cover image The Father and the Son: My Father's Journey Into the Monastic Life

The Father and the Son: My Father's Journey Into the Monastic Life

Matt Murray. HarperCollins Publishers, $25 (260pp) ISBN 978-0-06-018782-8

In his first book, Murray (former Chicago Tribune journalist and current staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal) grapples with his 59-year-old father's decision to enter a Benedictine monastery in central Illinois, a thousand miles and several light-years away from the shape and tenor of his former life as a successful personnel manager in Washington, D.C. More poignantly, the author, who did not have extensive religious grounding in childhood, has difficulty understanding his father's conversion. Murray first explores the dysfunctional nature of his father's family, but the reasons for his father's choices are not wholly there. Next, he analyzes his parents' relationships partly through his father's love letters and the journals left by his mother before she died of cancer. The author describes his bereaved father as a retired, widowed single parent who is trying to reinvent himself, and presents his own adolescent self as embarrassed by his father's crying copious tears during mass. Murray observes, but does not initially comprehend, his father's conversion process. Ultimately, the question of why his father embraced monasticism becomes a question of spirit rather than of sociology or psychology. Some insight comes when the father describes his conversion as a response to God's call and reflects upon the peace he's found in living in the present moment, open to God's gifts and graces. Murray's chronology and accounts of family relationships are awkward to follow in places, but the book seems genuine and without pretense, gently exploring the impact of a father's religious conversion on his family. (Nov.)