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Book Reviews
by Rev. Joseph A. Grenier, Ph.D.
 Rev.
Joseph A. Grenier, Ph.D. is the current presiding bishop of the
Celtic Christian
Church and has been co-director for Good Tidings since 1986. His doctoral work is in Church History
and he is a professor with
Global Ministries University. Joseph also works as a counselor
and spiritual director with
Spiritual Care Associates. He reviews books for us that we sell at
The Rose of Sharon Shop Online
Bookstore.
The
Scent of God
A Memoir
by
Beryl Singleton Bissell
New York: Counterpoint, 2006
Beryl Bissell entered a contemplative monastery, left it, fell in love with a
priest and he with her, he was laicized, they married and had two children.
After only five years of marriage he died of cancer.
Those are the are bare bones of Beryl’s story. But the book is a thousand times
more than that. Beryl does not look at her life through rose-colored glasss.
With unflinching honesty she describes the various stages of her life, the
people in it, the events that marked it, in the process revealing herself to be
a person of deep passion, whether that passion is directed at God or at her
husband and children. Add to that a style that is eminently readable, and the
book is one you can’t put down. You come away from it with a deeper understading
of God’s often mysterious ways with us human beings, and also with a deeper
appreciation of the pain and suffering that can accompany a human being’s
attempt to respond wholeheartedly to God’s will.
In Beryl’s case that suffering started at a very young age. She was born, the
third of four children, into a family in which the father was both a successful
banker and an alcoholic, and a mother, a very beautiful woman, who went into a
frenzy of rage when her husband was going through an episode of drinking.
Within that family life, and perhaps influenced by it, Beryl started to
experience a desire to enter the convent, and more particularly a contemplative
convent. A the age of 18 she entered a monastery of the Poor Clares, a strict
contemplative order, in Bordentown, New Jersey--another source of suffering,
since her parents were dead set against it.
For the next twelve years Beryl put all of her passionate nature into becoming a
saint as a Poor Clare. She went through a bout of anorexia and a time of
inordinate attachment to her Mistress of Novices. She describes these candidly,
making no excuses for herself. And she describes the rituals of the
monastery--senseless ones and all--as well as the other nuns, the large majority
very good ones, and the few selfish and insensitive ones. It’s a compelling
picture of an extreme form of life in which ones seeks God alone--and of the
human weaknesses that get in the way of that seeking.
Toward the end of that period her father suffered a very severe stroke, and her
mother, who cared for him with devotion, really needed help. Beryl’s sister Judi
had also entered the same monastery of Poor Clares, and her two brothers had
their own families to care for. Beryl was told to go to Puerto Rico, where her
parents had lived for many years, to help her mother. For the next few years she
went back and forth between the monastery and Puerto Rico, living several months
at a time in each place. In Puerto Rico she tried to live according to her
religious obligations; in the monastery she tried to rekindle her vocation--and
inevitably that dichotomy caused trouble.
In Puerto Rico she met a priest, Father Vittorio Bosca, Italian, friendly,
outgoing, very attractive, and also a good priest. He ministered to her father,
among the many other ways in which he served. Inevitably they fell in love. And
there began the cycle of attraction, feeling guilty, pulling back, seeing each
other again, recognizing their love, denying it, misunderstanding each other,
hurting each other, and so on--what we’ve called in Good Tidings the roller
coaster type of relationship, one which we’ve seen over and over again.
What is important here, in my estimation, is that both Beryl and Father Vittorio
were good people, honestly trying to be faithful to their respective vocations,
including the celibacy that was part of it. Despite that they came to love each
other deeply. And as Beryl describes with her typical candor her roller coaster
relationship with FatherVittorio, one begins to wonder whether she had a true
vocation to a contemplative religious life. Are there such things as temporary
vocations, by means of which God draws a person to religious experiences that
will affect for the good that person’s later life? I for one believe there are
such vocations. But that’s a whole other topic....
Be that as it may, Beryl did finally leave the Poor Clares, and a careful
reading of her story gives the impression that it was a correct decision. Her
true vocation was marriage and a family.
