Walker Percy

I wish he were still alive ...

Percy was a southern Catholic novelist and very acute in his ability to see around him. He understood that one of the large problems with Protestant Christianity ... maybe particularly in America was its enlightenment duality ... its distrust of mixing spirit with things ... with the body.

"she mistrusts the Old Church's traffic in things, sacraments, articles, bread, wine, salt, oil, water, ashes."

But he was also very aware that this distrust was not Christian. In fact, he saw the great work of Christ as uniting man within himself by uniting him to God. All Catholics have a better appreciation for the Incarnation and the great meaning that gives to the world of things ... and it has always been a part of the Hebrew understanding with their poetry of trees clapping and fields singing.

In Love in Ruins Percy's character thinks he has invented technology that will reunite man with himself. "my lapsometer, the first caliper of the soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house."

and toward the end ...
"For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man. Even now I can diagnose and shall one day cure: cure the new plague, the modern Black Death, the current hermaphroditism of the spirit, namely: More's syndrome, or: chronic angelism-bestialism that rives soul from body and sets it orbiting the great world as the spirit of abstraction whence it takes the form of beasts, swans and bulls, werewolves, blood-suckers, Mr. Hydes, or just poor lonesome ghosts locked in its own machinery."

"Some day a man will walk into my office as ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher."

At another point in the novel the protaganist's wife asks her Roman Catholic husband: "My God, what is it you do in Church?" More explains, "What she didn't understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the Angels, that it took nothing less than ... eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning."

I heartily agree. It is eating Christ in the bread and wine and loving my wife and my children who are real ... it is acknowledging God's presence with me now as my fingers hit these shiny keys and my eyes look upon technology--technology surrounded by human mess an empty glass containing watery lime (my new experiement in drinking fruit every day) and the multiple papers covered in messy ink and the flower-laden sheep that dance around my coffee mug and the tattered postcard from Iran in 1994 and the smooth wax candle handmade by Ryan ... it is all these things and these things present to God, God present to them, God praised through them, God given to them ... that make me a man and make me whole.

The last line of my book makes me cry when I read it ... I don't know if its because I have been through this novel a couple times or if you will get it reading it ahead of time ... but I write it anyway as the profound beginning of redemption in a fallen world. It is a domestic scene where the hero, finally married to one women, denies his old temptations and goes home to his wife.

"To bed we go for a long winter's nap, twined about each other as the ivy twineth, not under a bush or in a car or on the floor or any such humbug as marked the past peculiar years of Christendom, but at home in bed where all good folk belong."

Amen.