Critics' choices for Christmas: Laura Sheahen

Commonweal, Dec 6, 2002 by Laura Sheahen

If baby-boomer Catholics have been puzzled by their younger Gen-X counterparts lately, they need look no further than Colleen Carroll's excellent new book for an explanation of what's up with Gen-X Christians. The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Loyola Press, $19.95, 320 pp.) is a fascinating study of the return to traditional worship and doctrine among Catholics and Protestants under thirty-five.

A well-researched, enjoyable read, The New Faithful is studded with revealing vignettes. Twentysomethings work all day in power jobs and then go home to ... say the rosary. Pierced and tattooed teenagers combine music and moral mandates at the annual Rock for Life. Young lobbyists and lawyers on Capitol Hill push the church's social teaching in the halls of power. Attractive college students forgo their evening activities on campus to squeeze in a little eucharistic adoration. Tradition is "sexy and exotic," says a thirty-one-year-old seminary professor. Who knew?

The same professor laments the "boomer obsession" with reconciling faith and logic. Boomers think well-informed believers need to "prove you can be a rational Christian. And my big thing is: Who cares?" Christianity in the United States, it would seem, has already been there, done that.

The book defines another intriguing development: the early midlife crisis. Raised in affluent homes and often achieving career success in their twenties, some younger Christians are realizing that education, money, and power aren't cutting it when it comes to fulfillment. They opt out in search of jobs that are an "extension of their faith journey," and practice a traditionalism one describes as "in your face." If the movement toward orthodoxy is not a widespread trend, it's a trend nonetheless, and one worth watching.

Orthodoxy with a capital O is the subject of Father Arseny: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father (Saint Vladimir's Seminary Press, $15.95, 279 pp.), a curious work that has captivated post-Soviet Russia's emerging Christian community. A collection of narratives about a Russian Orthodox priest imprisoned for decades in Stalin's Gulag, the book is part hagiography, part One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The anecdotes that make up Father Arseny were penned in secret and first disseminated as samizdat (think smudged mimeographed sheets passed from hand to hand). They trace the impact of an unprepossessing man who became a source of grace in the Siberian camps--and beyond.

Thus we read of Arseny defusing lethal tensions between the political prisoners and the felons who share barracks; miraculously stopping a beating (perhaps, it is suggested, by something akin to astral projection); and urging a camp guard not to lose his soul by rejoining the secret police. Unlike most Russian prison tomes, there is even a lengthy happy ending: the second half of the book is written by people Arseny counseled after his release. These "spiritual children" recount the priest's prescient knowledge of their lives--everything from a son's illness to a woman's confession of adultery.

The writing is uneven, as any work by multiple anonymous authors must be; the translation is inelegant; and those who expect journalistic accuracy will be taken aback by such uncritical assurances as, yes, Arseny did ward off freezing by means of prayer. By the end, however, Father Arseny won me over, as the man himself won over the hard-bitten skeptics of the Gulag, demonstrating how a great spirit survived history's worst epoch to minister as a "reader of the human soul."

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's first collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage, won praise for its sensitive portrayals of young Indian women encountering America as new wives. Her latest volume of stories, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (Doubleday, $23.95, 268 pp.), explores the same immigrant experience from the standpoint of women either firmly established in U.S. society or helplessly confused by it.

The stories concern family relationships--often those of mothers and daughters--foundering across the distances created by not only green cards but conflicting expectations. They make real to American audiences "abhimaan, that mix of love and anger and hurt which lies at the heart of so many of our Indian tales, and for which there is no equivalent in English." Mothers lose the respect of daughters-in-law, siblings grow aloof, lovers quarrel--and often, cultural incompatibilities are to blame.

When the story lines occasionally stumble, Divakaruni's writing is saved by her keen outsider's eye for what is ruefully ridiculous in American society. In one story, an Indian woman laughs at her emigre niece: "To believe that you can control everything in your life! How absurdly American!" A mother-in-law visiting the States finds soap operas "baffling," and disparages Equal, the sugar substitute, as "that chemical powder."

Of course, it's not a literacy divide (one Indian grandmother quotes Shakespeare) that makes America's mores, like its knock-knock jokes, unintelligible. Though one character muses that she doesn't "fully understand the word privacy, because there was no such term in Bengali," we know the dictionary is not the issue. Too often, American society's very real emotional shortcomings are laid bare when Indian characters puzzle over customs like "children being allowed to close their doors against their parents." At their bittersweet best, Divakaruni's stories follow the poignant consequences of shutting others out, on one side of the ocean or another.