{"id":8813,"date":"2023-12-27T15:17:02","date_gmt":"2023-12-27T15:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=8813"},"modified":"2023-12-27T15:18:03","modified_gmt":"2023-12-27T15:18:03","slug":"walking-with-father-vincent-and-inspirations-lamentations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2023\/12\/27\/walking-with-father-vincent-and-inspirations-lamentations\/","title":{"rendered":"Walking with Father Vincent and Inspirations & Lamentations"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Good Questioning<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Andrew McNabb\u2019s two most recent books work differently to address the same questions about how to live as a believer and a parent and an artist.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Katy Carl
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As one writer and believer for another, I am grateful for Andrew McNabb. His 2008 breakout book of short stories, The Body of This<\/em>, received well-deserved positive attention in both secular and Christian circles. If the collection had done no more than reveal as-yet unexplored possibilities for small-press authors to position themselves as both literary artists and serious people of faith, it would have been worth celebrating. But more than this, the collection also took on an interlocking set of urgent questions about life as an embodied spirit and about what it means for such a spirit to answer the call to marriage and parenthood. Then, in 2014, McNabb published a one-volume dual book, Eight Days\/Virtue<\/em>. That book seems to marks a sort of watershed, a shift in McNabb\u2019s voice and concerns, as it details a series of dramatic spiritual experiences that opened up an avenue in his life to ongoing and deepening conversion.<\/p>

The McNabb whose voice rang out so clearly in his earlier volumes seems, in his newer work, to be speaking deliberately sotto voce. In mid-2023, and in quick succession, McNabb released two new books of nonfiction. Both books suggest the exciting possibility of a synthesis of economic, creative, and communal priorities, though neither quite achieves a full articulation of that synthesis. Taken together, they could be viewed as another dual release or double volume: a matrix upon which something bigger than itself begins to take form. Both are more in keeping with the thunderstruck tone of Eight Days\/Virtue<\/em> than the confident artistry of The Body of This<\/em>\u2014marked by the kind of limp that Jacob had after wrestling with the angel. This flaw may only add to the text\u2019s intrigue for readers in the midst of their own spiritual combats, who must ask: How can we keep walking forward after we have borne the kind of divine takedown that might have permanently flattened us\u2014but didn\u2019t?<\/p>

The first title, Walking with Father Vincent<\/em>, is part family history and part biography of McNabb\u2019s great-uncle\u2014the beloved Dominican priest and Distributist thinker Fr. Vincent McNabb. As such, the book delves into family history and dynamics; and in so doing, it contrasts not only McNabb\u2019s precursors with his present conditions, but the whole lifeworld that could give rise to such a prophetic figure with the profoundly different lifeworld in which the author finds himself raising his children. The other book, Inspirations & Lamentations: Literary Devotions of an Unusual Sort<\/em>, does what it says on the cover, in a way also suffused with deep vocational questions surrounding marriage and fatherhood.<\/p>

In Walking with Father Vincent<\/em>, the grand-nephew of the great priest speaks in a voice that sounds only partly his own, partly another\u2019s, borrowed and worn like an overcoat\u2014the voice of the hagiographer. Wearing the overcoat, the voice functions like any self-effacing disciple\u2019s: its only purpose to laud and extol heroic virtue, without regard to polished prose (even if more polishing might have furthered the prose\u2019s purpose). When McNabb\u2019s own voice rises to the surface, it seems mainly to lament his own failure to live up to his exemplar\u2019s example: How could he, when he is living the equally devout yet far more complicated life of a father and husband?<\/p>

The question is not a bad one. Even with the best of support, Catholic parents like McNabb\u2014and this reviewer\u2014can struggle under the dual burden of feeling misunderstood by an achievement-oriented culture and shut out from the silence and peace of religious life. Whatever in us longs to excel and go to extremes for God\u2019s sake can feel stifled or shouted down by the need to seem normal for our children. And by any measure, Fr. Vincent\u2019s religious life not only allowed but demanded extremes: extreme devotion, extreme asceticism, extreme ideals.<\/p>

