The Father and the Son: My Father's Journey into the Monastic Life - Hardcover

Murray, Matthew J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060187824 ISBN 13: 9780060187828

Publisher: Harper, 1999

Synopsis

"The year I turned thirteen, my father declared himself the patron saint of frustrated housewives from the time I started ninth grade I lived in constant danger of coming home from school to find a group of his disciples gathered in my living room."

So begins The Father and the Son, a funny, moving, and sometimes painful story about a son's rediscovery of his father and a father's discovery of a new life of faith as a monk and priest.

In this powerful work -- part memoir, part reportage--journalist Matt Murray explores the reasons his father, a middle-class homeowner and government worker, abandoned his life and moved to a rural monastery. The search takes the author back into his father's past, from his dirt-poor Depression-era childhood to his days as a struggling young writer in New York to his successful yet sometimes frustrated life as a husband and father. Murray recounts his mother's tragic death from cancer at the age of forty, and the difficult five years that followed for him, his farther, and his three siblings. He wrestles with the impact of his father's return to the Church at the age of fifty-two and subsequent decision to follow a life of faith, and the dramatic reshaping of his family that ensued.

As Murray tracks his father through his conversion and delves into his beliefs, he questions not only his father's faith, but his own, and offers, with stark honesty, profound reflections on the relationships between fathers and sons.

About this title

About the Author:

Matt Murray received a master's degree in journalism at Northwestern University. He has worked for many news organizations and is currently a staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

In his first book, Murray (former Chicago Tribune journalist and current staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal) grapples with his 59-year-old father's decision to enter a Benedictine monastery in central Illinois, a thousand miles and several light-years away from the shape and tenor of his former life as a successful personnel manager in Washington, D.C. More poignantly, the author, who did not have extensive religious grounding in childhood, has difficulty understanding his father's conversion. Murray first explores the dysfunctional nature of his father's family, but the reasons for his father's choices are not wholly there. Next, he analyzes his parents' relationships partly through his father's love letters and the journals left by his mother before she died of cancer. The author describes his bereaved father as a retired, widowed single parent who is trying to reinvent himself, and presents his own adolescent self as embarrassed by his father's crying copious tears during mass. Murray observes, but does not initially comprehend, his father's conversion process. Ultimately, the question of why his father embraced monasticism becomes a question of spirit rather than of sociology or psychology. Some insight comes when the father describes his conversion as a response to God's call and reflects upon the peace he's found in living in the present moment, open to God's gifts and graces. Murray's chronology and accounts of family relationships are awkward to follow in places, but the book seems genuine and without pretense, gently exploring the impact of a father's religious conversion on his family. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0060187824
• ISBN 13: 9780060187828
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272