Father Joe
If you've ever seen "Spinal Tap" then you know who Tony Hendra is. He was the Brit with the big face who played Tap's manager.Hendra wrote a book called "Father Joe, The Man Who Saved My Soul." In a nutshell, here's what happened: Hendra met a cloistered Benedictine monk named Father Joe when he was 14 years old. Father Joe was a part of his life from then on. Hendra went from wanting to become a monk himself to an eventual abandonment of his faith. He went to college at Cambridge and attended a skit performance by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. At that point his ambition turned from monk to satirist. Along the way, he worked with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and most of the original SNL stars.
Father Joe never gave up on Hendra. But he never pushed him either. He never told him how wrong he was for doing some of the things he was doing...drugs, affairs, neglecting his family. No matter what, Father Joe was there for one purpose: to love Tony. There is a lot of dialogue in the book and Father Joe ends almost every sentence addressed to Hendra with the word "dear."
The book's title gives away the happy ending. I'll share one passage just because you need to know more about Father Joe. I fell in love with the man. You will too if you read the book.
I had known this man now for thirty-three years, more than half his career as a monk. In a few weeks it would be his sixtieth anniversary. Sixty years, that is, since his profession in 1928, at the age of nineteen, writing out his solemn vows of stability, obedience, and conversion of life on a sheet of parchment and depositing it on the altar. St. Benedict's first and shrewdest Rule: put it in writing.
With the exception of the Great War, which he was too young to be aware of, he had bypassed just about everything in this terrible, grasping, murderous century. Where did he spend the Depression? In Poverty. Where did he spend World War II? At peace. Where had he spent the Cold War, with its bloody capitalist tyrants and bloody communist revolutions? Loving his enemies.
posted by Thurman8er @ 10:29 AM
5 Comments:
Another book for the list after I finish the best seller, "bzoqgjit."
I like reading new books and will have to give this one a try. Thanks. However, I wonder how you can love someone and NOT gently and lovingly confront them when they're destroying themselves and those around them. I'm sure there has to be balance. Love is deeper than compassion.
Brady, if you read the book, you'll see how Joe did it. Brilliant. He asked so many questions that Tony had to think about what he was doing to himself and others. Father Joe simply never pushed.
Steve, just wanted to say thanks for the encouragement you were to me in 2005. Here's to a great 2006 ... filled with great people, great reading, and covered, smothered, lavished, and saturated with our Great God!
Thought provoking insights, thanks Steve.
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