Program Particulars
*Times indicated refer to web version of audio

(01:44–03:33) Music
"The Multiples of One" from Awakening, performed by Joseph Curiale

(02:45) Cite from Elie's Book
In the prologue, titled "On Pilgrimage," to The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, Paul Elie writes:

This book, though, will take a slightly different approach, setting out to tell their four stories as one, albeit one with four points of origin and points of view. It is, or is meant to be, the narrative of a pilgrimage, a journey in which art, life, and religious faith converge; it is a story of readers and writers — of four individuals who glimpsed a way of life in their reading and evoked it in their writing, so as to make their readers yearn to go and do likewise.

(03:20) Existential Influence on Percy
When asked if he considered himself a Southern writer during a 1986 panel discussion with a group of French intellectuals, Percy replied: "I owe less to Faulkner and Southern writers and indeed American writers than to certain French writers: to be specific, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, and to go back a way, Blaise Pascal." Read an essay, "Walker Percy and the Christian Scandal", by Marion Montgomery examining the influence of French existentialism on Percy's writing and his Catholicism.

(03:50–05:00) Music
"Ave Donna Santissima" from Soir, dit elle: Words of the Angel, performed by Trio Mediaeval

(05:19) Introduction by Giroux
Elie notes that Robert Giroux's introduction to Flannery O'Connor's collection of short stories is possibly one of the best opening essays to a book that he's ever read. Read the complete introduction from which the following passage was excerpted:

One of Flannery's admirers was Thomas Merton, who became more of a fan with each new book of hers. Over the years I came to see how much the two had in common—a highly developed sense of comedy, deep faith, great intelligence. The aura of aloneness surrounding each of them was not an accident. It was their métier, in which they refined and deepened their very different talents in a short span of time. They both died at the height of their powers.

(06:48–08:00) Music
"Ave Donna Santissima" from Soir, dit elle: Words of the Angel, performed by Trio Mediaeval

(06:57) Reading from The Seven Storey Mountain
Thomas Merton (1915–1968) took the name of Father M. Louis after he joined the Trappist order at Gethsemani Abbey near Louisville, Kentucky in late 1941. With the publication of the autobiographical Seven Storey Mountain in 1948, he gained an international reputation. In the following passage from The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton describes an experience in a church in New York City where he would later be baptized as a Catholic in 1938:

God made it a very beautiful Sunday. And since it was the first time I had ever really spent a sober Sunday in New York, I was surprised at the clean, quiet atmosphere of the empty streets uptown. The sun was blazing bright. At the end of the street, as I came out the front door, I could see a burst of green, and the blue river and the hills of Jersey on the other side.

Broadway was empty. A solitary trolley came speeding down in front of Barnard College and past the School of Journalism. Then, from the high, grey, expensive tower of the Rockefeller Church, huge bells began to boom. It served very well for the eleven o'clock Mass at the little brick Church of Corpus Christi, hidden behind Teachers College on 121st Street.

How bright the little building seemed. Indeed, it was quite new. The sun shone on the clean bricks. People were going in the wide open door, into the cool darkness and, all at once, all the churches of Italy and France came back to me. The richness and fullness of the atmosphere of Catholicism that I had not been able to avoid apprehending and loving as a child, came back to me with a rush: but now I was to enter it fully for the first time. So far, I had known nothing but the outward surface.

It was a gay, clean church, with big plain windows and white columns and pilasters and a well-lighted, simple sanctuary. Its style was a trifle eclectic, but much less perverted with incongruities than the average Catholic church in America. It had a kind of a seventeenth-century, oratorian character about it, though with a sort of American colonial tinge of simplicity. The blend was effective and original: but although all this affected me, without my thinking about it, the thing that impressed me most was that the place was full, absolutely full. It was full not only of old ladies and broken-down gentleman with one foot in the grave, but of men and women and children young and old—especially young: people of all classes, and all ranks on a solid foundation of workingmen and women and their families.

I found a place that I hoped would be obscure, over on one side, in the back, and went to it without genuflecting, and knelt down. As I knelt, the first thing I noticed was a young girl, very pretty too, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, kneeling straight up and praying quite seriously. I was very much impressed to see that someone who was young and beautiful could with such simplicity make prayer the real and serious and principal reason for going to church. She was clearly kneeling that way because she meant it, not in order to show off, and she was praying with an absorption which, though not the deep recollection of a saint, was serious enough to show that she was not thinking at all about the other people who were there.

