Let me say it from the beginning so that there is no confusion: I want to be like Father Joe! In spite of the ups and downs, the sins and the successes, the belief and the unbelief of others, Father Joe remained a steady beacon of God’s love, wisdom, grace, and truth.

I bought the book, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul, because the author, Tony Hendra, played a role in one of my favorite movies of all time, This is Spinal Tap. He played Spinal Tap’s road manager, Ian Faith. I was interested in hearing of the influence of a monk on a comic. I found much more.

Tony’s Story

Tony’s introduction to Father Joe comes as the result of a series of crazy and unfortunate events. At the age of 14, Tony is caught fondling the young wife of his stoic and intelligent mentor in Catholicism, Ben Bootle. Ben brings him to a Benedictine monastery in order to discern what to do about this revelation. It is here, while awaiting his sentence, that Tony is introduced to his judge – a judge who would become his new spiritual mentor – Father Joe.

Over time, Tony is so enamored by Father Joe and the monastic life that he determines to become a monk. When he informs his father about his decision, his father tells him that he can be a priest, but not a monk – “chanting and making pottery and honey and whatnot!” To his father, monks do nothing more than “run away from reality.” To Tony, the monks are not running away from reality, but discovering true reality (102).

Encouraged by Father Joe to pursue his education, Tony receives a scholarship to Cambridge that he does not want to accept. Father Joe convinces him that the scholarship is a gift from God and therefore, he must accept it. He is told that he must complete three years of his English degree, and then, if he still wants to, there will be no further obstacle to entering the monastery.

Feeling banished, he sets out to complete his three years of college. While there, an experience in a theater changes him. “I went into that theater a monk. I came out a satirist. Save the world through prayer? I don’t think so. I’m going to save it through laughter” (149). This leads to a career in comedy, satire, and parody. After seven years as a stand-up comedian, Tony becomes the first managing editor of the National Lampoon. He also works in film (This is Spinal Tap) and British television.

Throughout these years he experiences a failed first marriage and the near-failure of his second (which is revived by following the counsel of Father Joe). He also gets caught up in all the vices of his chosen profession. He loses his faith along the way. Throughout this entire period, Father Joe remains an ever faithful and loving beacon of light and truth who constantly provides wise, spiritual counsel. Though Joe knows next to nothing about Tony’s world, the insights he offers consistently strike a chord with Tony, whether he likes it or not.

Father Joe’s Wisdom

Following are a few of the insights (in no particular order) shared by Father Joe that I found helpful and enlightening. Almost all of them revolve around the idea that the greatest sin is selfishness and that our human calling is to live unselfishly.

On Feelings:

“Someday you’ll experience a much greater light and certainty than just feelings… Feelings are a great gift, but they're treacherous if that's all we live for. They drive us back into our selves, you see. What I want. What I feel. What I need. A man and a woman pass beyond just feelings at some point, don't they? That's when they start to know true love. The love of another. The joy in another's existence. The wonderful ways that the other person is not like you, nor you like them. What you said about the p-p-prison of self you felt you were in – that was very exact. Love releases you from that p-p-prison, you see.” (98)

“Feelings trap us in the self, Tony dear. Doing a thing because you feel wonderful about it – even a work of charity – is in the end a selfish act. We perform the work not to feel wonderful but to know and love the other. It's the same with your romance. You may not feel your love, but God is still your loved one, your other.” (99)

On Hell:

Commenting on Sartre’s phrase, “Hell is others”: “I think it's p-p-poppycock. How can Hell be others? God is manifested in others. God is the Other. That's why the self must lose itself in love for the other. It's the self we must leave behind. Better to say Hell is the Self. L'enfer cest moi.” (99)

“God gave you a great gift that terrible night, Tony dear. He gave you a vision of Hell. Not that silly fire-and-brimstone stuff. True Hell. Being alone with your self for all eternity. Only your own self to hope in, only your own self to love. In saccula saeculorum. As you said, a p-p-prison with no door. I don't think that vision will ever come to you again. You must never forget it.” (100)

On Love:

“Tony dear, you will only be able to love when you understand how much you are loved. You are loved, dear, with a limitless… fathomless… all-embracing love.” (229)

“Tony, dear, you sound angry. Very angry. Like a military man speaking with hate of his enemy. War involves terrible sins, and it arises more often than not from hate. But you can't conquer one sin with another, hate with more hate. It only makes hate stronger. Love alone can conquer hate.”

