Jesus Barbecuing on the Beach

An interesting discussion of a book series I may have to find:

What Catholic readers will notice about Lit is that it is our fallenness -- sin, in a word -- that first puts Karr on the road to conversion. Desperately, for the sake of her young son, she yearns to be free of her addiction to alcohol, which she has inherited from both her parents. A Franciscan nun with whom she is friendly tells her to pray. One improbable prayer leads to another; soon, like Hazel Moates, the God-haunted hero of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, she embraces the God she is determined to spurn. Bare-assed human need, as she might put it, beyond the cold comfort of secular humanism, which the professional atheists recommend with such easy, heartless aplomb, forces her to cry out, like Christ's companion on the cross, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom" (Lk 23:42)...

Later, when I met her for dinner with a young Dominican priest attached to St. Vincent's, she recounted how astonished she was to find herself converting. When she took up the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, she discovered an understanding of sin that only deepened her solicitude for her family's communal distress. Readers of Lit will see the hard-earned fruits of these exercises in an unforgettable scene between the author and her dying mother. And yet when Karr tackles such painful matters, it is never with dreary religiosity. She certainly jolts my cradle-Catholic smugness when she asks, after describing the many benefits of conversion, "Isn't it great being Catholic?"

For the storyteller in Karr, who battens on the concrete, it is the reality of Catholicism that is most attractive. "One of the things I love about Jesus," she tells me, "was His carnality. For example, there is the time, after the resurrection, when He is on the beach and He encounters His disciples. What is He doing? He is making a barbecue! As a writer, there is something about this carnality that I love. . . . I think a big part of the grace I have been given as a Catholic within the Church is a love of the world, which I didn't have before I converted. One of the great gifts of the Church is that we have a body on the Cross -- it's not an idea of a body or a shape of a body but an actual body, a body like our own.

"No one can look at the Crucifixion and not recognize that. I love that line from Simone Weil: "Spiritual living is accepting reality at any cost." I remember reading that when I was first getting sober, when I really had no desire to become a Christian . . . and I remember being horrified by the idea that anyone should even dream of accepting reality at any cost. I remember thinking: what an awful, awful thing. And now I take so much consolation in knowing that I don't have to manufacture reality any more. You know, I was never much good at it. So much of my drinking and depression stemmed from that. There was never any really good news attached to it. And I had this confirmed when I read the Spiritual Exercises, which stress that sin is not merely a breaking of this or that rule but a turning away from God, a turning away from reality, a turning away from the truth."