired each other's works. Merton and Percy actually met, so did O'Connor and Percy. Day and Merton never met each other. The novelist Alice Walker was too young to have met O'Connor but the latter had a profound influence on her. Percy met the mother of John Kennedy Toole, who had killed himself at age 30, and she gave him the manuscript of her son's novel written in the spirit of the Southern Catholic fiction (like O'Connor's). A publisher had turned it down before Toole committed suicide. Percy found it an engrossing read despite the lousy paper it was printed on. It was later published and won the Pulizer Prize.

Both Day and Merton--from a Catholic point of view--had sordid pasts. When she was younger Day had lived in with a man, hippie-style, and bore him an illegitimate daughter. Merton also had a child out of wedlock before he was converted to the Catholic faith and became a monk. And when he was already a monk, and a famous Catholic writer at that, he had an affair with a beautiful nurse who had given him sponge baths when he was sick in a hospital. Even O'Connor apparently had some racist streaks; and Percy appeared confused with his philosophy.

Apart from the juicy, gossipy parts of this book, there were a lot of interesting philosophy, religion, history and literature here which I faithfully marked with dog-ears. I was prepared to give it 4 stars but Paul Elie's own encore, at the end of the Epilogue which carries the book's title, pushed the rating to a five. Despite its length, I am happy to type it here in full as a holy week penance for my sins:

"We are all skeptics now, believer and unbeliever alike. There is no one true faith, evident at all times and places. Every religion is one among many. The clear lines of any orthodoxy are made crooked by our experience, are complicated by our lives.

"Believer and unbeliever are in the same predicament, thrown back onto themselves in complex circumstances, looking for a sign. As ever, religious belief makes its claim somewhere between revelation and projection, between holiness and human frailty; but the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it belongs.

"This is the significance of a piece of writing that makes a case for the Communion of Saints by way of one girl's short, hard, complicated life--and, perhaps, the significance of the religious faith that makes its case through the account of God's experience of life on earth as a certain person at a particular place and time. There is no way to seek truth except personally. Every story worth knowing is a life story.

"In their different ways, the four writers this book is about sought the truth personally--in charity, in prayer, in art, in philosophy. Their writing was the most personal way of all, for in the act of reading and writing one stranger and another go forth to meet in an encounter of the profoundest sort. In this encounter, there are no self-evident truths. Nothing can be taken for granted or asserted outright. The case must be made to each of us individually, with fierce attention on both sides; we must be persuaded one at a time.

"Perhaps that doesn't tell us much; but it is enough, and perhaps a little modesty is a good thing, a useful check on our strivings. Like it or not, we come to life in the middle of stories that are not ours. The way to knowledge, and self-knowledge, is through pilgrimage. We imitate our way to the truth, finding our lives--saving them--in the process. Then we pass it on.

"The story of their lives, then, is also its meaning and its implication for ours. They saw religious experience out before them. They read their way toward it. They believed it. They lived it. They made it their own. With us in mind, they put it in writing."

And we read it. Thank you Flannery, Thomas, Dorothy and Walker.