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

by Matthew J. Murray

Overview

In this powerful, moving, and sometimes painful work week — part memoir, part reportage — Wall Street Journal reporter Matt Murray explores the reasons his widowed father, a middle-class homeowner and government worker, abandoned his world and moved to a rural monastery to become a monk. He thoughtfully traces his father's life, from his dirt-poor Depression-era childhood and his days as a struggling young writer to his sometimes frustrating role as a husband and parent, to the death of his wife from cancer. Throughout, Matt Murray wrestles with the impact of his father's return to the Church, with his subsequent decision to follow a life of faith, and witch the dramatic reshaping of his family that ensued. As he tracks his father's spiritual journey, he delves into his own beliefs, questioning not only his father's faith but his own and offering, with stark honesty, profound reflections on the complex relationship between father and son.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060930677
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/09/2001
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.59(d)

About the Author

Matt Murray received a master's degree in journalism at Northwestern University. He has worked for many news organizations and is currently a staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The year I turned thirteen, my father declared himself the patron saint of frustrated housewives. From the time I started ninth grade, I lived in constant danger of coming home from school to find a group of his disciples gathered in my living room. I would tromp up the front sidewalk, jiggling my keys, whistling or humming, kick open the front door, let the screen door slam shut behind me, drop my backpack to the floor with a thud -- then turn and discover I was a virtual intruder in my own house.

Five or six of my father's followers would be seated in a little circle of chairs. All were housewives from the neighborhood, women in their late thirties and forties whose husbands were at work. Their eyes would be focused adoringly on the only man in the room, a middle-aged figure with graying temples, a bushy mustache, a slight paunch, and an aura of sincerity: my father.

Dad presided from a large leather recliner. Though dressed in around-the-house clothes -- a cotton short-sleeved shirt, jeans, slippers -- he composed himself with the authority of a judge in a robe. He sat up straight, hanging over the edge of the chair. His eyes were closed, his cheeks flushed, his frame tensed.

The surrounding scene resembled a séance. The front curtains were drawn, leaving the whole room shadowy. The group held hands. Sometimes I could hear someone mumbling, but I could never tell whose lips were moving. The only motion I detected came from a flickering candle on the coffee table. Even the dust particles seemed suspended in the air. In the stillness, it felt like everyone had stopped, breathless, waiting for something.

But not forme. My invasions never registered with anyone. I was like a character in a ghost story who can see and hear those around him while they are completely unaware of his presence. No one's head would turn at my entrances -- not even my father's.

The women were members of Dad's new prayer group. He had begun hosting them several afternoons a week that autumn. Until that year, I had never heard of a prayer group, hadn't even known that people bothered to pray outside of church. Over the next few years, I managed to grow accustomed to them.

But I never could quell the gnawing unease my father's new hobby stirred up inside me. I missed the way things had been before he fell in with these people. I resented them for taking over the living room and banishing me to my bedroom so many afternoons. I disliked catching a glimpse of my father in such an intimate, private act as praying. From where I stood across the room, he seemed so isolated, so far away from me and everything around him. Most of all, I worried that he was starting to like being with them more than with me.

The women had quickly come to fill his days. Though he was now in his early fifties, he was acting like a teenager trying to become popular with the in crowd. I, the real teenager, felt like a tolerant parent as he babbled on about the gang over dinner or in the car. Every day there was a new joke, a funny story. Reluctantly, I came to know all about their lives. One, he confided, had a troubled marriage. Another had a violinist daughter who attended the Juilliard School in New York. This one had a rail-thin husband with a nervous tic that made his head jerk slightly to the left. That one foisted loaves of home-baked bread on us, heavy doorstops of dough.

I could see the tenderness my father felt for them was reciprocated. The women seemed to find in him the rare sensitive man to whom they could bare their souls and from whom they could receive encouragement. They called him on the telephone for advice. They invited him for bike rides in the park. They joined him in the morning for mass, then came back to our house with him for quiet talks over coffee.

They were friendly enough to me. They always asked me about school. But I found it easy to resist their Christian cheer and unassuming openness. To me, the women were a vivid outward sign of changes occurring within my father that I sensed were taking him away from me. They brought out the worst of my adolescent sullenness. It wasn't personal; mostly I was just annoyed with them for accompanying him on a journey I did not want to take myslef. And so as much as possible I kept them at arm's length. I told myself they resided in a strange world where I did not want to live.

Over time, I compiled questions for the lot of them, questions that flooded my brain whenever they came to my house: Where are your husbands? Do they wonder about this man you spend so much time with? Do you have romantic intentions toward my father? Don't you have homes of your own? Silently, I would interrogate the women as I crept past them to get a snack from the kitchen. Silent but brilliantly, I cross-examined each as I passed back through on my way to the stairs, cookies in hand. I grabbed the banister like a life preserver. Only when I was up in my room, with the door closed and the television turned up loud, did I find sanctuary.

Lying on my bed, I'd listen for the sudden eruption of life downstairs. Soon the quiet was broken: Conversation started up, chairs scraped the floor, good-byes were exchanged at the door. The house emptied out. Finally I heard the front door shut definitively behind them.

Only now came the rhythmic scuffle of slippers on the stairs, the clanging and jangling of the metal crosses that my father had taken to wearing around his...

The Father and the Son. Copyright © by Matthew J. Murray. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

"Told with the pace of an adventure thriller. It's a journey worth taking."-- "USA Today

From the Publisher

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.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Wall Street Journal reporter Murray pays homage to his father, a man whose life choices he has not always found congenial. James Murray was shattered by his wife's death. He grayed, began to withdraw from his favorite activities, dated only half-heartedly. At 52, he seized upon early retirement as an opportunity to start over. But Murray's new life was not exactly what his teenaged son had envisioned. Matt's father, a cultural Catholic, began attending Mass, reading prayer guides, and carrying a rosary from room to room. Dad began to simplify his life, trading the family homestead in for an apartment, and occasionally skipping meals. Once Matt left for college, his father began wandering around the country, moving from friend to friend, community to community. His journey culminated at Saint Bede Abbey, where the senior Murray eventually became a monk. The book drags at places, but the last two pages make it all worthwhile. Here, in a reminiscence of William Alexander Percy's meditations in a graveyard, Murray imagines what the death of his 73-year-old father: His dad will always be his dad, but in becoming a monk, he has joined another family, one that his son has only limited access to. A moving book that parents and children everywhere will appreciate.

Kirkus Reviews