of broken images,” an unrelenting waste land of howling desert. Whatever roots had nurtured the trees of religion and government and Western culture were now shriveled and naked, senselessly standing sentinel after so many torrents of destruction had devastated them. Eliot presents his jarring poem, full of sentence fragments and obscure literary references, as a reflection of the world he lives in, one in which the roots no longer support the trunk and branches of religion and civilization. The reader gets the nostalgically tragic sense that nothing from the past but fragments, presented as barren roots lacking any vitality, can be salvaged.
It is tempting to think the same of the world we inhabit today. The daily channeling of violence in the name of religion or ethnic strife, the worldwide uncertainty of a hopeful future for the next generation, the frequent (if only fleeting) triumph of ideologies of greed and repression, all contribute to the malaise which Eliot so acutely diagnosed in “The Waste Land.” If I may liken the Christian faith and the culture produced by that faith to a tree, its roots have been exposed for some time in the West due to a growing hostility to the supernatural. The desire of many secularist politicians is to see those roots wither, or even actively work to eradicate them. Eliot’s poem lends itself quite nicely to such a dire assessment of both secular and Christian culture.
But I refuse to succumb to such a temptation, however alluring and even comforting it often seems, and these letters explain why. Instead of transferring the plant to entirely new soil in which the roots can sink into more welcoming and fertile earth (whatever that might mean practically), I would rather do as Heaney does: make history and memories, however good or tinged with evil they might be, bear good fruit in the present and for the future. Each letter in this collection began, you might say, as a seed in my own soul. My aim was to analyze the roots that plunge into the fertile ground of my imagination. I am firmly convinced that my own Christian intellectual and cultural heritage has a vitalizing sap to channel to the men and women of the twenty-first century, whose hearts were made by a sower who scatters good seed. This desire to find what remains and make it grow again is a fundamental trait of Jewish and Christian faith.
You may very well think that a book of letters is a ridiculous way of pondering the origins of things and responding to the gigantic human failings and challenges of our time. I have no trouble imagining that a collection of epistles to an eclectic cast of personages, most of them dead or fictional, could strike you as downright absurd and not worth your while. Yet I find that such a format offers a uniquely refreshing perspective on the source of many realities, whether personal, cultural, or religious. In Letters of Fire, I drew inspiration from another T.S. Eliot poem, “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets, in which the poet observes the ability of the living to conduct a salutary conversation with the dead, a communication “tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”4 The creation of an illuminating correspondence with deceased historical characters and literary figures, to change metaphors from one book to the next, puts down new roots in fresh soil, and can even vivify hopes long since dried up by despair or ignorance.
To be honest, I had no central theme unifying the letters in the first book, aside from my dilettantish love of learning. In both works, my focus is catholic in the small c sense: embracing, talking to, and sharing with anyone and everyone. Dialogue with the dead, I have found, is a strangely fruitful and vivifying enterprise! The specific concept of roots, though, gives a greater unity to the individual letters of this volume.
Many different meanings of roots and origins will overlap in the following pages. Some names of my addressees will be immediately familiar to you, but I am certain you have never heard of Captain James Harvey, or Fr. Aloysius Kimecz. My letters to these two men are part of a digging into the field of my own life: the former is a blood relative with roots stretching back to Ireland and Civil War-era Philadelphia, the latter a confrere and friend in the Cistercian Abbey I now call home. I did not devote much overt attention to the monastic aspect of my life in Letters of Fire, and the bookends of this new epistolary tome offer reflections on monk life and the inspiration that guides men and women to this radical way of serving God. St. Benedict and Taylor Swift (yes, you read that right) set the tone at the beginning, and two twentieth-century Cistercians who suffered horribly at the hands of the Communist regime in Hungary—Abbot Wendelin Endrédy and Fr. Aloysius—at the end.
Rather than tell you a story about where things like sin and egos and Punxsutawney Phil come from, I enlist the help of people who have better insight about some part of the human condition than myself. Eve, that ill-fated and maltreated mother of all the living, gets a new hearing in my analysis of Genesis 3 and its explanation of the perennial reality of sin and death (spoiler alert: Adam is just as culpable as the first woman!). Miss Havisham, one of the most haunting characters ever created by Mr. Charles Dickens, is the object of my musings on anger and its chilling effect on the human heart, created to be a hearth radiating merciful warmth. The earth itself is the focus of my letter to the two peasants posing in a beautiful painting by Jean-François Millet entitled The Angelus. The beloved Dr. Seuss presumably will not take my letter to him kindly, since I castigate him for making millions of children think they are almighty Pelagians and the sole protagonists in their own super-duper-special universe. If you don’t know what a Pelagian is, you will after perusing that letter, and then hopefully you will understand why Oh! The Places You’ll Go! encourages its readers to become selfish ego-monsters. To Kisa Gotami, an early follower of the Buddha, I ask how her understanding of perennial questions about suffering and the self harmonize with or differ from my own Christian perspective.
Seeds are a primary topic of my letter to Heraclitus, a philosopher who lived centuries before Jesus. I get him up to speed on the work of the Christian philosophers St. John and St. Justin Martyr, who both wrote about the same idea of logos found in the extant fragments of his works that have come down to us. St. John defines the logos, which we usually render as “word” in English, as the person Jesus Christ, and St. Justin Martyr asserts that Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus possessed logoi spermatikoi, or seeds of the word, even before the time of Christ. What this means is that partial truths or insights about God and beauty and happiness may be gleaned in fields outside the confines of the Christian faith, and can even help us come to comprehend the infinite majesty of God and the gift of Christ to all human hearts longing for the full breadth of the Logos.
Not all seeds sown in the human heart, however, are healthy or life-giving. In some of these letters, I unearth the roots of current social maladies, especially in my beloved United States of America. In the letters to Martin Luther King Jr. and Roberto Clemente, I lament the racism that continues to ruin lives and cripple relationships between blacks, whites, and Hispanics in my country. Poor Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, stands on the wrong end of a rant about how his brainchild, the cell phone, has become the source of undeniable social regress and the stupidification of those caught in its screeny thrall. Lyle Alzado, a football lineman convinced that his steroid use killed him, is the recipient of a meditation on the crazed lust for athletic glory and the lack of restraint in the human will. The origins of greed are the object of my reminiscence to Nike, the goddess of victory and patron of the shoe and clothing empire today, about a humorous incident from my days as an impulsive child.
Sprinkled in the midst of such letters are others dedicated to topics of spirituality and faith. Several biblical characters who have always fascinated me get some unexpected fan mail, such as the sinful woman from Luke 7, Barabbas, and Barnabas. Saints and heroes of mine—most notably Benedict, Thomas More (my namesake in religion), and Bernadette—deserve special mention. Having set foot on the streets of Jerusalem, I wanted to pen a letter to the holy city to clarify my own thoughts on the possibility of peace in this world. The concluding letter to Galadriel, the beautiful elven lady from The Lord of the Rings, is a testimony to hope and graceful fortitude. I think the tone and content of that final note, one of “hope without guarantees,” express the essence of my intention with this collection.
And so, good reader, I invite you to think of these pages as seeds of the Logos which I wish to scatter in the fertile soil of your mind and heart. They have