“Remember: God's grief at the unspeakable things we do to one another is beyond measuring, but so is his mercy. It might seem a terrible thing to say to people who've lost and suffered so much at the hands of hatred and violence. But true courage is not to hate our enemy, any more than to fight and kill him. To love him, to love in the teeth of his hate – that is real bravery. That ought to earn people m-m-medals.”

On Detachment:

Expounding the meaning of contempus mundi – literally, “contempt for the world”: “But does contemptus mean 'contempt,' dear? Of course not. That would imply arrogance, superiority, pride. So much that we call worldly is actually just flawed or being seen through a cracked lens. Imperfect or imperfectly understood. Who are we to judge as contemptible a thing or person whose existence God sustains? Everything, however imperfect, has its purpose.” (81)

“No, Tony dear, contemptus mundi means 'detachment from the world,' seeing the world sub specie aeternitatis. Enduring or celebrating it, but never forgetting – even when it seems perfect and forever – that as the Bible says: ‘all this shall pass like grass before the wind.’” (81)

On Listening:

“None of us listen enough, do we, dear? We only listen to a fraction of what people say. It’s a wonderfully useful thing to do. You almost always hear something you didn’t expect.” (181).

“The only way to edge closer to the truth is to listen with complete openness, bringing to the process no preconceptions, nothing prepared.” (181)

On work:

“The work itself is prayer. Work done as well as possible. Work done for others first and yourself second. Work you are thankful for. Work you enjoy, that uplifts you. Work that celebrates existence, whether it's growing grain in the fields or using God-given skills – like yours. All this is prayer that binds us together and therefore to God." (202)

On the Present:

“New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.” (240)

A Saint Is...

To Tony, Father Joe is a saint. He begins his book with a beautiful description of what he means by this:

A saint is a person who practices the keystone human virtue of humility. Humility in the face of wealth and plenty, humility in the face of hatred and violence, humility in the face of strength, humility in the face of your own genius or lack of it, humility in the face of another's humility, humility in the face of love and beauty, humility in the face of pain and death. Saints are driven to humbling themselves before all the splendor and horror of the world because they perceive there to be something divine in it, something pulsing and alive beneath the hard dead surface of material things, something inconceivably greater and purer than they.

This man is one of those rare, rare creatures. Gentleness and goodness come off him like aftershave. For all his irrepressible curiosity and concern, for all his love of talking and listening and then talking some more, a great stillness surrounds him in which he will fold you without your knowing it, numbing the pain of your most jagged obsessions, soothing away the mad priorities of your world with the balm of his peace.

For more than forty years, since I was not much more than a boy; this lumpy gargoyle of a man has been my still center, the rock of my soul…

All my conscious life he was my strongest ally, the cherished gatekeeper of my lost Eden, a lighthouse of faith blinking away through the oceanic fogs of success and money and celebrity and possessions, my intrepid guide in the tangled rain forest of human love, my silken lifeline to the divine, my Father Joe. (4-5)

This is why I want to be like Father Joe. Though Tony lost sight of God throughout his life, he never lost sight of the love of Father Joe. Though he could reject God, Father Joe’s love was so clear and present that he could not deny or ignore it. And ultimately, this love was a reflection of God’s divine love for Tony. “His gentle power sprang from a straightforward assessment of the world and his job in it. That job was love.” (82)

Father Joe was “a saint of imperfection,” a man

who didn't see the everyday world as separate from the sacred. Who saw God everywhere, shining out from the down-to-earth and battered and untidy and defeated. Who was a commonsense saint, a saint of what could be done, not should be done, a practical saint, a saint of imperfection. (203)

This is what I want to be: a saint of imperfection, a cartoon monk, someone who reveals God’s love to a broken world, someone who sees all people and all events in the divine light of God. In other words, I want to be like Father Joe!

© Richard J. Vincent, 2005