Do You Hear What I Hear?: Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My
Condition: SECONDHAND
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When Minna Proctor's father, a university professor and musicologist, tells her he has decided to pursue the priesthood, all she can say is, "oh." Having grown up the child of divorced parents without a religious compass, Minna realizes how little she knows of her father's spiritual life, and beyond that, how little she knows about what it means to be called to something, much less a life of religious devotion. And then the church rejects her father's petition. Being the spirited, thoughtful intellectual that she is, Minna sets out to define for herself just what it means to have a "call," and then to be told by some authority (the church, in this instance) that your call may not be a call in the classic sense (whatever that is) at all. But, wonders Minna, who's to say? A kind of extended personal essay on the idea of calling based on conversations with her father, interviews with myriad priests and religious scholars and readings of classic faith narratives from Augustine to Simone Weil, DO YOU BEAR WHAT I HEAR? dissects calling for a whole generation who came of age largely without the language of religion to guide them culturally or spiritually. As she points out, The Brady Bunch never went to church. Going, deeply into the specifics of the Episcopal discernment process (literally, how a priest is made) allows Minna to write broadly about the mainstream American culture that sprawls around the church, and to understand, at last, the spiritual journey that has consumed her father.
Author: Minna Proctor
Format: Hardback, 274 pages, 160mm x 241mm, 472 g
Published: 2005, Viking Books, United States
Genre: Autobiography: Religious & Spiritual
When Minna Proctor's father, a university professor and musicologist, tells her he has decided to pursue the priesthood, all she can say is, "oh." Having grown up the child of divorced parents without a religious compass, Minna realizes how little she knows of her father's spiritual life, and beyond that, how little she knows about what it means to be called to something, much less a life of religious devotion. And then the church rejects her father's petition. Being the spirited, thoughtful intellectual that she is, Minna sets out to define for herself just what it means to have a "call," and then to be told by some authority (the church, in this instance) that your call may not be a call in the classic sense (whatever that is) at all. But, wonders Minna, who's to say? A kind of extended personal essay on the idea of calling based on conversations with her father, interviews with myriad priests and religious scholars and readings of classic faith narratives from Augustine to Simone Weil, DO YOU BEAR WHAT I HEAR? dissects calling for a whole generation who came of age largely without the language of religion to guide them culturally or spiritually. As she points out, The Brady Bunch never went to church. Going, deeply into the specifics of the Episcopal discernment process (literally, how a priest is made) allows Minna to write broadly about the mainstream American culture that sprawls around the church, and to understand, at last, the spiritual journey that has consumed her father.