Some Notes on Books for ACOB--First of Serendipitous Pairings

It's really odd how several books I've read fell into line with another book that had the same theme or something else holding them together. That has happened to me before (see my blog post on reading about donkeys from several years ago to which I could add one of the books I'm writing about here!) with serendipity making each book even more appealing.

The first of the two pairings I'll write about here are Penelope Chetwode's Two Middle-Aged Women in Andalusia and Vladimir Losskey's Seven Days on the Roads of France. Well, in some ways these are miles and miles apart but both books are by committed Christians traveling on backroads; Chetwode traveled ON the other middle-aged woman, the donkey whom Chetwode calls the Marquesa, and Lossky traveled on foot, or hitch-hiked.

In alphabetical order, Penelope Valentine Hester Chetwode, Lady Betjeman, was the wife of British poet John Betjeman, and she had become a devout Catholic, perhaps through her association with Evelyn Waugh. Well, I sure wish I'd lived in the time when a middle-aged women could ride a donkey through Spain and not fear being molested. (I read a fair bit of travel lit by women travelers—Rose Macauley, Freya Stark, those intrepid women who didn't let anything keep them back. I suppose that is what I was aiming for in my 7-day trip on the Trans-Mongolian Railway by myself a few years ago.)

Chetwode was a catechist in her home parish and along the way on her journey in Spain she would stop to talk to other like-minded folks using what Spanish she had. For me, this book also evoked memories of my travel through part of Spain with my son Niall after he had finished the Camino de Santiago. I could picture the landscape Chetwode was describing vividly. I think that is one of the great beauties of her writing—its vividness, forthrightness, and vigor. Then she breaks into a kind of mystical quality. 

As we got higher there was an ever wider view of the river valley below and the interminable grey sierras beyond it. This sort of landscape gives you an insight into Eternity: it is so vast and so beautiful and so still that you would like it to go on for ever.

She describes going to a catechism class with Doña Encarna and 37 young girls when Doña Encarda was teaching them about the parable of the wheat and tares. She describes the classroom with only one "tall narrow window (with glass)." Then she tells us how she had been doing a W.E.A. (I had to look this up, it's Workers Educational Association) course and how she spent most of the time

looking across to a recreation room where the members of the local youth club were playing ping-pong. How could I be expected to fix my mind on medieval history?"

She is not all 'religiousy' though. She writes, in quite the same vein as Angela Thirkell (another blog post to be) that

It is dreadful how often my thoughts stray to cooking when in church. I may start off with the best intention to hear Mass well, but my attention is quite another thing and soon wanders off into recipes and menu-planning until recalled by the Sanctus bell.

Isn't that sad truth for many of us--maybe not to cooking, but some other mundane run of life things.

One thing that was very interesting to me as a theologian steeped in Vatican II theology is that while in Spain she chats with one priest (in French) about the "coming Ecumenical Council and the problems connected with reunion." I wished she had gone into more depth about their discussion. She was quite sensitive to the liturgical reforms going on at the time and describes a mass she attends where the participants, girls and women, are "handed out dialogue Mass cards called in Spanish Misa participada. The phonetic spelling, to try to get people to pronounce the Latin correctly, was most extraordinary." She goes on to say that none of the women took cards as they could not read. This is a most interesting look into the issues that liturgists were dealing with in preparation for the council which would, of course, lead to mass in the vernacular, and not the people speaking Latin. Anyway, I found reading her I had the same experience as she had of travel in Spain:

Oh, the healing silence of Spain! It is like lanolin being rubbed into your soul.

The Lossky book was entirely different. In June 1940, he traveled on foot trying to reach a place where he could volunteer for the French army, but as he is redirected many times, it becomes clear there is no army to join and his goal becomes to find his family in the great morass of people just trying to get somewhere. Lossky is perhaps the theologian who has most influenced my own theology. All the thinking on theology for me has been under the influence of the idea of theosis and the Imago Dei. Losskey wrote about these in In the Image and Likeness of God and my well-worn copy attests to the fact that I have returned to it time and again for my own musings on theology.

There is another overview of Seven Days at the Covenant blog so I'll just keep to a few particular things I found noteworthy. He clearly viewed himself on a pilgrimage, but he focused on the idea of "free will" (as a child we attended a Free Will Baptist Church and the concept of "free will" has been a constant for me). But he develops the idea of free will along with that of a nation and writes of his much beloved France, his home after being exiled from Russia.

In the history of any nation, there enters into play a new factor—one unknown to the sciences called 'exact'—namely, free will. The 'soul' of a people is not some being superior to individuals that determines their actions, transforming them into mere vital functions of an organism in the manner of an entelechy that organizes the functioning of cells in a body. Our role is immeasurably greater, our responsibility without limits. For the true soul of a people is made up of our acts of heroism and our moments of cowardice, our righteous actions and our sins, our deeds in favour of life and those favouring death. Formed by millions of free wills, governed by the divine will, help along by the saints—who walk in God’s ways and watch over their people—this soul of a people, this non-organic, so-called 'entelechy' is always in the process of being formed always in the process of becoming, always dependent on our acts and decisions. It is called historical destiny.

As I've been doing so much editing in the area of contextual theology, I found Lossky's idea of "Gallicanism" to be well thought out, an idea of France as against Rome (as one instantiation of a local church). He demanded that France should develop her own religious destiny which had existed long. 

Gallicanism is nothing other than the defence of the rights of one local church, autonomous in its interior life, faithful to its ancient traditions of ancient piety and the Christian culture particular to it. It is at the same time a universalism, but a concrete one based on the rich diversity of Christian territories each guarding its traditions; on a multiplicity of local churches, different from each other yet at the same time forming One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

He felt that Rome, "Latinism," had tried to impose its own traditions upon the others as if that one tradition were universal. 

Both of these books are beautifully written. Entirely different, yet so similar. If you like travel books where people are moving slowly with time to think, these will appeal to you.