The Living of Maisie Ward.

by Dana Greene The University of Notre Dame, $25, 255 pp.

When, Karl Rahner assumed Romano Guardini's chair at the University of Munich in 1963, he praised the octogenarian writer and thinker as a Christian humanist who had led Germany's Catholics out of an intellectual and cultural ghetto and into the contemporary world. One could hardly quarrel with those words. In a long career, Guardini made singular contributions in liturgy, literary criticism, and the philosophy of religion. From The Spirit of the Liturgy (1918) to the phenomenally popular The Lord (1937), his books were considered classics in their day. Guardini died in 1968 at the age of eighty-three. Curiously, within a few years his writings were practically unread. In the last decade his work has undergone a modest revival. Robert Krieg's study invites us to reconsider in depth the work of a Catholic writer who was one of the most popular and influential in the first half of the twentieth century.

Krieg opens with a biographical chapter and closes with a bibliography of Guardini's works and works about him, as well as a chronology of his life. A series of thematic chapters set out Guardini's thinking on a range of topics. Krieg, better than most, understands that with Guardini we are not dealing with an intellectual system builder. Guardini's books covered Christology, liturgy, spirituality, and ecclesiology. But he also wrote studies of Pascal, Socrates, Rilke, Dostoevsky, and Dante, as well as a steady stream of works on cultural criticism, meditative reflections on the Bible, the Christian life, and the church's sacramental life.

Guardini's early studies were on Bonaventure (on whom he wrote both his dissertation and academic habilitationschrift). His keen interest in phenomenology, Kreig notes, gave Guardini's theological orientation a direction not unlike that of Hans Urs von Balthasar (who had been a student of Guardini), John Paul II, and the later Josef Ratzinger (whose dissertation work was also on Bonaventure). Such a theological "tone" owes more to Plato than to Aristotle, is deeply contemplative, and less concerned with historical-critical approaches to Scripture. This strain of theology is more sapiential than intellectual. All of these writers combine a deeply rooted Christian vision with a passionate drive to speak to the contemporary world. All likewise have a deep interest in belles lettres.

Guardini spent his entire mature life, after a few years in pastoral work, within a university milieu. He not only lectured and wrote, but he also celebrated the liturgy, worked with youth, served as a confessor and counselor, and enjoyed a vast reputation as a preacher. His chaired positions were never in theology as such. At Berlin, for example, his chair's province was the "Catholic World View." Guardini rejected Nazism, which he viewed as a system of ersatz salvation. After publishing on his anti-Nazi position in 1935, his lectures were monitored by informers. In 1939 he lost his professorship and had his youth center closed. In 1941 he was banned from public speaking. After the war he resumed his active career with such distinction that in 1965, three years before his death, Pope Paul VI wanted to name him to the College of Cardinals, an honor Guardini declined.

Whether there will be a new appreciation of Guardini in the future is hard to predict. Some of his works have begun to reappear (in, for example, the "Resourcement" series published by Eerdmans). One thing is clear, however. Guardini serves as a model for a kind of Christian thinker we need in every generation - a theologian who has a wide-ranging interest in real issues faced by a culture at a given time. Such a theologian must combine the ancient understanding of speaking of God out of authentic experience with a willingness to speak to an audience larger than that of fellow academics and theologians. Romano Guardini surely did that, as Robert Krieg shows in this extremely interesting and well-researched work.

At the 1993 Parliament of World Religions, the Dalai Lama suggested a meeting of Buddhist and Christian monastics take place in order to discuss their respective ways of living the monastic life. He more specifically suggested the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky as the site for the meeting because it had been the home of Thomas Merton, whom he had met on Merton's fateful journey to the East in 1968. That suggestion found realization in July of 1996. The Gethsemani Encounter is a record of those discussions and a collection of the papers read at the conference.

