A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints.

Amazing in their variety, as the seventeen essays that editor Paul Elie has gathered together in A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints illustrate, the lives of the saints express startlingly disparate ways of imitating Christ. One doesn't have to be Catholic or even religious (and a number of these authors are neither) to become charmed or inspired by saints' lives, their stark confessions and acute spiritual insights, and, sometimes, their endearingly comedic stories. The saints - the cranky, the gregarious, the sensual, the neurotic, the intellectual, the stubborn, the sweet - break into the lives of these writers, disturbing, illuminating, and provoking.

In a disarmingly confessional essay, Jesuit Avery Dulles writes about Saint Robert Bellarmine, another fiercely loyal Jesuit theologian (but not a somber one: Saint Bellarmine refused to brush flies away from his face; his nose was their Paradise). From the militant and humbler Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Ron Hansen hopes no less than to "figure out how to live magnificently." Francine Prose lingers over the life and writings of the towering Saint Teresa of Avila, who explodes conventional ideas of what it means to be female. In admiring and sheltering words, Kathleen Norris writes about the gallant girl martyrs, who, giving themselves up for slaughter during the persecutions that racked the church in the third and fourth centuries, rebelled against the constraints of family and society. In a soulful and sassy meditation, Commonweal's associate editor Paul Baumann, awash in "plastic and polyester ... pampers and the color pink," ponders pregnancy as transubstantiation and empathizes with Saint Joseph, patron of harried fathers, whose "consternation over his wife's seeming procreative autonomy is the consternation of everyman."

Novelist Kathryn Harrison interweaves her own story of loss and redemption with the life of Saint Catherine of Siena. In an effort to win the love of an intractable mother, a young Harrison tried desperately to harness the experience of rapture, first attained through the healing hands of a Christian Science practitioner after a bloody car accident. She needed no instruction in the lives of the saints to realize the transformative power of physical pain, twisting a vise on her fingers and pressing ice to her tongue, reveling as the blood oozed out (blood lingered in the mouth of the other Catherine when she received the host).

Harrison freed herself of her body's constraints; she abjured sleep and sought to transmute an unruly body into one that mirrored her mother's fashion-honed expectations: she stopped eating. Saint Catherine rejected ordinary food but sought expiation for all souls and found sustenance by imbibing the pus from the cancerous breast of a callous - but soon contrite - companion. Her emersion into God thrust the holy woman into affairs of the state and of the church, and into the lives of countless souls; her creative accomplishments were astonishing (she authored The Dialogue, one of the most important spiritual writings of the Middle Ages). There are captivating parallels in the lives of Saint Catherine and Kathryn Harrison, but the saint's discipline was saturated in dazzling theology: "it is by such suffering that we become conformed to Christ crucified," she wrote. By conforming to Christ, Saint Catherine believed she was saved and participated directly in the salvation of the world. Harrison's emaciated look produced a crop of bones, newly emerged "angles and hollows,"but the bait with which, she had hoped to entice her mother became her own greatest temptation: "I loved transformed self."

Harrison's is a mesmerizing essay, raw and powerful. She raises important questions about what may motivate the appetite for renunciation: Saint Catherine

ate" and "savored" the souls of her sisters and brothers; "this after all, was our gentle Savior's food." "In no other food," she divulged, was she "ever to find pleasure." But Harrison mistakes her patron's zest for extravagant self-abasement with a rejection of life, and it is not clear if she recognizes the enormous differences between her own willful feats of endurance and the saint's imitatio Christi. Harrison's fashion-conscious mother marveled at Saint Catherine's dietary propriety: "she lived for years on one lettuce leaf!"

