…we are perplexed, but not in despair…

2 Corinthians 4:8

I was telling a friend of mine about the idea for this book, before I’d written a word of it. I felt awkward doing so, though, since I had just finished preaching to her about how I (finally) had what I thought was a good idea, but was reluctant to break the spell by verbalizing it. Especially to editors, who never fail wreck the mood by rudely asking for “clarifications” and “outlines.”

Grace is an attorney, not an editor, though, so I forged on, safe space achieved. I explained it to her as we sat on a bench along the walking trail, November leaves floating to the ground. The saint around the corner, I said, and I told her the first story in this book, the one I’m going to tell you in the next chapter. And, as expected, as soon as the words emerged into the air, they immediately felt diminished, not worth the effort it would take to type out over weeks and months. Stupid.

She shifted on the bench. That’s funny, she said, this thing just happened to me…

In Dublin a few weeks before, she’d happened upon a place – a courtyard, a square, a corner? - and run into a statue of Matt Talbot. Servant of God Matt Talbot. She wasn’t looking for it, wasn’t thinking about Matt Talbot, this patron almost-saint of addicts - at all, but there he was, and it hit her, she said, because of the toll substance abuse had taken on some members of her family and her circle and how it had been weighing on her. A surprise, but perhaps not.

So maybe?

This book is about experiences like that, and I’ve had a lot of them. It’s about unexpected run-ins with saints and the saint-adjacent who were completely new to me. It’s about encountering saints whom I thought I knew pretty well in unexpected places and learning something new about them. It’s about bumping into the remnants of maybe-saints or even definitely-not-saints who have something to say to me. It’s about the strangeness and fittingness of that meeting, every single time.

It’s a travel book, yes, it’s a book about spirituality, yes, but because it’s our whole selves on both kinds of journeys, it’s about all of us, all the things. Or at least a lot of it: aging, kids, being a woman alone or with others, being happily Catholic, miserably Catholic or (most often) contentedly, irritated Catholic. An irritated Catholic, that’s it.

St. Paul nails it in 2 Corinthians, actually: we are perplexed, but not in despair…

Death. About books and writing, movies, social media and the stupidity and brilliance of the internet, about drinking and weight and the communion of friendship and the absolute glory (for some of us) of being alone. Even alone in a crowd.

One of the things I said to Grace that day was how hesitant I was to start writing, how much I feared that I would get lazy and end up in the same old Template of Inspirational Writing, the one that begins with a Moment in an Ordinary, Daily Life, then oh here comes a crisis or challenge or bump in the road, but guess what? Time for the gentle, ironic epiphany! The full circle, around down Winsome Lane to the Cottage of Clarity and Peace where everything will work out because God’s got this.

Because, indeed, that’s something I’m thinking about and describing here. I can’t deny it. How the saint around the corner is not just the Saint or Blessed whose body you run into in a decaying church in Naples, but the actual living human being who lives next door to you where you are, right now. Not a saint, perhaps, and maybe a little devilish, but a person, a child of God who has something to say, something to teach you, whose interesting, intriguing, crazy, sad life beckons and invites communion. Right around the corner, right next door, standing in line in front of you, sitting across from you at the dining table, absently, maybe even sullenly.

Full circle. Beautiful. But also predictable and winsome and been told before, sold for a season, and forgotten.

Must it be that way, that painfully predictable way? The definitely easier way?

Back in the early 60’s, Wilfrid Sheed (son of Catholic apologists and publishers Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward) wrote a comic, painful novel called The Hack about well, just that. A self-described hack of a writer, a family man who’d been writing spiritual pap for years and was, by the time we meet him, trapped. Both his faith and his writing chops had been warped by his professional habits of penning sincere, simplistic, heart-warming and assuring uplift. But you do so much good was the dependable response to his spiritual and vocational frustration.

Reading the novel a few years ago, decades after its publication and a couple of decades into my own career of doing just that kind of work, it hit hard and true. The medium, and in some ways the message had changed, but the impact on the content creators – as we now call ourselves – was the same. Our writing becomes habitual, our imagination and vision shrink out of habit, economics and audience expectations, shifting only as much as the next hot platform algorithm demands.

And so for the 21^st century spiritual or human interest writer, and so for me, even though that satisfying full circle was not at all what I actually, really felt. At all. The winsome (you knew it was coming) paragraphs did not reflect the sharp, probing, cynical and vaguely hopeful voice in my head. Nor did it match the lives of the people I know – which is most of us - who are struggling in the midst of life and belief, who cannot, at this moment proclaim, satisfied, wow, that all worked out perfectly! God’s got this!

The Saint Around the Corner has a hook, and maybe it’s winsome (last time), but hopefully it’s more. I haven’t written it yet, so we’ll see. A while ago, I was at a conference, and started talking to another writer, a woman I followed on a social media for what reason I don’t know. Also for a reason I don’t know, I started talking to her about my creative stasis, this blockage, about my fear of getting caught in the beautiful winsome (dang it) centrifuge of inspirational writing. She said to me, imagine the person to whom you can speak in that voice. Which voice? That bitchy, hopeful, believing, cynical voice. That one. And write it to that person. For that person.

Of course. I’d often worked past writing blocks in the past by imagining I was writing a letter or a missive of some sort. The difference was that it had never been addressed to a specific person. Why in the world not? This was genius! To address this strange thing that swirled, inchoate, in my head, to someone I was confident would tell me if I was being lame or trite but at the same time would not judge me for reaching to the margins, for stretching beyond the winsome.

One person popped immediately to mind. Then another. And another. All of whom had complicated lives that did not fit into the template of satisfied, tidy Catholic living, who had no time for platitudes, who were smart and wry, disappointed and hopeful, who would not be upset, would understand if the circle were drawn only halfway, then trailed off, not sure of what was next, if what we were drawing was a circle at all.

Yes, I’m talking to you, all you saints around the corner.

This one’s for you.

Coming July 1: Ferrara, Italy

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