The format of each conference called for reflections on a set theme. For example, in a session on prayer and meditation, there were Buddhist papers on "mindfulness" and Zen sitting and harmony/dialogue/meditation with corresponding Christian papers on the concept of contemplation and on the role of lectio divina in the monastic life of the West. The early conferences dealt with large topics such as community, spirituality and society, growth in the life of perfection. Later conferences, which did not use formal papers, focused on specific spiritual topics ranging from mind and virtue to issues of teaching, language, Scripture, practice, experience, discernment, and grace. The final topics section, under the rubric of "Tragedy and Transformation," dealt with suffering, sacrifice, violence, social action, tolerance, women's issues, and unity.

The sessions on topics, since they were not in the form of formal papers, are recorded here in transcripts of actual conversations. For me, these transcriptions were the most interesting part of the volume, since it enabled one party to ask the "What do you mean by...?" question. The other side then would provide analogies or clarifications so that some common ground for discussion might be reached. These encounters encouraged precision and also clarified differences. Is the Christian monastic virtue of humility the same as Buddhist selflessness (and, one could add, is the key to understanding the difference to be found in the concept of "self")? Is the Christian concept of grace alien to Buddhism or is there some link between Christian grace and Buddhist teachings on "blessings"? The exchanges recorded here were done in an irenic spirit and in a brief period of time. Readers might wish to add "Yes, but..." to many of these conversations. But that reaction, I suppose, is exactly what a book devoted to exchange ought to provoke.

The epilogue has two tributes to Thomas Merton, one by the Trappist James Conner who had been a monk at Gethsemani and is now the abbot of the monastery in Ava, Missouri, and the other by the Dalai Lama. Abbot James recalls some words of Merton from the Asian Journal. Deep contemplative encounters, Merton wrote, transform communication into communion. Judging from these pages, all who participated lived together during their Gethsemani encounter in an amity which reflects the best of both traditions.

Readers of this journal might like to know that this week of common reflection was not a "one-shot" deal. Such interreligious exchange has been going on now, with the blessing of Rome, for nearly two decades. Buddhist monks can live for extended periods in Christian monastic centers and Christians are able to enjoy hospitality in Buddhist centers as well. That such exchanges between those who "keep the silences" bear much fruit is clear from the reactions of all the participants who were invited by Diana Eck of Harvard University, as the conference closed, to share their impressions of the week. David Steindl-Rast said that the word which came to him as he reflected was "gratefulness." Readers of this volume will feel the same.

Rosemary Haughton has been one of my favorite theologians. Books like The Catholic Thing (1980) and The Passionate God (1981) still stand up well after nearly two decades. Haughton's writing combines a number of extremely important strains: a deep respect for the Christian tradition of spirituality, a prophetic sense of social justice, and a close attention to actual experience. For Haughton, that experience encompasses her conversion, her role as a mother of a large family, a life lived in small intentional communities both in Scotland and in this country, and her sense of herself as a Christian feminist.

Ryan has written a serviceable intellectual biography of Haughton. Like many books born of the-dissertation experience, this volume has a first chapter of intellectual throat clearing (in this particular. case, a survey of recent thinking on Christian spirituality). The second chapter provides a readable biography covering Haughton's British childhood, her adolescent conversion, subsequent marriage, and years spent in Yorkshire, Scotland, and Massachusetts with a family that included ten children, two "official" and several unofficial foster children. Haughton's current base is at Wellsprings Community in Massachusetts, which provides shelter for battered and homeless women. In the midst of this strenuous existence, she has managed to write thirty books, twelve pamphlets, and enough articles to take up just under twelve pages in this book's bibliography.

Haughton's Catholicism has its deep roots in the matrix of English Catholic renewal associated with the Dominican Spode House and the Distributist Movement in the generation after G. K. Chesterton. Unlike some who come from that background, Haughton has not been subject to any reactionary nostalgic vision of society or the church. She has grown spiritually and culturally over the years, with her more recent writings drawing from the liberationist vision of small Christian communities. Her fundamental conviction is that such communities need to provide the sort of hospitality characteristic of the contemporary Catholic Workers but whose roots are also in the monastic tradition.

