Faith Fired By Literature
Matt Hohenberger
From left to right- Flannery O'Connor | Walker Percy | Thomas Merton | Dorothy Day
"Certain books, certain writers, reach us at the center of ourselves." --- Paul Elie
Paul Elie is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. In this book, he explains how the lives and faiths of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy were influenced by literature. They each set out on their own pilgrimage and began to follow a new way of life which they experienced first by reading.
Dorothy Day, during the 19th century, read novels by Dickens and Tolstoy, and thought that there was a sense of the human race as one family and believed in the interdependence of people. This feeling of the good of the human race started when she was eight years old during a San Francisco earthquake in which she witnessed how the people helped each other in the wake of disaster. So she began asking, “Why can’t we just keep doing that? Why can’t society be organized so that we can help each other a little more…. That I actually recognize that that person [one in need of help] is a brother or sister to me in a way?” This type of reformer imagination of how the world might be better than it is was Day’s guide of how she lived out her life. Day wanted to find this human good in her life, so she turned to the Catholic religion for help. Elie tells Ms. Tippett that Day once wrote, “I have one life and I’m going to really live it to the fullest by trying to be a saint.” And thus she began associating with the poor, and her way for that to happen was in joining the Catholic Church. On May 1st, 1933, Day, along with Peter Maurin, put out a newspaper, The Catholic Worker. During the depression, the same pair decided to put their words to action and created a community in which the needy could go to and be fed and helped. Because of her belief that the world was inclined toward love, she created a community in which she showed that love by working those who needed help in their everyday life.
Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, read about monasteries and medieval philosophy such as Dante before he knew what he was called to do. After reading those books, he realized that “This [becoming a religious authority] is [was] the life for me” and became a monk. Once arriving at the monastery of Gethsemane in Kentucky, he realized that it was the perfect place on earth for him. He then experienced Augustinian restlessness, the core of Merton’s spirituality, where he is restless until he rests in God. Elie explains that through Merton’s continuous writings like personal journals and books, such as The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton was able to accept himself as a full human being and even declaring the immensity of joy of being a man. One of the other great things that came out of the books were some of the risks he made, including changing who he was and what he believed. He had originally thought he was a Catholic monk with apartness and superiority, until he realized there wasn’t a part of superiority in Christianity. So when he wrote his autobiography, he was, in a sense, writing “a big letter to the world, the world he left behind,” according to Elie. This was his pilgrimage; a voyage out to the other world where he saw it through a different view, one where he wasn’t superior.
This is an excerpt from Thomas Merton’s Collection of essays, Mystic and Zen Masters.
“And yet the pilgrimage must continue, because it is an inescapable part of man’s structure and program. The problem is, for his pilgrimage to make sense; it must represent a complete integration of his inner and outer life, of his relation to himself and to other man….we can voyage to the ends of the earth and there find ourselves… and see that the stranger we meet there is no other than ourselves.”
This is an important part of any life, secular or not. That one must constantly search for who they truly are, and this is what Thomas Merton did.
Walker Percy had tuberculosis in the mid ‘40s, and while he was bedridden, he read through many books on existential fiction and philosophy iwhich helped him realize who he was as a person. Percy was a person of despair due to his father and grandfather’s suicide, his mother’s car accident, and the feeling of there being no point at all to life. He was a pathologist studying dead bodies who decided to start diagnosing the living instead of the dead. But when he nearly died of tuberculosis, he decided to become a novelist who wrote about the human person. Percy shows that in a novel, the ordinary person enters the spotlight. Like a novel, Christianity directs us to ordinary lives as a place where the divine, Jesus, is to be found. Walker Percy writes, “Judeo-Christianity is about pilgrims who have something wrong with them and are embarked on a search to find a way out. This is also what novels about.”
Flannery O’Connor realized the stories of the Old Testament gave her a new view of the rural South, which boosted her experience as a writer of fiction. She believed that one relied mainly on disbelief, and this disbelief is combined with attraction for the holy. She also thought that most people are not able to just settle and accept the world, but that one’s hunger for something deeper is so strong that disbelief becomes a starting point and then a continual testing ground for one's religious passion. She writes that the faith of a Christian must be grounded on the experience of disbelief. She notices that in the New Testament, Peter said, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief, ” which she believes the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and thinks it is the foundation prayer of faith.
These four pilgrims each had an incredible openness to the written word as a way for experience and for furthering their lives. They each had their own certain expectations because of the stories which preceded them, and they wanted to test them personally, to see if they were genuine. Their pilgrimages were a way of taking others’ stories, and making them their own by seeking truth through charity, prayer, art, and philosophy. Because of their openness to change in the world, each one of these people portrayed was filled with faith in looking for their own truth in the world.
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