Falling in love with the good, the true, and the beautiful

Griffith Park, 1997. Photo by Vince Miller.

Homiletic & Pastoral Review has a beautiful review by Father Christian Raab, O.S.B., of my memoir Sunday Will Never Be the Same. He writes that the book has "a striking narrative which, like a good mystery novel, invites the reader to make discoveries alongside the protagonist and not before her." And he adds,

Unlike most mystery novels, however, this book is more of a “who is it?” than a “who done it?” What the author discovers through her trials and triumphs over the course of many years is who God is — the truth of God’s solicitous presence, the truth of God’s love in Christ, the truth of the Church as God’s family, and the truth of Mary as a universal mother. In discovering these truths about God, the author also discovers her own true identity as God’s beloved.

I especially appreciated this insight of Father Raab's:

A case can be made that the book turns upon Goldstein’s reading of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Chesterton describes a conversation between an anarchist poet and a “poet of law and order.” The latter says: “It’s things going right that is poetic,” and “the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.” Goldstein seems to have, by this point, already intuited that while much of rock music celebrates chaos and focuses on nihilistic despair, some of it, like the Boettcher music she has fallen in love with, manages to communicate the true and the good and the beautiful. Chesterton gives her a conceptual framework for better understanding her own taste and the impetus to more fully pursue what the good poets are pointing to.

Read the full review at the HPR website.

Note: If you purchase Sunday Will Never Be the Same or any other book through the Amazon links in this post or elsewhere on this page, I will receive a commission that I will donate in its entirety to support the HER Foundation's volunteer corps, which assists pregnant women who suffer from hyperemesis gravidarum. Thus far in 2019, I have donated $115 to the HER Foundation thanks to Dawn Patrol readers' Amazon purchases.