What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious of god than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one. For even those who might have been there for no better motive than that they were obliged to be, were at least free from any of the self-conscious and human constraint which is never absent from a Protestant church where people are definitely gathered together as people, as neighbors, and always have at least half an eye for one another, if not all of both eyes.

Since it was summer time, the eleven o'clock Mass was a Low Mass: but I had not come expecting to hear music. Before I knew it, the priest was in the sanctuary with the two altar boys, and was busy at the altar with something or other which I could not see very well, but the people were praying by themselves, and I was engrossed and absorbed in the thing as a whole: the business at the altar and the presence of the people. And still I had not got rid of my fear. Seeing the late-comers hastily genuflecting before entering the pew, I realized my omission, and got the idea that people had spotted me for a pagan and were just waiting for me to miss a few more genuflections before throwing me out or, at least, giving me looks of reproof.

Soon we all stood up. I did not know what it was for. The priest was at the other end of the altar, and, as I afterwards learned, he was reading the Gospel.

(08:41) The Catholic Worker
Based on the French Catholic Peter Maurin's program of social reconstruction, Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933 with the intent of uniting workers and intellectuals in joint activities such as communal farming and housing and feeding the urban poor in New York City. As part of that outreach, the Catholic Worker, a radical monthly newspaper supporting pacifism during World War II, was published with Day serving as editor until her death in 1980. "Our rule is the works of mercy," said Dorothy Day. "It is the way of sacrifice, worship, a sense of reverence."

(9:24) Percy's The Moviegoer
Walker Percy won the 1962 National Book Award for his novel, The Moviegoer.

(10:00) Passage from Elie's Book
The following passage extends Krista's recitation from the Elie's introduction to The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage:

What is a pilgrimage? The theme, which is found all through their work (and the work about them), is never defined precisely there; but a pattern of pilgrimage emerges, one that seems to fit Dante and Chaucer, these four writers, and the present age alike.

A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in the light of a story. A great event has happened; the pilgrim hears the reports and goes in search of the evidence, aspiring to be an eyewitness. The pilgrim seeks not only to confirm the experience of others firsthand but to be changed by the experience.

Pilgrims often make the journey in company, but each must be changed individually; they must see for themselves, each with his or her own eyes. And as they return to ordinary life the pilgrims must tell others what they saw, recasting the story in their own terms.

(12:39–13:22) Music
"Prelude from Suite No. 1 in G Major" from The Cello Suites: Inspired by Bach, performed by Yo-Yo Ma

(15:12) Views of the Afterlife
Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) was a French philosopher and author who is known for his interpretations on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. A free-thinking Catholic convert, Maritain ardently defended Catholic thought and doctrine but often came under fire from both liberal and conservative intellectuals. From the early 1940s, he lived in the United States and taught at several universities. Two decades later, he would return to France, publish a work criticizing the reforms of Vatican II, and join a religious order in Toulouse.

Listen to a recording [mp3] of an interview he did on a radio station at Notre Dame.

(15:16) Augustinian Restlessness
Elie cites a passage from St. Augustine's Confessions highlighting the restlessness that Augustine conveyed in his memoir: "You have made us and directed us toward yourself and our heart is restless until we rest in you."

(19:12–19:50) Music
"A Psalm of Life" from Mark Twain's America: A Portrait in Music, performed by Jacqueline Schwab

(22:25) Reading from The Long Loneliness
In the postscript to her 1952 autobiography The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day writes:

We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.

We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, "We need bread." We could not say, "Go, be thou filled." If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.

We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded.

We were just sitting there talking and someone said, "Let's all go live on a farm."

It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.

I found myself, a barren woman, the joyful mother of children. It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.

The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is poverty, some say.

The most significant thing is community, others say. We are not alone any more.

But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.

