Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul (Paperback)

First, the writing. It is excellent. At times I just wanted to savor the words and the thoughts, yet Mr. Kendra's writing style kept me moving. That is a wonderful combination, when you want to slow, but the writing contains an innate excitement that keeps your eyes moving.

Next, the "memoir". Mr. Kendra's life is the ancillary aspect of the book. He is the main supporting cast to the Father Joe. Mr. Kendra is brutally honest about himself - one can not help but think that he was a better person than he portrays himself to be.

The book tracks the author's spiritual life starting with an affair with a married woman when he was 14 years old which causes him to meet of Father Joe, with whom he mantains a relationship for the next few decades. After that meeting, the author spends several years planning and plotting to become a Benedictine monk. After finding comedy as a new object of worship, he completely abandons his faith, loses a wife and almost a second before he comes back to the fold.

That rendition gives the book such short shrift. It is filled with thought-provoking ideas about self, faith and relationships without getting sappy or tawdry. Father Joe is his friend, father, mentor and spiritual adviser who stays with him throughout leading him without pressure into self-realization.

If there is one theme of this book, it is not God or religion or even faith. It is the ability of a person to delude himself. Father Joe is instrumental in showing Kendra that lesson. The Benedictine idealism is Kendra's illusionary safe harbor that allows him to stray - it will always be there to redeem him if he needs it.

The book obviously has depth of feeling. It has gentle humor and brazen candor that prevents it from being sappy. It also contains philosophy and quotations from great thinkers that add a universality that will appeal to non-Catholics and even non-Christians. Those additions give the book an intellectual heft lacking in books like The Five People I Met in Heaven.

One criticism and word of caution. Have a dictionary close by - Kendra's vocabulary is envy inspiring. The criticism is that I wish he had included a few more translations of terms and passages.

I can not recommend this book highly enough. This is a book I know I will return to - if not to read in full, then at least to enjoy again portions of its wisdom and wit.

Tony Hendra never talked about his background. I assumed that he was, like the rest of us, -in flight from something --- you don't gravitate to comedy because you're happy. But the nub of it was, Hendra had been happy. And for an amazing reason: He had been, at least in his own mind, a teenage monk.

It happened this way: "I was fourteen and having an affair with a married woman." Well, not quite. This English schoolboy was taking religious instruction from an eccentric Catholic named Ben Bootle and spending too much time with Bootle's wife. Lily Bootle was a tortured soul, drawn to the "sins of the flesh" and terrified of them as well. She fell hard for this brilliant student (even if he did crib the math homework from his schoolmate, Stephen Hawking). The difference in their ages? Didn't matter. They began with kissing. His hand moved south. And then her husband walked in.

Ben Bootle's response was not what you would expect: He took Tony on a little trip. Two hours on a train across England, a half hour on a ferry to the Isle of Wight, a short bus ride --- at last they reached a Benedictine monastery called Quarr Abbey and Ben introduced Tony to a big-nosed, floppy-eared, knobby-kneed, grinning monk. Tony knelt at his feet to confess. "No no no no," Father Joseph Warrilow said. "Sit down next to me." He took Tony's hand. "Now, dear, tell me everything."

Tony did. When he finished, Father Joe said, "Poor Lily." That was it: no judgment, no prediction of brimstone, just total acceptance of Tony's story, complete forgiveness for what happened ("You've done nothing really wrong, Tony dear") and endless compassion for Lily's pain and loneliness. Penance? "I think you've already done a good deal of penance," Father Joe told the astonished boy.

Father Joe stood. "I didn't want him to go," Hendra writes. "I'd never felt so safe and secure with anyone in my life.....I wanted to tell him everything that had ever happened in my few years. There were a million things I wanted to ask him."

But Father Joe had to be up early. "We'll see each other again and talk and talk. God bless you, my dear."

"Again the hug, again the swirl of skirts, again the super-sandals squeaking away down the linoleum," Hendra writes. "Then silence. And peace."

Over the decades, Hendra would lose that peace, even as he gained the world. (Many of you will remember him as "Ian Faith," the cricket-bat wielding manager of the crazy rock band featured in the legendary mockumentary "Spinal Tap.") While he spares us the gory details, he spares himself nothing --- he is, he tells us, a loathsome husband, a despicable parent.

But don't forget the subtitle: "The Man Who Saved My Life." Father Joe's message to Tony never changes, but at last Tony hears it. It's not a theological message; it's nothing the Pope and his Cardinals would turn into doctrine. Indeed, it's as corny as a Beatles refrain: "All you need is love." And, of course, the Beatles' follow-up: "And in the end/the love you take/is equal to the love you make."

It's one thing to hear a lyric. It's a very different thing --- a very rare thing --- to have someone walk the path ahead of you, showing you by example how to live nobly. No wonder readers are rushing to buy this book; it puts them in the room with one of the greatest men of the century. A monk. An unknown monk, at that. And funny-looking. And not so strong on the doctrine. What a magnificent joke on all our pretty concepts of enlightenment!

There's a happy ending to this book, a very big one. On one level, it's Tony and Joe's happy ending. But if you step back a bit, you'll see it can be yours too. And you don't even have to be a Catholic --- or even a Christian --- to experience it.

If you're only going to read one book this summer....

--- Reviewed by Jesse Kornbluth