Two by Undset: Part 1

The beginning of the semester is always a nice time for leisure reading. I'm not yet bogged down with classes and in the mood for more meditative pursuits. I have been reading two works by Sigrid Undset (you may recall my earlier post on her masterpiece Kristin Lavransdatter). The first is her tetralogy The Master of Hestviken, and the second is her biography of Catherine of Siena, recently republished by Ignatius Press.

I actually re-read The Master of Hestviken, which is composed of the four books The Axe, The Snake Pit, In the Wilderness, and The Son Avenger. I really can't do justice to the plot of this epic novel in a blog post - and it really is epic in the best sense of the word, as Undset was inspired by the old Norse sagas. Like Kristin Lavransdatter, the novel is set in medieval Norway, and is roughly contemporaneous to Kristin (a young Lavrans Bjorgulfson makes a cameo appearance towards the end of The Snake Pit). The main characters are Olav Audunsson, the eponymous heir of Hestviken, and Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter, his foster sister. Olav and Ingunn are betrothed as children and raised as brother and sister. When they grow into teenagers and succumb to temptation, they naively expect that their eventual marriage will shield them from the consequences. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The family intrigues come fast and heavy as Olav rashly kills a relative of Ingunn's and is forced to go into exile. When he returns to find that Ingunn has been seduced and borne an illegitimate child, he kills her seducer, and for complicated reasons, finds himself unable to confess the sin for many years.

This book is nothing short of depressing, in all honesty. Things never really improve for Olav and Ingunn after the sins of their youth. Just when you think it is impossible for them to make their lives worse, it gets worse, without fail - and they usually do it to themselves. In Kristin, Undset deals with the reality that there is no "happily ever after" and she makes that even more bleakly clear in The Master of Hestviken. Even after Olav secures his ancestral manor and marries Ingunn, she suffers ill health and dozens of miscarriages, dying after years as an invalid. He raises Eirik, her illegitimate son, as his own, alternately trying to do penance for murdering the child's father and hating the boy for not being his own blood. In the end, it is Eirik who resolves the conflict of his parents' sins, but only after following his own crooked path.

Reading this description probably doesn't induce you to read the book - but there is so much more to it than the bald list of Olav's endless sufferings. The love between Olav and Ingunn is beautifully described. Almost like Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, their childhood affinity grew into a love that has so shaped them that they cannot imagine life without each other. (Olav even begs Ingunn to come back to him after she dies, a scene which should be familiar to readers of WH.) In spite of all Ingunn's failings, Olav shows an amazing selflessness towards her which raises them above Cathy and Heathcliff's animal passion. Later, as Olav realizes the gravity of his sin and struggles to confess, we are treated to inner monologues that perfectly describe the crushing weight of sin and the pain of separation from God. It is a book well worth reading - not "leisure reading" but a novel that will help you grow spiritually. There aren't many books I can truly say that of.

After typing up this lengthy post on The Master of Hestviken, I realized that Catherine of Siena really deserves its own post. I will follow up in a day or two.

Book club

Here on campus there really isn't much support for graduate student spirituality. In sharp contrast to the undergraduate student body which is 80% Catholic, only 54% of graduate students identify as Catholic, and I would guess that fewer are weekly Mass-goers. Most graduate students I've met are either not Catholic or rather apathetic about their faith. There are masses in the chapel at FOG, as well as a weekly rosary, but the majority of grad students are off-campus like me and there are few activities especially for us. There is one club, the Thomas Aquinas Society, that exists for the Catholic graduate students, but due to the demanding schedule of grad students it isn't always very active. The guys that run it are great - but busy just like the rest of us! It doesn't help that we don't get a whole lot of support from Campus Ministry - but I digress.

TAS had a happy hour at Legends two weeks ago to mark the beginning of the semester, and we were invited to share our ideas and thoughts for activities for the coming year. I suggested the idea of a book club for Catholic reading, which was enthusiastically received by a number of students. Since we have a pretty small group so far, I would like to invite my Domer readers to join up. This semester I will have the participants vote on the book they want to read. We will be choosing between a study of Pope Benedict's encyclical Spe Salvi and the book Life of Christ by Abp. Fulton Sheen.

