Love Affair

In a manner of a religious mystic, Greeley sets down his groping, rhapsodic prayers to ``my Love'' or ``Her''--meaning God--in this year-long journal. Through a daily , missive to his ``Lady Love,'' the priest, novelist and sociologist summons up the courage to cope with pneumonia and his fears of death, having been diagnosed with a lump on his left lung (it proved noncancerous). Mixing intense moments of quiet luminosity with humdrum observations, in this daybook he records his thoughts on movies seen, books read, friends' deaths, the Gospels, life's limitations and the nature of earthly and spiritual love. Greeley criticizes the Roman Catholic Church as ``an institution of oppression, inflicting enormous injury on its people.'' He ponders the ``wonderfully Catholic'' poetry of Czeslaw Milosz as well as Philip Larkin's verse. Though he condemns Saddam Hussein as wicked, he laments the Persian Gulf conflict as ``ugly and unnecessary'' and prays for its victims. (Sept.)