(24:25–27:06) Music
"Prelude from Suite No. 1 in G Major" from The Cello Suites: Inspired by Bach, performed by Yo-Yo Ma

(28:03–28:46) Music
"A Psalm of Life" from Mark Twain's America: A Portrait in Music, performed by Jacqueline Schwab

(30:15) Passage from O'Connor
In the spring of 1962, Flannery O'Connor talked to an English class at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the audience members was a young poet, Alfred Corn, who was enamored with what O'Connor had to say but was too shy to address here directly. The following excerpt comes from O'Connor's reply (May 30, 1962) to Corn's letter to her:

I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you think, of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith if faith is still valuable to you, and it must be or you would not have written me about this.

I don't know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. This may be the case always and not just in the 20th century. Peter said, "Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief." It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

The writer John Hawkes, like Elie, cites the same quote in his essay on O'Connor and her fiction in "Flannery O'Connor's Devil":

I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.

(34:32–36:27) Music
"Sonata III: Grave (Mulier, ecce filius tuus)" from Haydn: The Seven Last Words, performed by the Emerson String Quartet

(34:49) Passage of Walker Percy
In the essay "Another Message in the Bottle," from Signposts in a Strange Land, Walker Percy writes on writing, religion, and morality:

A good novel is like a good table. The parts have to fit; it has to work, that is, sit foursquare and at the right level. And it has to please. Its truth lies in the way it looks, feels, hefts—the touch and the grain of the thing. Its morality follows from the form and the excellence of the thing. That is to say, its morality comes from within, follows naturally from its making and is not imposed from without. It does not preach.

Let me say a final word about the relationship between the art of the novel and Christianity, the Catholic faith in particular, at least as I see it. It might appear from what I have said—that art is in the sphere of making something—that novel-writing is pure craftsmanship and has nothing to do with religion. Indeed, mightn't Christianity even be a handicap to the writer, considering the number of bad so-called Christian novels that have been written? It can be argued that the most beautiful vases in the world were made by Greek pagans and Japanese Buddhists.

Here I can only give my own conviction. It is that there is a special kinship between the novel as an art form and Christianity as an ethos, Catholicism in particular. It is no accident, I think, that the novel is a creature of the Christian West and is virtually nonexistent in the Buddhist, Taoist, and Brahmin East, to say nothing of Marxist countries.

It is the narrativity and commonplaceness of the novel which is unique. Something is happening in ordinary time to ordinary people, not to epic heroes in mythic time.

……

The fact that novels are narratives about events which happen to people in the course of time is given a unique weight in an ethos that is informed by the belief that awards an absolute importance to an event which happened to a Person in historic time. In a very real way, one can say that the Incarnation not only brought salvation to mankind but gave birth to the novel.

Judeo-Christianity is about pilgrims who have something wrong with them and are embarked on a search to find a way out. This is also what novels are about.

(37:21) Reference to Zen Buddhism
Zen is a school of Buddhism, originating in China in the 6th century and fully developing in Japan in the 12th century, that claims to transmit the spirit or essence of Buddhism, which consists in experiencing transcendent enlightenment (bodhi).

Zen Buddhism teaches that the potential to achieve enlightenment is inherent in everyone but lies dormant because of ignorance. Enlightenment is best achieved by an abrupt awakening, breaking through the boundaries of common, logical thought. This awakening requires training in the different methods necessary to reach enlightenment, which typically takes the form of a master-disciple relationship.

(36:45–37:32) Music
"Sanctus" from The Mystery of Santo Domingo de Silos: Gregorian Chant from Spain, performed by the Chorus of Monks of the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos

(40:59) Merton's Experience in Louisville
The following passage recounting Merton's epiphany at a street corner in Kentucky was excerpted from The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage:

One morning in 1958 Thomas Merton put on a black suit, left the monastery, and set out for the city. There, outside an old hotel on a crowded street, he had a religious experience:

In Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, suddenly realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were, or could be, totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream—the dream of my separateness, of the "special" vocation to be different … I am still a member of the human race—and what more glorious destiny is there for man, since the Word was made flesh and became, too, a member of the Human Race!

Thank God! Thank God! I am only another member of the human race like all the rest of them. I have the immense joy of being a man!

He stood there watching, like Dorothy Day during the San Francisco earthquake, and felt the wall between himself and others collapse. The unity of the human race, suggested in Scripture, professed in faith, was shown to him and put into perspective—"as if the sorrows of our condition could really matter, once we begin to realize who and what we are—as if we could ever begin to realize it on earth."

