Book of the Week

Paul Wilkes is a writer whose main focus is religion. How he discovered that vocation is the subject of his memoir, In Due Season. Born into a Slovak working-class family in Cleveland, the first in the family to go to college, he worked his way through Marquette while holding a fulltime night job in a factory. After school, he joined the Navy and had a (very) small part in the Cuban missile crisis. After leaving the service he began a lifelong career in journalism that was punctuated with some fascinating intervals.

Estranged from the Church for ten years, during the 1970’s, Wilkes went through a conversion experience, one that led to his co-founding an organization to help Brooklyn’s poor. He even lived with the poor in Catholic Worker-style. What makes this narrative particularly compelling is that he goes through a reversion brought on by a high-paying job, moving to Greenwich Village, and jumping headfirst into the hedonism of seventies Manhattan.

When he realizes that this hasn’t made him happier, Wilkes goes through a re-conversion process that leads him to a Trappist monastery in Massachusetts. In the process, however, Wilkes discovers that his vocation is not to be a Catholic Worker or a monk, but a writer on religion. How he fully discovers, and accepts, both himself and his vocation, is the at heart of this book. Two things go a very long way toward recommending this book: Wilkes has had an interesting life, and he’s a good writer.

Parts of this book are very funny, like when the teenage Wilkes and a friend drive all the way to Gethsemani Abbey to meet Thomas Merton, only to discover that they don’t know what Thomas Merton Looks like. His account of his work with Brooklyn’s poor is inspiring without being sentimental or sensationalist, and his discussion of his work as a Eucharistic Minister is quite moving.

However, I must say the book sours a little when he talks about covering Pope John Paul II’s death. Wilkes seems to believe that there are two Churches: the Vatican II Church of John XXIII, and the John Paul II Church, which he sees as trying to subvert the work of the former. Frankly, we’ve heard this before, and I for one can’t buy into that “us vs. them” mentality.We’re talking about one and the same Church, a divinely instituted organization made up of fallible people who are living in the light of Christ’s promise that He would be with us until the end of the world.

That being said, I still recommend this book very highly. One can see the influence of great spiritual writers like Augustine and Merton, but what emerges is a unique spiritual memoir, one of the finest I’ve read in quite a few years.