A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories, The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Time of the New Millennium, Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue and The One Light: Bede Griffiths's Principal Writings.

A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories
Nancy Mairs
Beacon, $23, 195 pp.

The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians
at the Time of the New Millennium
Charles W. Sennott
Public Affairs Press, $30, 479 pp.

Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue
William A. Dryness
Baker Books, $21.99, 188 pp.

The One Light: Bede Griffiths's Principal Writings
Edited by Bruno Barnhart
Templegate, $29.95, 496 pp.

I doubt that Nancy Mairs, best known for her 1994 book Ordinary Time (Beacon Press), would like to be called a "spiritual writer" but she does belong to that select world of writers, mainly women, who are Christian observers of the world around them, and possessed of the eye and ear of transcendent faith. They tend to be sharper, more penetrating, less sentimental and pietistic than many who claim a spot in the academic niche of spirituality. I have in mind Catholic authors like Sara Maitland and Patricia Hampl and Protestants like Kathleen Norris and Anne Lamott.

Mairs describes herself as "a cripple, a Catholic grounded in liberation theology; a daughter, wife, sister, and mother; a depressive; a feminist." The unwelcome guest of the title is death--not death as a mass phenomenon, but death closely observed as Mairs loses her mother and stepfather, meditates on the death-row prisoners in her state of Arizona with whom she corresponds; thinks of the death of the other (in the case, a string of pets); and the murder of a foster son. It is a mark of the sharpness of her eye and intellect that these long narratives are neither maudlin nor self-dramatizing. I was struck by her chapter on condemned prisoners. She has no sentimental illusions about them, but contests their deaths: "We may--must--remove them from our midst and help them atone in whatever natural span they have left. Their deaths do not belong to us."

Mairs's choice of subject is not accidental: she attempted suicide some years ago in a fit of depression. She still flirts with this troubling guest as she loses control over her body from multiple sclerosis, which has left her wheelchair-bound. She continues to hold on, with the love of a husband who has had his own brush with cancer, of her family, and her wonderfully named faith community, Christ in the Desert. Her persistence is not stoic but gritty; it comes from faith tempered by experience and a clear eye.

A few years ago I met Mairs and her husband in Tucson. I will not forget her wonderful, extravagant hat and her love of good talk. I had already read Ordinary Time with admiration; she was at the time working on her perceptively titled book about life as a disabled person, Waist-High in the World. This book is every bit as good as the previous two. Is she a spiritual writer? You'd better believe it.

Some bare facts explain why Charles Sennott, once Middle East bureau chief of the Boston Globe, wrote this book. Greater Palestine (present-day Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank) was 20 percent Christian a century ago; today the figure is 2 percent. Jordan had a Christian minority of 13 percent in 1900, 6 percent in 1961, and 2 percent today. There are similar statistics for the historic Armenian quarter in Jerusalem and the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt. A recent study of the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem shows that 50 percent of the Christians there think about leaving the country. In 1967 the Christian villagers of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, owned or controlled thirteen square kilometers of land. By 2000, as a result of Israeli confiscation (for "security" reasons) or hidden land deals, the area had shrunk to less than a third that size.

Christian tourists who visit the Holy Land each year almost never consider that the Arab population includes Christians. The fundamentalists and zealous Evangelicals who give unstinting support to the state of Israel, for theological reasons, ignore the native population or regard it, as one of them told me a few years ago, as "half-pagan gnostics." The outer fringe of that group finds common cause with extremist Jewish groups who want to reclaim the Temple Mount where the Muslim Dome of the Rock and the al Aqsa mosque sit. Those groups that do try to aid Palestinian Christians only add to the perception that the Christians are "Westerners," and hence un-Islamic, an idea which creates its own problems. The Vatican-sponsored Bethlehem University, opened at the urging of Pope Paul VI to stem the tide of Christian departures, is now 75 percent Muslim, and its students want a mosque.

The fear is that the ancient Christian presence in the Holy Land will dwindle to museum status. Sennott addresses this problem. He shows that the hemorrhage of Christians from the area has three components. First, many Arab Christians are well educated, have connections in the West (emigration began long before the birth of the state of Israel), and a sense of near despair at their condition. The other components are: the repressive attitude of the Israeli government toward the Arab population, and the rise of militant Islam, with its increasing tendency to lump the Arab Christian population among the infidels. Such militancy is found in many Palestinian Muslims. (This situation also faces the Copts in Egypt.)

Sennott's long narrative--loosely organized around the places hallowed by Jesus--offers a look at the complex mixture of religion, politics, and culture which characterizes that part of the world. Despite the precipitous decline of Arab Christians in Israel, there are Christians who come from the Philippines and Africa for low-paying jobs, as well as an estimated sixty thousand nominal Christians among the million Russians who entered as Jews, nearly a third of whom are not authentic Jews under the traditional criteria.

Ironically, it was nineteenth-century Christian intellectuals who first articulated a theory of Arab nationalism; this has now become a fiery brand of Islamic identity that, at best, marginalizes Christians. Any theory of nonviolent resistance to Israeli injustices has been a product of Christian theory, however imperfectly implemented. But some very brave Jews, Muslims, and Christians have made small but serious efforts to redress legitimate grievances.

I have visited Israel and recognize the bewildering complexity of the issues Sennott describes. His sense of sympathy for the Christians who have been uprooted, hemmed in, and discriminated against is patent. One thing is sure: unless things change, the native Christian presence in the land of Jesus will continue to diminish. Only caretakers of the holy shrines will be left, along with a faithful remnant of Palestinian Christians, together with some zealous fundamentalists eager to see the eschaton arrive. With them will be pockets of brave souls who will inhabit the contemplative outposts, study centers, hospices, and peace groups who love the land made holy by the Word made flesh.

