FATHER JOE

To those of you unfamiliar with this wonderful book, I strongly recommend it. Every once in a while we all need the kind of validation Father Joe brings to Tony Hendra. See this review by Andrew Sullivan from the NYTimes of a couple of years ago. It may bring back the old Beatles classic, "All You Need is Love".

The Saint and the Satirist



Saints are perhaps always best evoked by sinners. And it would be hard to think of someone more at ease in the world of modern sin than Tony Hendra. He is and has been a brilliant satirist, an alum of National Lampoon in its glory days, an architect of the peerless parody rock documentary, ''This Is Spinal Tap,'' a man who has known (and tells us of) serial sex and drugs and rock and irony. But this extraordinary, luminescent, profound book shows us something wonderfully unexpected and deeply true. These ideas of sin that we have are not really sin. Or rather: they are the symptoms of sin, not its essence. And its essence is our withdrawal -- our willful withdrawal -- from God's love. This book is about Hendra's slow, aching, hilarious but profound attempt to accept God's unconditional love for him. And this truly difficult acceptance is a consequence of one other man's quiet listening and faith. Of another's love.
That other man was the Rev. Joseph Warrilow, an English Benedictine monk, who spent almost his entire life in a monastery on the Isle of Wight, off England's southern coast. Hendra stumbled across Father Joe almost by accident. At the age of 14, Hendra had befriended an odd married couple near his hometown in Hertfordshire, north of London. The man was a hyperstrict Roman Catholic convert, the wife a lonely woman who came to fall for the awkward adolescent. Over several encounters, her passion unfolded, and the teenage boy found himself kissing and then, finally, fondling a married woman. That was when her husband caught them, and, as a consequence, whisked the miscreant teenager off to a monastery for spiritual discipline.
Young Tony was prepared for the worst. But he found something else. The old monk who turned up in his tiny visitor's cell is cartoonish in appearance -- big flat feet in sandals, ''big pink hands like rock lobsters sticking out from frayed black cuffs. . . . A fleshy triangular nose . . . gigantic ears, wings of gristle, at right angles to the rather pointy close-shaven skull. The long rubbery lips were stretched in the goofiest of grins.'' But this almost comic figure immediately shocks. Hendra kneels for confession:
'' 'No no no no,' said Father Joseph Warrilow 17 times. 'Sit down next to me. . . .' I sat down. Without looking at me he took my hand in his -- big, surprisingly soft -- and held it on the arm of the chair. His long mobile lips pursed and unpursed several times; he blinked rapidly until finally his eyes closed. Evidently it was his way of concentrating his energies. His hand relaxed slightly over mine and I began to feel its warmth. . . . A calm suffused me, a physical sensation running through my body like a hot drink on a cold night. For the first time in a week, all my fears melted away. 'Now, dear,' he said, eyes still closed, 'tell me everything.' ''