By contrast, children need comfort and care; therefore a parent caring for young children must live a holy life without holiness\u2019s accepted evidences. The parent\u2019s penances do not always show up on the outside; they can look like either the fulfillments of decent but unaccountable preferences or, perhaps, like not having had any preferences in the first place. All the effacement, if it goes well, remains interior. This leaves us with a painful awareness of our own imperfections and limitations: an awareness that haunts and sometimes threatens to swamp this book\u2019s entire topic, and which noticeably marks its prose.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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At our best we bear the body as both crown and cross; at our worst we fall into its mud and muck and slime and celebrate these as if they were the glory to which we had to rise. There must be a third way.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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V<\/p>

All of the restraint that must have gone into the writing of Walking with Father Vincent<\/em> seems to find its playful release in Inspirations & Lamentations<\/em>, which walks a line of serio ludere<\/em> between the frivolous and the profound. Though some of the entries are simply punny\u2014literary dad jokes?\u2014many provoke deep reflection. Without giving their language games away, it seems right to say they serve more as prompts and prefaces to art and prayer than as either pursuit\u2019s substance.\u00a0<\/p>

In these volumes, the contemplative in McNabb is foremost, while the artist in McNabb seems committed to a kind of winking silence: perhaps salutary, perhaps purifying; perhaps in some way the silence of the child who is rapt in a game of hide-and-seek. One thinks of Chaucer\u2019s late-in-life retractions of his earlier, earthier works. One thinks of the French playwright Racine\u2019s refusal to continue writing serious plays after a certain point in his life\u2014an example greatly admired by the devout Catholic novelist Francois Mauriac, who also at one point walked away from fiction to pursue forms that seemed to him more spiritually promising. But sanctity does not require this kind of blanket renunciation of creative labor. At times it might require the opposite.<\/p>

A reader would be within bounds to wonder whether that might be the case here. For the best questions raised by McNabb\u2019s nonfiction remain partially unasked in it and, to the degree that they are raised, wholly unsettled. That ferment, that perplexity, provides none of the certainty called for by the sociological observer\u2014a certainty which only too often proves false\u2014but it provides a wealth of positive inquiry for art and for life:<\/p>

Is a happy, healthy family even possible in contemporary culture? What about a fruitful, fervent creative life? Can these pursuits go hand in hand with the good life? If so, what will they look like, and how will they feel? How and where do we draw the line between sacrificing for<\/em> others\u2019 legitimate needs and desires and sacrificing to<\/em> an artificially inflated, ever-escalating, standard of growth for growth\u2019s sake without wisdom? How is justice within the family circle connected to, and productive of, justice beyond it? How can anyone winsomely present the tenuous-seeming, but in reality rock-solid, connections between chastity and justice, purity and creativity, art and prudence? When it seems that everything is arrayed in force against the things that are for our peace, how can we blink away the false visions dangled before us by one ideology or another?<\/p>

In this set of questions, have we really moved so far beyond the concerns of The Body of This<\/em>, which takes its title from St. Paul\u2019s letter to the Romans (7:24): \u201cWho will deliver me from the body of this death?\u201d At our best we bear the body as both crown and cross; at our worst we fall into its mud and muck and slime and celebrate these as if they were the glory to which we had to rise. There must be a third way. In these texts it feels as though Andrew McNabb\u2014marked by heritage as a seeker of third ways\u2014would like us to find it. Beyond and through these two volumes\u2019 complications and hesitations, one can see the possibility of a third, secret book which would fill in the missing pieces and show the way forward. I hope McNabb will one day write that book. Perhaps it will be another book of ideas, as both these volumes are. But more likely, I predict and hope it will reflect a higher fulfillment of McNabb\u2019s literary vocation: a work of energetic, finely drawn, and equipoised literary art.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Katy Carl<\/strong> is editor in chief of Dappled Things<\/em> magazine and author of two books from Wiseblood Books, As Earth Without Water<\/em>, a novel (2021), and Fragile Objects<\/em> (2023). She is a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society through the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of St. Thomas\u2014Houston.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Walking with Father Vincent<\/strong> was released by Gracewing on June 10, 2023. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here<\/a>. Inspirations & Lamentations: Literary Devotions of an Unusual Sort<\/strong> was published by Arouca Press on December 4, 2023 and is available from the publisher here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew McNabb\u2019s two most recent books work differently to address the same questions about how to live as a believer and a parent and an artist. 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