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Love is All . . .
Credo: Essays on grace, altar boys, bees, kneeling, saints, the Mass, priests, strong women, epiphanies, a wake, and the haunting thin energetic dusty figure of Jesus the Christ
by Brian Doyle
Saint Mary’s, 1999. 126 pages.
[Editor’s note: Doyle’s Credo is now out of print. His most recent books are Leaping (2003, Loyola), Spirited Men (2004, Cowley), and The Wet Engine (2005, Paraclete). The review below still serves as a fine introduction to this remarkable writer.]
Reviewed by Patrick Madden
It occurs to me that Credo’s subtitle, cover art (a slightly diagonal heavy oil-painted maroon cross), and bottom-of-the-page catch-quote (“. . . a bright star in the constellation of contemporary Catholic writing”) aim at a specific audience. But I believe the subtext of the essays the book contains is larger than any particular religion. The writing that catches the writer’s experience and thoughts is too grand to be limited by its subject matter. The interesting wordplay -- snitches of unconventional punctuation, casual slang juxtaposed with the seriousness of scripture, clever simile -- is a pleasure for readers of all ages and creeds. This, Brian Doyle’s first book-length solo effort, will certainly impress its intended readership; it is my hope that it may also reach more people than that.
Structurally, Brian Doyle’s book is a sandwich: twenty-one short thematic essays grouped into three sections between two longer essays. But the book reads more like a platter of hors d’oeuvres: pick up the book whenever you’re hungry and you’ve got a spare minute and breeze through two or three pages’ worth of insight. Find inspiration in the lives of the saints, retold with Doyle’s anachronistic wit, go along with his meditations on the Mass, kneeling, bees, geese, priests, moments from the life of Jesus. Did you know that the term Jesuit began as a derogatory name used by Protestants to refer to the Catholic “Company of Jesus”? Have you considered the real-life significance of “loving thy neighbor,” even in the face of dishonest thieving backstabbers? Have you been intrigued by Christ’s angry cleansing of the Temple? Brian Doyle has, and he elaborates on the event as it may have taken place. (His instructions: “Think of the man for a second, not the eternal Son of Light.”) Among these gems (some more resplendent than others) you will find two humorous works of fiction: one in which the author gives a peek into what may have happened as Mary told Joseph the angel’s good news, and another that purports to be excerpted from the diary of Saint Kevin of Glendalough, whose incredible longsuffering and unwavering devotion to his vows leads to an interestingly ridiculous situation with a blackbird. Throughout, Doyle’s love for his religion’s lore -- its scriptures, its heroes and heroines, and its modern faithful -- overflows his words and infects the attentive reader. Contrarily, he also shows his resistance to heavy-handed religion as he eulogizes the Index Liborum Prohibitoum (discontinued in 1966), calling the fifteen-century-long censorship effort “diligent and well-intentioned folly.”
Catholic or not, Christian or not, you will find Doyle’s concise writings, all of which stem from his Catholic faith and his Irish ancestry, cause for delight. The ingredients are meant to be picked at, sampled and savored, enjoyed for their piquant and varied flavors.
But it is the sandwich’s bread that is most sustaining in this book’s case. Perhaps this is irony forced by an incomplete analogy on my part, or perhaps it is fitting that a book drawn from spiritual experiences and wonderings rely on its bread. In any case, Doyle has placed his Best American Essays 1998 selection, “Altar Boy,” first in the book and abutted the last essays with “Grace Notes,” a quite-different version of an essay that appears in Notre Dame Magazine under the title “Filled with Grace.”
I suspect that even people who have never served at Mass (never seen a Mass?) might be interested in Doyle’s reflections on what being an altar boy is all about. For him, it was an honorable service, a stressful apprenticeship, an entrance into temptation (he sometimes collected offerings for prayer candles), a front-row seat to observe the miracle of the Transubstantiation. He has a keen memory of the various Masses and rites and of Latin prayers he no longer needed to know after Vatican II. Through the scattered narrative -- snippets recollections of special occasions and general happenings of the altar-boy experience -- and through Doyle’s introspection, we get a picture of the times and of his seeds of faith despite a growing cynicism in the world. So that it makes sense when we read, “I believe so strongly, so viscerally, in a wisdom and vast joy under the tangled weave of the world, under the tattered blankets of our evil and tragedy and illness and brokenness and sadness and loss, that I cannot speak it, cannot articulate it, but can only hold on to ritual and religion like a drowning man to a sturdy ship.”
In my favorite selection in the whole book, Doyle writes of a visiting Franciscan who has ventured into the altar boys’ locker room, sitting uncomfortably in his ascetic robe and sandals, his ugly feet glaring in the author’s memory, trying to talk with the boys as they change after Mass. Then this reflection, rich with simple words and flowing phrases, a change in tense so fluid and seamless it’s like a dream:
Years later I realized with a start that Christ probably looked a good deal like the Franciscan, with his dusty feet and pocked face, and I had ignored the guy, wished him gone no less than a shaky Peter had wished Jesus gone from his past before the cock crew; Peter standing there in the icy darkness, the fire at his feet sparking up into the dangerous night, sharp voices coming at him like needles, he shifts uneasily from foot to foot and damns his friend as easily, as thoughtlessly, as you might crush a beetle; then a shooting pain of light in the sky, dawn crawls over the hills, and right in his ear, as loud and shrill as a scream, comes the shriek of a rooster and the horrible knowledge that he has betrayed the man he loves. . . .
Drawing inspiration possibly from Pascal’s Pensees, “Grace Notes” takes the form of varied and seemingly disjointed musings on the subject of grace. I tell people all the time: If you’re writing about something fast, use fast words, punctuate fast, make me think fast when I’m reading. Brian Doyle does this naturally, expertly. For instance, he writes that his newborn son’s heart operation “was terrifying but it happened so fast and was so necessary and was so soon after the day he was born with a twin brother that we all mother father sister families staggered through the days and nights too tired and frightened to do anything but lurch into the next hour.” The writing makes us lurch with him. The essay glides smoothly without transitions from one short section to the next, each meditation connected to something above it, the essay like a mobile, “grace” the tack holding it to the ceiling. Doyle includes sections on the etymology of the word, its probable alphabet (“acrobatic, blessed, calm, dignified,” etc.), its effect in the lives of saints, its omniscience, its tendency to bring joy, its physical form, the sin that can never be forgiven: the refusal of God’s grace. He struggles with the problem of evil in a crashing waterfall of writing:
God loves some of us violently. . . . How else to understand raped children, broken and bloodied and murdered children, children with ancient eyes, children who were never children, children who bear the marks of evil to their graves, children torn by evil as I write, as you read? How else to understand them? Tell me why they suffered and died, or suffered and did not die but were haunted and twisted all their lives by evil done upon them. Tell me why there have been so many millions of little broken Christs. Tell me.
And no one will tell me, for no one knows, only the inscrutable Lord.
That, I think, is the most eloquent expression of this dilemma I have ever read.
In the author’s introduction, a list of his beliefs (including the “best of all possible breakfasts: a peanut-butter-and-cheddar-cheese sandwich with a cup of ferocious coffee”), Doyle confesses, “Love is all I ever write about; and I hope that you will . . . find something of use or delight in these pages, and not overmuch to snort at.” A humble exhortation, a sincere, simple wish. Easily fulfilled, I think. In Credo there’s not much to snort at at all.
Patrick Madden lives with his wife and two children in Athens, Ohio, where he is a PhD student in English at Ohio University.
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