Haughton's attractive theology is about how life is actually to be lived: Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality whose holiness needs to be experienced. In an excellent essay on prophetic spirituality, she makes the shrewd comment that ordinary life does not need "to be sanctified" as if it were unholy without such attention. Everyday life is already holy. "Working hard over 'material' matters is part of the enterprise," she writes.

Haughton's writing, in short, is derived from experience in the concrete and not in the abstract. The phrase cited above about "working hard over material matters" has an authentic ring coming from a woman who had to feed and clothe a dozen children and who cared for a husband burdened by various emotional problems. In 1967 she visited Thomas Merton (the monk noted in his journal that he had never met a pregnant theologian before). Haughton learned from Merton that she needed to give voice - "to symbolize and embody" is the way she put it - to whatever it is that we speak of when we talk about spirituality. In that sense, even though she is a prose writer, there is something very poetic - in the very best sense of the word - about her writing. Yet, Haughton has no desire to interiorize her experience completely. She wisely notes that frequent retreats and calls to "wait on God" can often be evasions of social responsibility.

In her bibliography Ryan notes that Haughton had two books published in 1997. I have not seen them yet, but be assured that I will read them eagerly. Haughton represents that excellent tradition of lay theologians who write from a perspective quite different from that of academics. Both styles have their place in the theological tradition. As Bernard Lonergan observed of Haughton's work, we need those who are able to give concrete objectification of their spiritual experience.

Of the famous duo, Sheed and Ward, Maisie Ward (1889-1975), was born into a distinguished English Catholic family. Ward's grandfather, a contemporary of John Henry Newman, was famous for his expressed desire to have an infallible pronouncement from the pope each morning with his Times. Her father was a biographer of Cardinal Wiseman. Maisie Ward was, as she said, a third-generation member of the Oxford Movement. Denied a university education by her father (who sent his two sons to Oxford but believed women had no need of such an education), she stayed at home, wrote, and gave support to her family as her father worked on his great two-volume biography of Cardinal Newman. Maisie found a vocation of sorts as a member of the Catholic Evidence Guild - outdoor preachers who spoke regularly at Hyde Park Corner (they were still at it when, as a student, I saw Cecily Hastings and Frank Sheed speak sometime in the late 1950s) as apologists for the Catholic faith. Through the guild she met the Australian, Frank Sheed, whom she married in 1926 when she was thirty-eight and he, eight years younger.

Soon after their marriage they began the publishing enterprise that would become Sheed & Ward. Over the next five decades they not only managed the publishing house (with offices on both sides of the Atlantic), but Maisie edited, translated, or wrote over twenty books herself, including five on Chesterton, Newman, and her friend Caryll Houselander. She also kept up a strenuous lecture schedule and worked with an organization to provide decent housing for the poor. After the first blush of optimism in the aftermath of Vatican II, there was a general malaise in Catholic publishing. Eventually Frank and Maisie settled in Jersey City, where they lived modestly. The wrenching changes in the aftermath of the council left them somewhat bewildered and hurt.

Catholics of a certain age will read this book with waves of nostalgia and memory washing over them. The life of Maisie Ward overlapped with some of the most significant moments in modern Catholicism. The whole cast of characters is here: Christopher Dawson, C.C. Martindale, Dorothy Day, the Baroness de Hueck, the Abbe Godin (whose Is France Pagan? she translated), Sister Madeleva, Martin D'Arcy, Ronald Knox, Hans Kung, Charles Davis, Hubert Van Zeller, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, Caryll Houselander, as well as movements galore: Cana, Christian Family Movement, Integrity, Catholic Interracial Council, the Catholic Rural Life Movement, and, preeminently, the Catholic Evidence Guild.

Dana Greene's biography is a loving one. She has obviously done a lot of research and talked with a fair number of Maisie's contemporaries. It is not as witty or as moving as Wilfrid Sheed's memoir of his parents, Frank and Maisie (1986), where Frank Sheed gets more fully drawn. But it does add insights and detail about the life of this extraordinary woman. This book, marred by very few errata, fills in a gap in the history of Anglophone Catholicism, and for that reason alone we should receive it with appreciation.

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