The Life You Save May Be Your Own; An American Pilgrimage

Catholic New Times, Dec 5, 2004 by Mike Burtt

The Life You Save May Be Your Own; Ah American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004, 555 pp.

I had two immediate and contradictory concerns after encountering Paul Elies, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, an American Pilgrimage. Is it really possible to adequately describe the lives of four of the most important Catholic writers of the 20th century in a single book? Secondly, as we move into the next century, how much more is there to say about them?

I need not have worried. In a way we haven't heard before, Elie tells the stories of the four: Thomas Merton, monk, peace activist and author of Seven Store, Mountain; Dorothy Day, foundress of the Catholic Worker Movement; Walker Percy, the doctor turned author of the Moviegoer and Flannery O'Connor, chronicler of rural Southern life.

Elie accomplishes this by avoiding the temptation to lump the four together into a single group. Although the four mid-century American Catholic writers read and admired each other's work, exchanging letters occasionally, and were even playfully referred to as "the school of the holy ghost" by Caroline Gordon, it would be unfair to consider them a single movement of any kind.

Elie also avoids telling four separate biographies of "four Catholics of rare sophistication, who overcame the narrowness of the Church and suspicions of the culture to achieve a distinctly American Catholic outlook."

Elie takes the story in a third direction, weaving their stories into a single pilgrimage with separate and very different entry points, coming together at a place where literature, life and religion meet. For Elie, a pilgrimage signifies "a personal as well as collective journey undertaken in the light of a story, and although a pilgrimage can be undertaken in company, each pilgrim is changed individually." The term is originally a religious one but has maintained its relevance in the secular world. Likewise, these writers saw their own lives fundamentally as a "religious one," but one fulfilled only in society as a whole.

The theme of pilgrimage often appears in their work as well as what has been written about them. Day called her column, "On Pilgrimage," while describing her trips to different Catholic Worker houses across the country, she also documented her attempt to live out the examples she found in the Gospels and in Russian literature. While Merton remained behind monastery walls for nearly his entire adult life, his writing and correspondence documented his attempt to draw a bridge from the tumultuous mid-century to the time of medieval European philosophers.

They wrote unconventional prose with a religious message to un increasingly secular population from far-flung locations, among the very poor of New York, monks of Kentucky and the rural south, as in the case of O'Connor and Percy. Yet the question of how to communicate their unique vision to those in mainstream America was a major preoccupation of the writers. How they managed to do so with such incredible success is a major theme of the book.

Elie suggests the answer lies in the fact that they allowed themselves the freedom to follow their own preferences, rather than what was fashionable at the time. They did not read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Kierkegaard and the medieval mystics and philosophers as much as they consumed them. They didn't study those that came before them as much as they made their work their own.

The book's title, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, is borrowed from an O'Connor short story, but speaks clearly to the way the four writers approached their lives, as well as their writing. Although they wrote passionately about their religious convictions, they were out to save themselves, not others.

Elie has written a great literary work. He has accomplished something much more than a biography about those who, as Day wrote, found meaning in life by following the imperatives found in the Gospels and her favourite novels. In setting out on a pilgrimage to tell the story of four writers that make you want to change your life, he ended up writing that kind of book himself.

Mike Burtt writes from Victoria.