Enrique Fernandez writes a rip-roaring, thigh-slapping, soul-searching, and spirit-rousing essay, featuring Saint Lazarus and the author, who, having traveled to Cuba to report on the daily lives of the citizens of his mother country, became a skeptical but eager supplicant to the patron of the crippled and the feet impaired, hoping that this holy amalgam of Christian saint and Yoruban deity might cure his "foot dyslexia." Years of inflicting "toe crushing" pain on others had leached Fernandez of his confidence, wreaked havoc in his professional life, and spawned potentially dire consequences (Fernandez is a Latin music journalist who frequents salsa clubs, where being "deft, smooth, sharp, suave," is de rigueur). Joining a procession of "walkers," "genuflectors," and slitherers, the doubting but determined dyslexic journeyed several miles outside Havana to the rural shrine of Saint Lazarus to voice his particular plea: "Saint Lazarus, Babalu-Aye, please help me walk straight without tripping, stumbling, twisting my ankle, stepping on feet, or splashing in puddles." Tossed into the prayerful crowd was a pious penitent clearing the way by brushing the path for "the crawler," who announced that he wanted to feel the pebbles, the pain. "The other man kept brushing until the crawler stopped, looked up again, and said, `If you don't stop, I'm going to stand up and fuck you up." Among the teeming crowd, Fernandez saw an able-bodied man crawling on bloodied knees, his small, naked, club-footed boy saddled on his back. Back in New York and several puddle splashes later, Fernandez realized to whom and for whom he should have offered his prayers: "That was Saint Lazarus." Fernandez delivers a perfect balance of solemnity and levity, so familiar from the lives of the saints.

Saint Jean de Brebeuf has frequently been dismissed as barbaric or embraced with pernicious sentimentality. In one of the best essays in this collection, Tobias Wolff does neither. In 1629, Saint Jean, a young aristocrat from Normandy, landed in what is now Quebec. He was a missionary to the Hurons, a people for whose rituals and beliefs, healers and feasts, he had an unfettered disdain. Yet Saint Jean weathered famine and disease, violent winters and lonely solitude, and offered his life for the Hurons. He had tried fervently to convert them to his faith: he squirreled food away, doling it out to the deserving; he hectored, cajoled, an ridiculed. Wolff is both chastened and appalled by Saint Jean, a man "of unbending principle" whose faith in his God was unwavering and ferocious and whose missionary zeal is testimony to the terror of brilliant certainty. A quarter century after Saint Jean arrived to preach among the Huron, their population was decimated; the saint's apostolic fervor had helped to ensure the annihilation of the lives and the culture of the people whose souls he had come to save. And yet, "everything he did, he did with the best of intentions." As Wolff points out, there is much to admire about Saint Jean. The martyr is seductive and attractive, particularly perhaps for those who fear that under the cloak of multiculturalism, moral relativity and a feebleness of will threaten to triumph. "If all things are true, then what particular thing is worth living for, let alone dying for?" Wolff asks. "I know I am not alone," he writes, "in my disgust with the flaccidity of spirit that comes upon us as the consequence of trying always to accommodate the justice in each claim on our sympathy and understanding." But, Wolff cautions, "I believe that this disgust is the greatest spiritual problem of our time." This is a timely and necessary essay.

These essays are liberally peppered with delightful and disturbing anecdotes, but there are disappointments. Striving for candor, David Plante's essay on Saint John of the Cross reeks of vainglory; straining for profundity, it is tedious and banal. Hansen recoils in disapproval from Ignatius's penchant for penitential asceticism, and few of these essayists appreciate the way in which so many of the saints chose suffering not in order to punish their bodies, but because to do so was to merge with the body of their Savior, whose suffering saved. And there is the occasional infusion of a patronizing tone, a Chiding inflection, as if the saint should have known better, as we modems do (in Bruce Bawer's essay on Saint Francis, for example).

Still, A Tremor of bliss is enormous fun and instructive, too. It is an unmuffled proclamation that the hold of the holy dead is tenacious: they continue to tease the imagination, inflame the passions, and provoke the conscience of women and men; they elicit anger and praise; they perplex and disgust and enthrall.