Needed: mysticism & method.

The Strangest Ways Walking the Christian Path Robert Barron Orbis, $15, 175 pp.

A striking feature of contemporary Catholicism is the experiential divide between those whose initiation into Catholic faith and theology had begun prior to the Second Vatican Council (to be sure, a diminishing number) and those whose introduction to Catholicism was mediated through the "experiential" religious education and sometimes improvisational liturgies of the seventies. For an older generation, the conciliar experience was profoundly liberating. For many, schooled in the council's aftermath, the postconciliar experience was often trivializing: the squandering of a rich heritage. Hence, without any illusion regarding the restoration of some mythical golden age, many younger theologians are committed to retrieving the treasures of the tradition and to minting a vernacular that creatively translates, but does not debase, the original coinage. Prominent among this younger generation is Robert Barron.

Barron, a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, teaches theology at Mundelein Seminary. He has written three previous books that have won wide appreciation. Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master already sets forth Barron's conviction that spirituality lies at the heart of theology and that the divorce of theology and spirituality leads to mutual impoverishment. And Now I See: A Theology of Transformation develops this insight in a sustained and systematic way. In that work Barron exhibits one of the most distinctive and attractive characteristics of his approach: he shows how theological issues are not restricted to formal theological writings, but permeate many classics of literature. He draws sensitively and suggestively upon the work of Dante, Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor, mining their theological lode. In Heaven in Stone and Glass, Barron extends his theological exploration to the nonverbal medium of the Gothic cathedrals. Catholic theology, for Barron, is an avowedly incarnational enterprise rooted in the confession of the unique Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.

Barron's incarnational sensibility is clearly evident in his latest work. He begins The Strangest Way by recounting an incident during an encounter between Christians and Buddhists at Gethsemani Abbey. One of the Buddhist participants finally gave voice to his consternation at the depiction of Christ crucified everywhere in evidence. This honest confession focused the dialogue and brought it to a new level of intensity and directness. For Barron, the sheer particularity and distinctiveness of the Christian "way," revealed in the passionate exchange regarding the crucified Savior, contrasts starkly with the "relatively bland and domesticated Christianity" into which he had been initiated in the late 1960s and 1970s.

It has led him to the view that post-conciliar Catholicism has accommodated too uncritically to some of the most problematic features of modernity, leading to a "Cartesianizing of Catholicism."

Barron's brief against modernity, personalized in Descartes, the "father of modern philosophy," cites the individualism that slights community and tradition, the rationalism that deprecates affectivity and imagination, the dualism that divides mind from body, human subjectivity from engendering environment. In a word, philosophical and religious modernity advocates and promotes not concrete incarnation, but abstract excarnation. For Catholicism to succumb to this temptation is to betray its original and defining genius.

This critical discernment sets the constructive agenda for Barron's book. In it he sets forth "a theology of paths and practices, an embodied and exercised Christianity." The Strangest Way maps a contemporary itinerarium in Deum. It offers an evocative mystagogy that seeks nothing less than to lead the attentive reader deeper into the mystery of God. Barron identifies and elaborates upon three "paths" that must be traversed, though in reality they are simultaneous rather than strictly sequential. Each path, besides being probed by reference to Scripture and the theological tradition, is further illumined through extensive exegesis of a literary text.

The first path, "Finding the Center," is made imaginatively concrete through a consideration of Brideshead Revisited. Barron reads Waugh's novel as depicting fascination with, flight from, and ultimate surrender to Christ on the part of the protagonists. For Christ himself is the center, gracing our lives with sense and direction. But the grace is costly, and the promise stark: "You will be led where you do not want to go!"

The second path, "Knowing You're a Sinner," disputes modernity's contention that confession of sin manifests lack of self-esteem. It holds that to acknowledge oneself as sinner is a sign not of psychological insecurity but of spiritual maturity. Indeed, recognition of sin is itself the fruit of revelation: a coming to see clearly, in the light of Christ's Incarnation and cross, our own betrayal of truth. The literary masterpiece Barrow draws on to illumine the path of conversion and repentance is Dante's Purgatorio. Climbing the seven-story mountain, one learns, not merely in the mind but in the body, that purification of the death-dealing sins comprises a journey of transformation, the realization of true freedom.

The third path explores the climactic stage of this liberation from ego. Barron provocatively calls it: "Realizing Your Life Is Not about You!" Centered and shriven, the disciple is sent: "Do you love me? Feed my lambs." Barron invokes Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away to underscore the strangeness of this mission. Confronting the perennial pull to live and tell our stories as ego-dramas, the good news proclaimed by Paul joyfully summons Christians to realize their true selves in surrender: "No one lives as his own master and no one dies as her own master: for, both in life and in death, we are the Lord's."

Christ is the center not only of the self, but even more of the church and, indeed, the cosmos. The classic cosmic Christology of the Catholic tradition finds new resonance in the contemporary conviction of the co-inherence and interdependence of all reality, which faith perceives to be groaning with the pangs of new birth. The Christian is sent forth to assist the Spirit's midwifery.

Correlative to Barron's delineation of the three paths to holiness is his retrieval of traditional practices which embody the strangest way. The discussion of prayer and pilgrimages, fasting and forgiveness, is both insightful and enticing. Beyond that, three practices in particular command one's attention in our present ecclesial crisis: confession of sin, truth telling, and nonviolence. Each presents us with an imperative that demands an unremitting discernment of God's will. Each reinforces and supports the other. Barron's contention that "the breakdown in confessional practice has made the church sick by neglect" deserves serious pondering, as the extent of the present sickness unfolds.

Not long ago I was speaking with a college senior who had returned to the practice of the faith, after exploring for a few years some of the practices of the Eastern religions. I asked what he thought had been missing from his own Catholic formation. He replied at once: "Mysticism and method." The Strangest Way offers promising perspectives on both.

Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, teaches theology at Boston College.