This episode is known as the "vision in Louisville," but it might be better to be called a street-corner epiphany, for it was not a glimpse of God so much as a recognition of other people. And although it has been seen as the beginning of Merton's "turning toward the world," it was the defining moment of a process that was spread out over several years.

(42:24) Merton Meets the Dalai Lama
In 1968, Merton met with the Dalai Lama at the seat of the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala, India. Merton wrote to his abbot, Dom Flavian Burns: "The talks with the Dalai Lama were very fine. He did a lot of off-the-record talking, very open and sincere, a very impressive person, deeply concerned about the contemplative life, and also very learned. I have seldom met anyone with whom I clicked so well, and I feel that we have become good friends." During that same trip while attending an international monastic convention in Bangkok, Thailand, he was electrocuted by a faulty wire.

During an interreligious dialogue at Gethsemani Abbey in 1996, His Holiness the Dalai Lama paid tribute to his deceased friend:

I have been moved a great deal today at this memorial or recollection of the life of Thomas Merton and I am very happy that we have done this. From the point of view of a religious practitioner and, in particular, as a monastic, Thomas Merton really is someone that we can look up to. From one point of view he had the complete qualities of hearing — which means study, contemplating, thinking on the teachings, and of meditation — hearing, thinking, and meditation. He also had the qualities of being learned, disciplined, and having a good heart. He not only was able to practice himself, but his perspective was very, very broad. Thus, it seems to me that in this memorial or recollection of him we should seek to be following his example that he gave us. In this way even though the chapter of his life is over, what he was hoping to do and seeking to do can remain forever. Not only is his wonderful model being followed in this monastery, but it seems to me that if all of us followed this model it would become very widespread and would be of very great benefit to the world.

For myself, I always consider myself as one of his Buddhist brothers. So as a close friend or as his brother, I always remember him and I always admire his activities and his lifestyle. So since my meeting with him and so often as I examine myself, or better really follow some of his example and occasionally just as at this meeting, I really have deep satisfaction now, knowing that I have really made some contribution regarding his wish. And so for the rest of my life, of course, the impact of meeting him will remain till my last breath. So I really want to state that I make this commitment and this will remain till my last breath. Thank you very much!

(43:49–45:36) Music
"First Impressions" from Appalachia Waltz, performed by Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, and Mark O'Connor

(44:00) Reading from Mystics and Zen Masters
The following extended passage from Merton's 1967 book, Mystics and Zen Masters, was selected by Paul Elie:

The story of man's pilgrimage and search has reached the end of a cycle and is starting on another: now that it is clear that there is no paradise on earth that is not defiled as well as limited, now that there are no lost islands, there is perhaps some dry existentialist paradise of clean ashes to be discovered and colonized in outer space: a "new beginning" that initiates nothing and is little more than a sign of our irreversible decision to be disgusted with the paradises and pilgrimages of earth. Disgust with paradise, but not with crusades! The new planet is apparently to be the base for a more definitive extermination of infidels, together with the mass of less agile pilgrims so occupied in keeping body and soul together that they cannot be singled out as pilgrims to a promised land.

And yet the pilgrimage must continue, because it is an inescapable part of man's structure and program. The problem is for his pilgrimage to make sense—it must represent a complete integration of his inner and outer life, of his relation to himself and to other men.

The Bible has always taken man in the concrete, never in the abstract. The world has been given by God not to a theoretical man but to the actual beings that we are. If we instinctively seek a paradisiacal and special place on earth, it is because we know in our inmost hearts that the earth was given us in order that we might find meaning, order, truth, and salvation in it. The world is not only a vale of tears. There is joy in it somewhere. Joy is to be sought, for the glory of God.

But the joy is not for mere tourists. Our pilgrimage is more than the synthetic happy-making of a vacation cruise. Our journey is from the limitations and routines of "the given"—the Dasein which confronts us as we are born into it without choice—to the creative freedom of that love which is personal choice and commitment. Paradise symbolizes this freedom and creativity, but in reality this must be worked out in the human and personal encounter with the stranger seen as our other self.

(47:04) O'Connor's Story
The title of Paul Elie's book was adopted from a short story by Flannery O'Connor, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Read the complete version.

(50:13–52:40) Music
"First Impressions" from Appalachia Waltz, performed by Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, and Mark O'Connor