I am trying to find a place for us to meet, either on or off campus. I'm going to try to contact Campus Ministry about meeting space in CoMo (a building I'm totally unfamiliar with) but eventually I'd like us to meet off-campus to make things a bit more relaxed. I'm in the process of checking out area cafes and coffee shops. This is going to be a busy semester for me - but I'm excited about the book club and hoping it will provide some intellectual and spiritual stimulation.

Fun at the discount book store

New Year greetings to all! I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas - I know my husband and I enjoyed our first Christmas together. We attended our very first Midnight Mass at the Basilica, braving ice and snow. I have been holding on to Christmas for as long as possible - I don't want to put away my Christmas decorations and music. But now it is almost Epiphany and the start of a new year. My prayers for wisdom in the last post were apparently answered - I ended up with 2 A's and a B in my classes, which puts me on track to take qualifying exams in the spring. Deo gratias! Of course, I have to keep up this semester, but I think it will not be quite as difficult.

There is a giant discount bookstore here in South Bend (well, technically, it's in Mishawaka, where all the shopping is. I joke that Mishawaka is an ancient Potawatomi word meaning "land of strip malls.") I drive by it frequently and keep meaning to drop in. Today I finally went in there! It was a little discouraging at first to walk in and see a long table full of romance novels, but there were a few gems. I found that they actually had a few good Catholic books. I had gone in there looking for "light reading" but I ended up with mostly spiritual reading.

Here is my haul:

God's Choice by George Weigel. A book about the end of John Paul II's papacy and the election of Benedict XVI. I like Weigel's writing as I think he really has a handle on the state of the Catholic Church today. (His biography of John Paul II, Witness to Hope, is a must-read.) I have been reading this all evening as my husband was watching bowl games on TV. It brought back a lot of memories of that spring and summer of 2005. Looking back, that was the year when I really began to get serious about my faith. That summer I was an REU student at Purdue and had a memorable encounter with a Catholic professor there. I think I will write about that more sometime since it was so pivotal for me. But for now I will move on to...

Fire Within by Fr. Thomas Dubay. This book is a summary of the spirituality of Sts. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. I have been drawn to St. Teresa for a long time and really want to get to know her and her way of prayer better. Fr. Dubay is an excellent writer but sometimes hard to digest. I am a voracious reader but I find his books difficult to finish (kind of like Pope Benedict's). I think this will end up being my spiritual reading for Lent.

Salt of the Earth by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI!). This one has been on my to-buy list for a while. It is based on an interview that journalist Peter Seewald did with Cardinal Ratzinger. The Cardinal talks about his life and about the challenges the Church is facing at the turn of the new century. This should be a good one.

(I also saw Karl Keating's Fundamentalism and Catholicism while at the bookstore. I didn't think I needed it at the time, since I don't run into as many Fundamentalists here as I did back home, but I might go back and get that one. I like Keating's writing style and it should help me bone up on Catholic apologetics.)

And just for some fun, Cheaper by the Dozen. The mother in the story, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, is one of my secular "heroes", being a prominent woman engineer of the 20th century and a mother of 12 children, to boot. I had already read a great biography of her (Making Time) and decided to supplement it with the more famous memoir written by two of her children. This book should not be confused with the silly Steve Martin movie of a few years back! I doubt we could find such a positive portrayal of a large family these days. Large families seem to be stereotyped as chaotic, poverty-stricken, and suffering from parental neglect. Sad that children are no longer seen as blessings. But I'm wandering.

Not from the discount book store, but another recent read was My Life with the Saints by Fr. James Martin, SJ. I had seen good reviews of this on some Catholic blogs so I decided to pick it up. This is a warm, personal story about how Fr. Martin "met" his special saints and how they influenced his life. The saints range from Aloysius Gonzaga to Joan of Arc to Dorothy Day and everyone in between. The first story about the Saint Jude statuette had me in stitches! I could relate to the book since I've encountered my favorite saints in very similar, seemingly random ways. I highly recommend this book.

I look forward to reading all these books and sharing my thoughts with you!