Celebrant’s Flame

Celebrant’s Flame: Daniel Berrigan in Memory and Reflection
Bill Wylie-Kellermann
Cascade Books (April 26, 2021), 214 pages
Kindle edition $9.99

Although Cascade Books published Celebrant’s Flame in April 2021, The Christian Century gave it an extensive review in its 2022 Spring Books issue.

I don’t question the importance of keeping Daniel Berrigan’s legacy alive, but I found this to be a rather odd book. The chapters are a strange mixture. Some chapters are the author’s reflections or material Wylie-Kellermann has published previously. Some chapters are letters that Wylie-Kellermann solicited from those who knew Berrigan, asking for their recollections, while others consist of Berrigan’s own words.

It was difficult for me to follow the book as there were no consistent chapter headings to indicate the contents of a given chapter. Sometimes a footnote provided the information and the chapters that contained letters often made the name of the writer clear. Sometimes I had to read into the chapter to figure out that it was Wylie-Kellermann’s own commentary. Because the book draws from multiple sources there is also a lot of repetition; there is no forward-moving narrative.

The book paints a picture of Berrigan’s life as an activist that seemed to me to be unbalanced. For example, Berrigan spent just over eighteen months in prison for his part in destroying draft records. But some sections of the book read as if he were incarcerated for twenty years. After his conviction Berrigan went underground, but Wylie-Kellermann gives no explanation for Berrigan’s motivation for doing so. When agents finally arrested him at the home of peace activist William Stringfellow he surrendered without resistance.

One enjoyable aspect of the book is the picture it gives of members of the religious community involved in social activism. Thomas Merton frequently appears in the book as does Thich Nhat Hanh. Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker communities are important figures in the movement. And, of course, Berrigan’s brother Philip plays a central role.

Bill Wylie-Kellermann is not an objective observer. He was a young seminarian when he met Berrigan, right after Berrigan’s release from prison. He became a Berrigan follower from there on. I assumed that Wylie-Kellermann was Catholic, but it was only when I got to the author credit at the end of the book that I learned he is a Methodist pastor.

Celebrant’s Flame is not page-turning reading, but it represents an important archive documenting Daniel Berrigan’s life as a social activist.

Wild Woman

Wild Woman: A Footnote, the Desert, and My Quest for an Elusive Saint
Amy Frykholm
Broadleaf Books (August 3, 2021), 217 pages
Kindle edition $13.74, Amazon hardcover $14.10

The Wild Woman of the title is Mary of Egypt, a little-known saint in the Christian church. Amy Frykholm first discovered Mary in a book she stumbled across while verifying the footnotes in a book she was completing. It was only several years later when she heard the name mentioned at a writing conference that she felt drawn to pursue Mary.

Our primary source for Mary of Egypt is a life written in Greek by St. Sophronius, whose life straddled the fourth and fifth centuries AD. He tells the story through the eyes of Zosimas, a monk who encountered her in the Judean desert. As the story goes, Mary left her family in Nubia, in the north of Egypt and traveled to Alexandria, where she lived a life of offering sexual favors. In Alexandria she saw people boarding a ship headed to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Holy Cross. Without money she again offered her favors to gain passage, an offer the ship’s crew accepted. Once in Jerusalem she attempted to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but an invisible force held her back. She encountered the presence of the Virgin Mary, repented of her lifestyle, and was allowed inside the church. From there she crossed the river Jordan where she lived the rest of her life as an ascetic.

Frykholm was so drawn to the life of Mary that she set out on her own journey to visit the places where Mary would have walked. Her mother and her husband sharing different segments of the journey, she visited Nubia, the Monastery of St. Anthony in Egypt, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and the Judean wilderness.

The author describes her visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where she learned that there was supposedly a chapel dedicated to Mary. She was frustrated in her attempts to find the chapel. She was told that it was closed, or that it was only open one day a year. The Copts told her that the Orthodox were responsible for it, and the Orthodox told her that the Copts were responsible. Finally, with the help of a local who had connections with the community around the church, the Orthodox archbishop found the key and let her in. She was disappointed that there was little associated with Mary there.

