Leaps of Faith
The ways believers understand the sacred and the profane.

Reviewed by Lauren F. Winner
Sunday, April 16, 2006

AN INFINITY OF LITTLE HOURS

Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order

By Nancy Klein Maguire

PublicAffairs. 258 pp. $26

THE GOD FACTOR

Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People

By Cathleen Falsani

Farrar Straus Giroux. 269 pp. $24

MY LIFE WITH THE SAINTS

By James Martin

Loyola. 411 pp. $22.95

In 1960, when other American teenagers were dancing the twist or chanting "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini," Chuck Henley was thinking about prayer. If prayer is real, he wondered, why would anyone want to do anything but pray all day? Raised in a Catholic family near Philadelphia, Chuck knew there were monasteries where he could do just that. So, in early December, he left home for a Carthusian community in England.

Founded in the 11th-century, the Carthusian order embraces a demanding monastic discipline that would strike even most monks and nuns as severe: hairshirts, regular fasts, almost no contact with the outside world. Carthusian time is governed by the calendar of the church; Washington's favorite gadget, the BlackBerry, with its frenetic 24/7 pace, has no meaning inside the monastery. The zenith of the Carthusian day is the Night Office, a prayer vigil kept between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m.; the monks see the impossibility of a good night's sleep as a form of ongoing penance.

Nancy Klein Maguire, a scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library, wanted to know why men joined the order -- and why some of them left before taking their final vows. (Maguire is married to an ex-Carthusian.) In An Infinity of Little Hours , a riveting and sympathetic account, Maguire has reconstructed the experience of Henley and four other men who made their way to Parkminster, the center of British Carthusian life, in 1960. Henley was one of the novices who, his health broken by the rigors of monastic life, left before making his final "solemn profession" to the community. Now a retired librarian, he still treasures his time as a Carthusian, and he has resumed many of his old monastic practices. Like Henley, Maguire appreciated both the strains and the beauty of Carthusian life -- the whole point of which is, in the words of one monk, to "see that God loves you."

The God Factor

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Cathleen Falsani also spent her early years thinking about spirituality. In the introduction to The God Factor , she describes an epiphany she had when she was 12. She was listening to a U2 album, and the Irish rock group's lead singer, Bono, was belting out " Gloria in te domine ." Falsani realized that the lyrics were Christian liturgy recast, and she was "transfixed" by the revelation that God could be found "in the places some people say God isn't supposed to be" -- even in rock music. That revelatory moment so many years ago has now prompted Falsani to interview celebrities, from literary wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer to White House speechwriter Michael Gerson, about their spiritual lives. (Bono's profile, of course, comes first.) The profiles are eclectic. The economist Jeffrey Sachs, a secular Jew whom Falsani says "can conjure the zeal of a preacher" when discussing our collective responsibility to help the downtrodden of the developing world, lambastes the American tendency to blame poor people's poverty on their moral failings. The rock singer Melissa Etheridge describes herself as a "healer" and explains why she consults psychics. Refreshingly, the poet Seamus Heaney declined Falsani's request for an interview; pleading hopeless inarticulateness about his spiritual life, he sent her a poem instead.

But Falsani's reporting never transcends the gee-whiz feeling of her pre-teen rock-and-roll epiphany. To wit, her interview with Hugh Hefner. Though a tad uncomfortable in Bunny-land, Falsani seems wooed by the Playboy magnate's descriptions of his commitment to morality. "I try to do what's right, to do what I believe to be truly humanistic and rational and loving," he says. And, even more banally: "Some of my most spiritual moments . . . come from walking through the forest, come from walking through the backyard; feeling connected to the wonder of what this is all about." When Hefner concludes the interview by winsomely commenting that he'd not expected their conversation to be so "truly spiritual," Falsani muses, "Me neither, Hef. Me neither." It's hard to know whether Falsani is being sarcastic or credulous; could she really have found profound meaning in the pap about wandering through the manicured backyard of the Playboy Mansion?

All in all, these profiles are entertaining, but Falsani would have done well to offer more interpretation. Now we know a little more about the religious lives of our superstars -- so what? What does that tell us about America? That even our sophisticates and literati still believe in something? That America is spiritually diverse? Or spiritually superficial? Even an epilogue would have gone a long way toward making sense of these sacred snapshots.

The Saints

A rather different collection of spiritual heroes sits at the center of James Martin's My Life with the Saints . In a volume that is part memoir and part inspirational guide, Martin, a Jesuit priest and associate editor at America magazine (a Catholic weekly), applies the teachings of great saints to everyday life. From St. Ignatius of Loyola, for example, Martin has learned to search for spirituality not only in church but also in quotidian, ordinary stuff. From Mother Teresa, he has learned that true joy can come from finding Christ by serving the poor. From St. Peter, a beloved but decidedly imperfect disciple of Jesus, Martin has come to see that our flaws and failings can help us recognize our ultimate dependence on God.

Martin is interested in holding up the saints not as paragons but as exemplars of holy struggle. All the saints, he writes, struggled in one way or another -- with illness, with the chafing structures of organized religion. Martin might have chosen a wonderful old Hasidic story as an epigram: Reb Zusya taught that when he arrived in the World to Come, God would not demand, "Zusya, why have you not been like Moses?" Rather, God would ask, "Zusya, why have you not been the best Zusya you could have been?" Martin's final word for us is as Jungian as it is Catholic: God does not want us to be like Mother Teresa or Dorothy Day. He wants us to be most fully ourselves. ·

Lauren F. Winner is the author of "Girl Meets God" and "Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity."