Reading Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own

I have been reading The Life You Save May Be Your Own, An American Pilgrimage the past few days, a book where author Paul Elie draws a chronological parallel among the four Catholic authors of the 20th century.

I quote from the publisher's website:

In the middle of the twentieth century, four American Catholics, working independently of one another, came to believe that the best way to explore the quandaries of religious faith was in writing -- in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story -- a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the foundress of the Catholic Worker movement and its penny newspaper in New York, Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-centered" literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them -- the School of the Holy Ghost -- and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common."

A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story, and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie tells these four writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms their readers could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change -- to save -- our lives.

"Paul Elie's book is lucid humane, poignant, and wise. As a work of the spirit, it is universal and in no way sectarian."
--Harold Bloom

It has been an intense read. I knew bits and pieces of their life and their work, now I feel as if windows opened and I can see much of their lives. I cannot say Elie succeeded entirely in his ambitious attempt, and I certainly had problems with some of his statements, but he did write a fascinating book.

I loved Flannery from the day I "met" her in graduate school; my love for her has only augmented since. Having read both The Seven Storey Mountain and The Long Loneliness many years ago, I have to say I have never been especially drawn to Merton or Dorothy Day, yet knowing them better has been a very good thing. I just wonder what drives one to live a life so in need of redefinings.

The surprising effect on me was Walker Percy. I have not been able, to this day, to finish a single one of his books. And yet, as I finish Paul Elie's book, I feel like a made a new friend in this strangest of Catholic authors!

More on this book later.