Frykholm then crossed the Jordan and visited an archaeological site that had an association with Mary, a place that was once a hostel for pilgrims. From there she made a trek into the Judean wilderness to understand the terrain in which Mary supposedly lived. She saw a dragonfly chrysalis in which she felt the essence of Mary.

Interweaved with her own story, Frykholm writes about her best friend Ali, an Episcopal priest, and Ali’s struggle with cancer. Ali parallels her quest with Frykholm’s.

The author was so engaged with the story of Mary that she asked her father, a scholar of the Greek language, to help her learn Greek, which he did via Skype. The two of them then created an English translation of Sophronius’s work, which appears as an appendix to Wild Woman.

Frykholm’s own journey is every bit as engaging as the life of Mary. She continues the sojourn in an eight-episode podcast for The Christian Century called In Search Of. She interviews some of the people she mentions in the book, and others who have helped her with her mission to understand Mary of Egypt.

I had never heard of Mary of Egypt until I learned of Frykholm’s book, but as it happens Mary appears in the 2018 edition of the Episcopal volume Lesser Feasts and Fasts. You’ll find her on April 3, with her name in brackets, meaning that she’s there for trial use.

I am grateful to Frykholm and to Mary of Egypt for enriching my own spiritual journey.

Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul

Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World
J. Philip Newell
HarperOne (July 6, 2021), 285 pages
Kindle edition $13.99, Amazon hardcover $21.28

I can’t think of anyone better qualified to write about Celtic spirituality than J. Philip Newell. He was, after all, once the director of the retreat center on Iona, and continued (in pre-pandemic times at least) to lead pilgrimages there. Newell does an impressive job of discussing several individuals who were instrumental in furthering the cause of Celtic Christianity.

The author begins his survey with Pelagius, who was a contemporary of St. Augustine. Pelagius believed that human nature was not inherently sinful. He also believed in teaching women. For this and other (in the church’s eyes) heresies, the Roman church condemned him more than once. Newell then discusses St. Brigid. Brigid, of course, has pagan routes. Once source said that she was a Druidess. The Celtic Church, however, heartily embraced her.

Newell goes on to discuss John Scotus Eriugena, who lived in the ninth century. Eriugena saw the sacred in all the natural world. The author then gives a treatment of the life of Alexander John Scott, a Scottish minister of the nineteenth century. Scott’s teachings got him into trouble and very little of his writing has come down to us. Newell, however, believed that Scott’s teachings were important and chose to write his doctoral dissertation about him. While his advisers were dubious Newell was able to resurrect enough source material from contemporary sources to resurrect his legacy.

The author discusses both John Muir and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Muir, the son of a Calvinist preacher, had a spiritual side we rarely hear about. Teilhard believed the divine existed in the material. I had often seen him referred to as a paleontologist, but Newell states that the church sent him into the field because of his writing. (Other sources, perhaps closer to Teilhard, say his paleontological work influenced his thought.) The Catholic Church banned his writing, but he signed all of his books over to his literary assistant who was able to publish them after his death. Newell also writes about George MacLeod, who was responsible for the modern incarnation of Iona as a retreat center. Clearly Newell has a great fondness for MacLeod. Finally, Newell devotes a chapter to the poet Kenneth White, who had a Celtic mentality and wrote poems about the sacred journey.

Newell devotes a chapter to the Carmina Gadelica, a collection of Celtic poems and songs. A man named Alexander Carmichael, who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gets credit for compiling many of these. These pieces were originally written in Gaelic, and Newell writes that the Gaelic spoken in the Hebrides Islands of Scotland is related to Sanskrit. He says that one can find in these works the same sense of the sacred found in Sanskrit poetry.

Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul is an excellent introduction to or review of Celtic Christianity.