RELIGION BOOKNOTES.

Eileen Egan is one of the most remarkable Catholic women of our time. Her active and rich life includes work with Catholic Relief Services during World War II, participation in the peace lobby at the Second Vatican Council, collaboration with Mother Teresa (about whom she wrote a prize-winning study), and an intimate friendship with Dorothy Day. Egan is a tremendously spiritual person who has spent her life as a maker of peace and a staunch foe of violence in all its forms.

Peace Be with You is Egan's summa of peacemaking theory and practice. As such it can be read either systematically from beginning to end or episodically according to its discrete sections. Either way, the reader will find fascinating details about the movement for peace and nonviolence. Part history, it gives us a panoramic view of the theory, praxis, and lives of the peacemakers of the church in our time.

Egan divides her work into three large sections. The first traces the attempts made over the centuries to develop what she calls the "Way of Justified Warfare." The central chapters of that section treat three major figures in the development of what is known as the "just war" tradition: Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Bernard of Clairvaux.

The second section addresses a multitude of topics under the rubric, "The Way of Nonviolence." The eight chapters which constitute this section include an exploration of a "theology of peace"; a recollection of the peace lobby at the Second Vatican Council; a chronicle of the nonviolent revolutions in the Philippines and Eastern Europe (with wonderful pages on the indefatigable Jean and Hildegard Goss-Mayr); portraits of Thomas Merton, the Berrigan brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other adherents of Gandhian nonviolence; and a history of conscientious objection (the evolution of Catholic thinking on that issue is fascinating). A particularly fine section of chapter 14 sketches a history of the Pax Christi movement.

The third part of the book devotes two loving chapters to the life and witness of the late Dorothy Day-chapters with a special poignancy since Eileen Egan herself was such a close friend of Day and a steady collaborator of the Catholic Worker movement as a regular contributor to its newspaper's pages. Her portrait of Day has the ring of authenticity.

Two aspects of Egan's temperament suffuse the work. She is self- effacing (the index does not even include her own name), so much so that one fervently hopes that someone will write her remarkable life story if she cannot be induced to do so. In addition, she is very judicious in her treatment of persons and events. When confronted, for example, by the cliche-ridden question of pacifism in the Second World War (an issue that vexed many members of the Catholic Worker), she calls that war "just." But she adds that if the victorious powers had not been so punitive at the end the First World War, Hitler might never have risen to be a leader. In other words, a just war was waged because issues of injustice led to the rise of those against whom war had to be waged. There is, of course, a cautionary tale in that observation.

To be fully committed to peacemaking in a radical fashion is a conversionary grace from God. The witness of an Eileen Egan, as well as the kind of book that she has written, is an "occasion of grace." May we hear more from this exemplary woman.

One of the duties of the dean of Christ Church (Oxford) is to preach the annual Christmas sermon. After having fulfilled that obligation for four years, John Drury was short on new ideas. He hit on the idea of distributing post-card copies of Poussin's Adoration of the Magi to the congregation before the liturgy and then, in lieu of a traditional sermon, took the time allotted for a homily to guide the congregation through a close inspection of the painting. As a well-respected New Testament scholar possessed of an art school education, Drury was well trained for such an exercise. That sermon led to other lectures and to the beautifully produced Painting the Word, which was born of a lecture series on religious painting that Drury gave at London's National Gallery.

Drury argues that one should look at a great work of art with what Simone Weil, in her famous "School Studies" essay, called "attention." Attention is not brow-knitting but a serious, single-minded gaze with the expectation that one will "see" if one is attentive. The paintings to which Drury "pays attention" are almost all in the collection of the National Gallery in London. This makes the book a valuable companion for anyone fortunate enough to visit that stunning museum.

By being attentive one learns, in Drury's sympathetic reflections, how the same scene from the Gospels (which, famously, give us little background; we must fill in by the use of the imagination what Saint Ignatius would call "composition of place") can be described variously by different artists. A compelling example of such painterly exegesis occurs when Drury sets Duccio's Annunciation next to Fra Lippo Lippi's Annunciation of a century later (1450) and Poussin's seventeenth- century treatment of the same theme.

One of the most nourishing things about Drury's text is how his attention to the paintings occasions acute theological observations. In a discussion of Rembrandt's Ecce Rex Vester and Rubens's Coup de Lance, for example, Drury notes that some painters rejoice in sheer physicality. This prompts him to remind us that the long, almost metaphysical, discourses in the Gospel of John are punctuated with moments of startling physicality-think of the fear that opening the tomb of Lazarus might be a repulsively smelly event. Circumcision, hunger, scourging, crowning with thorns, being nailed to wood, are physical facts, pointing to Christ's embodiedness, and capable of being vividly imagined.

Inevitably, I suppose, Drury's work begs comparison with the enormously popular Sister Wendy Beckett, whose reflections on art have been both a television and publishing success. The approaches of the two are quite different. Sister Wendy honed her eye on a life-time of using art reproductions as aids to her prayer life. Her comments are, like those of Drury, rooted in prayerful attention. Drury, though, is the more academically prepared of the two, but not so much so that he wanders into the purely scholarly. His comments are longer, more detailed, and intellectually more compelling. Both authors, from quite different perspectives, teach us to see as they do.