With a keen interest in art, I have always kept an eye out for any theologian who takes up the subject seriously. Dryness's new book let me see how a theologian in the Reformed tradition thinks about art and theology. The Reformed tradition is not conspicuous for its interest in the visual arts. I recall visiting Calvin's church in Geneva, a twelfth-century Romanesque building dedicated to Saint Peter. The walls were stripped bare and painted white; the stained glass windows were gone; the altar was a poky little shelf below a massive pulpit on which rested a huge Geneva Bible. Calvin's chair sat at the left of the pulpit. If there was ever a shorthand way of describing the Reformation's attitude to the visual arts this was it: the absolute centrality of the Word; the diminution of the visual and sacramental. If the plastic arts are central to historic Catholicism, arts centered on the Word are characteristic of the Reformation. Protestants sing; Catholics gaze.

Dryness tries to make a case for a second look at art from the perspective of the Reformed. He shares company with Yale theologian Nicholas Woltersdorff, who has written well on the subject. Dryness wants his tradition to engage image and aesthetics more seriously: he argues that there is a biblical, theological (especially, an incarnational), and evangelical set of reasons for doing so. What is not so clear is why he wants this second look to take place. If I follow his argument, he is concerned because God is honored by the lifting up of beauty, and the shrinking of the visual constricts the human impulse to worship fully. The problem is that he is not clear about what might be the difference between the general theological significance of art and art in the service of the church. His book tends to meander through both subjects. Paul Tillich, for example, kept his theological focus on art in general, but never unburdened himself at any length on the place of art within the church; Dryness wishes to take up both subjects but does so in a somewhat confusing fashion.

The problem Dryness does not confront directly is that the use of art, especially in relation to worship, is closely tied to a deep sense of the sacramental, which is linked in turn to what theologian David Tracy has called the "analogical imagination." The vast panoply of Catholic rite and imagery derives from a foundational conviction that such things mediate grace. This conviction can lead to something too much like magic--an insight central to the Reformers' iconoclasm. Still, Catholics privilege the sacramental; such a stance is part of what makes up the Catholic imagination.

The Catholic Church after Vatican II went through its own minor spasm of iconoclasm. In the name of liturgical reform, churches that looked like corporate auditoriums were built, chucking out statues, shrinking the Stations of the Cross. It has always seemed to me odd that we often replaced icons and statues with banners. Banners carry words, not images, so this was probably meant to recenter the Word in our liturgy. We are slowly recovering our sense of the iconic. But what does sacred art look like today? Some of the best contemporary art comes from the non-Western world, and our culture has seen the rediscovery of one of the most ancient forms of religious art: that of the icon writer.

Here is a curious conundrum: we have profoundly innovative religious composers today (Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecki, Olivier Messiaen, for example), but who can name a first-rate Catholic visual artist working in the West? Or a Protestant one? This may seem a trivial question; but after the horrible events of September 11 people began to sacralize particular spots, light vigil candles, leave flowers, create crosses out of rubble, and put up images. This derived from a deep, almost atavistic, impulse of the kind that once urged people to create for the glory of God. Somehow those spots seemed more sacred than many of our impoverished church buildings and their bare, indifferent walls.

I read Bede Griffiths's account of his conversion to Catholicism (The Golden String) many years ago, and over the decades tried to keep up with his life as a monk in India. In 1955 Griffiths, a Benedictine, left England to live a life that attempted to inculturate Christian monasticism in a place with a contemplative and monastic tradition five centuries older than Christianity itself. After Vatican II, he was able, with some like-minded people, to attempt a monastic life very unlike Western models. Sanskrit was used in the liturgy; a strict vegetarian diet was adhered to; chairs and kneelers were eliminated; oriental liturgical texts were used. This sort of accommodation had a long, if timid, history behind it (think of the Jesuits' seventeenth-century Chinese experiments). It was all the more urgent in places like India, which had its own tradition, and where Christianity (except in the Syro-Malabar south) was somewhat identified with colonialism.

Far more difficult is the challenge of thinking about doctrine from a non-Western point of view. What does the Christ of India look like? Is there a connection between Christian mysticism and the Indian traditions that derive from the Upanishads? Griffiths took these questions on as part of his lifelong work. Later he became more interested in the philosophia perennis and the new physics.

I am no expert in these matters and can't judge how successful Griffiths was in navigating them. He apparently worked more from a hermeneutics of trust than one of suspicion. He did not linger over what appear to be radical incommensurabilities between the Indian and Christian theological traditions. Hinduism seems to have a weak doctrine of creation, and to place little value on the historicity of revelation (which may explain why thinkers like Griffiths are more at home with images of Christ taken from the captivity epistles and the prologue of John than those derived from the synoptics).

I leave this to the province of experts at home with the traditions under discussion. What attracts me to Griffiths is the bravery with which such issues are confronted. In a global age, this kind of interreligious dialogue is not a luxury but a necessity. My own (conservative) instincts tend to favor more cautious thinkers, like Jacques Dupuis--badly treated by the Vatican not long ago--but I am fascinated by those who have lived in the way that Griffiths did, by exploring existentially these profound questions. I say this despite the fact that his later writings have a kind of mushy Jungian, New Age-ish, ring to them.

Bruno Barnhart has done us the signal service of assembling generous selections from Griffiths's writing (including some early Commonweal essays). His introduction gives an adequate biography of Griffiths and an outline of the evolution of his thought. The anthology has a useful bibliography of writings by and about Griffiths. This is a fine first look at a pioneering figure and is a nice companion to Shirley DuBoulay's 1998 Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths (Doubleday).

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.