In the case of Father Vittorio, the decision to leave the priesthood, though
very painful, was in one sense easier. He had never really wanted to be a
priest. He was searching for a father figure, and found it in the priests of his
parish. He entered a religious order at a very young age, was told that wanting
to return home was a temptation, and was ordained young so that he could not
leave. But he did leave the order so as to work with people as a secular priet.
His deep love for Beryl led to his decision to leave the priesthood, and his
conscience led him to wait for his dispenstion before marrying her. He obtained
it through the help of a sympathetic Roman Catholic bishop in New Jersey, and he
and Beryl were then married by that same bishop.
It would be wonderful to say that they lived happily ever after. But that was
not to be. Even before they were married, Vittorio had developed cancer. There
followed bouts of serious weakness when he truly seemed to be dying, and
surprising combacks that allowed him to live a practically normal life. The
couple had two children, and Vittorio was a loving and happy father. Then, when
he and Beryl had only been married five years, that cancer claimed him.
It was not the end of tragedy in Beryl’s life. When her beloved daughter
Francesca was only 24, she was shot and killed--a homicide that remains unsolved
to this day.
In our work with the women who contact us in Good Tidings, we always encourage
them to resolve their relationships with integrity. Beryl and Vittorio did that,
painful though it was for each one to sunder his or her previous commitment. In
that they remain a model of faithfulness in searching for and doing God’s will,
no matter what the exterior circumstances may seem to say.
Joseph A. Grenier
JOURNEYS ON THE EDGES: THE
CELTIC TRADITION
Thomas O’Loughlin
All things
Celtic are very popular today, and there is no end to books and CDs published
about them. And often enough the publications are more about New Age things
than about Celtic matters. How to distinguish the good material from the
publications simply using the word “Celtic” as a sales pitch? It’s not always
easy.
So let me
tell you about a very good book about the spiritual outlook—the spirituality—of
the ancient Celts. The “ancient Celts” are those peoples who lived in
northwestern Europe in the first millennium of the Christian era. The Book is
“Journeys on the Edges: The Celtic Tradition,” and the author, Thomas O’Loughlin,
is a scholar, teacher and lecturer who is thoroughly familiar with the Celtic
heritage.
O’Loughlin
starts by making the unexpected point that it’s not really possible to describe
a fully articulated spirituality of the ancient Celts, for the simple reason
that we do not possess enough documents and other artifacts dating from the
Celtic period to do so. What is possible—and this is what O’Loughlin does in a
masterful way—is to identify various more widespread traits of the Christian
life of the Celts, and from that get an insight into their way of living the
faith.
One of
those traits is a love and appreciation of all of nature, not just in itself as
beautifil and good, but especially as pointing to its creator, God. The word
for this is a “sacramental” view of nature, and it’s a beautiful trait of the
spirit of the Celts.
Another of
their traits—and this one is not so easy for us to grasp—is that they felt
themselves to be a nation and that this nation was the last one to receive the
revelation of God. They were, in other woprds, “on the fringes” of the world,
and once thay had received Christ God’s plan would be complete. That was St.
Patrick’s outlook: he was ordained by God to bring the Gospel to that last
nation and then God’s plan would be complete. In the same way they felt
themselves to be living in the last period of time, the period after Christ.
What was next was the end of this world as we know it—not a destruction, but a
completion, a perfecting, a transition from shadow to substance. It was a
thoroughly religious way of seing the world, and one that may well seem strange
to us today.
A final
trait that I’ll mention is that of journey. All of creation, as already noted,
was on a journey to God. It manifested God and glorified him, and in going
through various stages, it journeyed on to its final perfection. Within that
basic journey, all of us are also journeying, from birth to death, to that final
perfection in God. For some Celts, that conception of life led them to go to
out of the way places, so as to concentrate on God. For others, it meant to
travel to distrant countries, to bring them the message of the Gospel. However
it manifested itself, the basic conception was that each of us and all of nature
were on a journey to God.
Those few
paragraphs give you an idea of what is in this excellent book. I highly
recommend it as giving a competent idea of the rich elements of spirituality to
be found among the ancient Celts. We carry the book in our store, and if it’s
sold out we can order a copy for you.
Joseph A. Grenier, Ph.D.
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