"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Monday, May 20, 2002 Brian Doyle is a most gifted writer. He once penned an evocative essay on his experiences as an altar boy, a condensed version of which is available here at Catholic Digest. A particularly moving portion, not included in the version linked above, is excerpted thus by Father Richard John Neuhaus in a 1997 installment of his First Thingscolumn (fifth item from the bottom:
"Writing in the American Scholar, Brian Doyle offers a deeply affecting remembrance of what it was to be an altar boy in days long past, and then this reflection on the continuing reverberations of those early mornings in the half-darkened church serving Father Whelan’s mass: 'I have come, in my middle years, to a passionate belief in a Coherence—a pervasive divineness that I only dimly comprehend and cannot at all articulate. It is a feeling, a sense. I feel it most near my elfin daughter, my newborn sons. Last night I stood over the huddled body of my daughter, asleep in her bed, her hair flowing around her like dark water. She had fallen asleep only minutes before, sobbing herself to sleep after soiling herself and her bedding and her bear. She is very sick and cannot control her bowels, and she is humiliated and frightened by this; she fell asleep in my wife’s arms, her sobs muffled in the folds of my wife’s deep soft flannel shirt. I stand above her now in the dark. She is curled like a question in the corner of her bed. My body curls itself into an ancient gesture of prayer and humility, and I place my hands together and begin to weep—for love of this child, in fear of illness, in despair at my helplessness. I make a prayer in the dark. I believe so strongly, so viscerally, in a wisdom and vast joy under the tangled weave of the world, under the tattered blanket of our evil and tragedy and illness and brokenness and sadness and loss, that I cannot speak it, cannot articulate it, but can only hold on to ritual and religion like a drowning man to a sturdy ship.'" #
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