The subtitle of Matt Murray's memoir is "My Father's Journey into the Monastic Life." Jim Murray was a successful provider and parent, who, after the untimely death of his wife from cancer, entered a small Benedictine monastery where he persevered to final vows and, in 1993, to ordination to the priesthood. At this writing, he teaches in the monastery's prep school, gives spiritual direction, and is active in the liturgical life of his community.

While the precise focus of this book is his father (now Father James), Matt Murray looks back on the life of his mother Michele (a convert from Judaism who made her name as an essayist and reviewer for the New Republic and the National Catholic Reporter, where she was also book- editor-at-a-distance, and some of the national dailies), and on her long and painful struggle with cancer. Murray also includes a retrospective account of his father's upbringing which was not, by any measure, an easy one.

Memoirs, by definition, narrate events that impinge on the life and attitudes of the chronicler. Matt Murray does not intrude overmuch into this story-it is, after all, the story of his father's life-but he does let us share his bewilderment at the suffering and death of his mother, his puzzlement as he watched his father's fitfully manic life afterward, and his somewhat bemused reaction to his father's increasing attraction to his Catholic faith, as well as his propensity toward tearful outbursts at prayer.

It is not clear if Matt Murray is himself an active churchgoer or a believer, but he is hardly dismissive of his father's faith. In fact, it is clear that he loves this man who is his father and is now an elderly monk who has found his way to the monastery. His remarks on his father's spiritual journey-how it was shaped by the Ignatian Exercises provided him by his spiritual director before he entered religious life-is accurately and tenderly rendered.

Murray is a fine writer with a perceptive eye for detail. The book will be of interest to anyone who loves the theme of the spiritual journey set, for once, in the context of a family.

A few years ago [September 12, 1997], I reviewed Mathewes-Green's book Facing East, which was the author's account of her conversion to Orthodoxy after a long spiritual pilgrimage. Her new volume, At the Corner of East and Now, is a continuation of her life story and an effort to open up the Orthodox experience to Americans. Here, Mathewes- Green, a commentator for National Public Radio and a regular columnist for the Evangelical magazine Christianity Today, chronicles her present life in an Orthodox parish in Maryland led by her husband. (Readers of the earlier work will recall that he was formerly a Protestant pastor.)

Mathewes-Green alternates narratives of everyday life with reflections on the liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, that being the usual order for Sunday worship in both Orthodox and Eastern Catholic liturgies. She has chapters devoted to attempts by Orthodox monks to reach alienated youth in California; a friend who is an icon maker; her own work as a reader for the blind on a radio station; her presence in a circle of women inmates mourning their aborted babies; and a Christian rock festival. There is an absolutely wonderful chapter (the best in the book in my estimation) about shopping in thrift stores.

Along the way we learn interesting facts about the world of Orthodoxy: for instance, that a large number of younger Orthodox converts came into the church after having been active members in the popular Evangelical Campus Crusade for Christ. We also learn, of course, a good deal about the shape of the Byzantine liturgy through the eyes of a faithful member of the church.

Mathewes-Green writes that, as a recent convert, "I have a tendency to gush." Gushing is not quite the way I would put it; there is a new convert's triumphalism which lingers from her previous book: she now is in possession of Christian truth, so everyone who is not Orthodox is somewhat suspect. That attitude can be very irritating when she avers, to cite just one example, that Orthodox theologians integrate faith and learning into a perfect spiritual harmony, while Western theologians only "acquire intellectual understanding of religious theory," producing "removed deductive theological reasoning." Her genial ignorance of Western theology makes it likely that she would be astonished to learn that both historical and contemporary Western theologians are far from mere logic choppers and, further, that many of them have contributed greatly to our understanding of the ancient Fathers of both the East and the West.

If one leaves aside these patches of religious flag-waving, there is much to be learned about the Orthodox tradition from this work. If for no other reason than the sheer demographic growth of Orthodoxy in this country, both through immigration and conversion, we need to make ourselves acquainted with the Christian East. Pope John Paul II hopes to publish a martyrology commemorating all those who perished in the twentieth century for the faith. A large portion of it will contain the names of Orthodox Christians who died behind the Iron Curtain. Contemporary theological literature has been immensely enriched by Orthodox thinkers who went into exile from the East and found their home either in Paris at the seminary of Saint Sergius or abroad. About Orthodoxy, I can only echo what the deacon cries out at the Byzantine liturgy before the reading of holy Scripture: "Wisdom! Let us be attentive!"

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.

Peace Be with You
by Eileen Egan
Orbis, $22, 350 pp.

Painting the Word: Christian Pictures and Their Meaning
by John Drury
Yale University Press, $25, 220 pp.

The Father and the Son
by Matt Murray
HarperCollins, $25, 260 pp.

At the Corner of East and Now
by Frederica Mathewes-Green
Tarcher/Putnam, $23.95, 279 pp.