John Senior and the Restoration of Realism
Made for the Stars but Rooted in the Soil
by Fr. Francis Bethel, O.S.B.
reviewed by Erin Doom & Eighth Day Books
Feast of the Holy Nun and Martyr Pelagia of Tarsus
Anno Domini 2020, May 4
John Senior and the Restoration of Realism
by Father Francis Bethel, O.S.B.
This is our kind of book. And we agree with Alice von Hildebrand’s foreword, which claims that it “should be in the hands of every educator and every parent.” We’d add that it ought to be in the hands of anybody and everybody who cares about culture, be they carpenter or attorney, computer geek or luddite. This is the story of a seed that was planted at the University of Kansas in the 1970s: the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program (“IHP”). According to Fr. Bethel, the program was built on the tenet that reality is real, a “revolutionary” fact for modernity, which was communicated in IHP through the prose, poetry, music, architecture and art of Western culture, in conjunction with the book of Nature. This seed seemed to have been squashed when the program was shut down by the state, due to “controversial” conversions to the Catholic faith and young men being “brainwashed” into exploring the Christian vocation of monasticism. Despite the state’s attempt to destroy this seed, however, that group of young men went on to become monks at the French medieval Benedictine Abbey of Notre-Dame de Fontgombault. In 1999, those same monks moved back to the U.S., near Tulsa, OK, where the original seed blossomed into a new full-blown monastic community: Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey. Almost two decades later, that abbey has grown into the heart of a growing community of lay people who participate in the monastery’s thriving liturgical life. That seed has also blossomed in many other ways, including the creation of schools inspired by its curriculum (including Eighth Day Institute’s vision for a catechetical Academy), and the publication of the delightful novel and international bestseller The Awakening of Miss Prim, which can be read as an imaginative portrayal of IHP in action. But Fr. Bethel’s book is much more than the story of a blossoming seed, and certainly more than a mere biography of John Senior, the primary catalyst for IHP. It might be better considered a study of John Senior’s thought, which Fr. Bethel summarizes as Senior’s realization that in order for humans to fulfill their vocation of tending toward and shining like the stars, they must be nourished in the real soil of this world, that “we must ground all intellectual and affective life on the experiential and imaginative level.” Realism was the primary key to Senior’s mature thought and the guiding principle for his development of IHP. And it’s best articulated in the title of this book’s introduction: “Made for the Stars but Rooted in the Soil.” John Senior’s life and work remind us of what we’re made for and where we come from. And Fr. Bethel’s book is a testament to and inspiration for that vocation. It really ought to be in everyone’s hands, including yours.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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