The Descent into the Mist of Catholic Writing

I just got off the phone with a friend—an author, Crisis columnist, and writer of more than 1,500 articles—who shared he was planning a 24-hour fast at a nearby chapel with the hope God might lead him out of a writing crisis.

“Beware,” I warned him. “You might come out worse than when you went in.”

Ask a Crisis writer to share an opinion on Pope Francis, or a best-loved saint, or the assassination attempt, or the Synod on Synodality and responses come like Paul Skenes purpose pitches. Words become geysers, often far too hot for your liking. If, however, you want to slow him down, ask about his writing process—and watch him transmogrify into St. Joseph. In the noiselessness of his attempt to retrieve his clubfooted answer, you will know what you need to know: you’ve grazed up against his soft place; you’ve sent him down a black-diamond drop into the island of his soul. 

Catholic authors rarely speak of the untamed countryside in them. Their job is to write, not explain how. But their stories often come from low-clouded and cold places in them, a landscape where landmines of dark memory, secrets, shivering lonesomeness, tension, and long-suffering reside.

It is the writer’s Molokai. 

Why does my writer friend, and I imagine most other Catholic writers, choose to descend deep spiral staircases into the forlorn places in them? I imagine it is because they know it’s where the fur flies, a place where they might find a word from God. So, the writer hangs in the air down there, like a bird of prey hoping to see a fluttering of movement. If luck is on his side, he’ll see the glint of a tiny pearl, dive down, and scavenge. Then he’ll push hard from the bottom of his soul and beat his wings to get the words down. 

Flannery O’Connor is a rare one who built a home in her lonesome place. She wrote letter after clever letter to friends attempting to explain her companionless writing process, but she probably never got far. What she probably wanted to imply was: I try not to tiptoe past my landmines; I seek them out to stomp on them. O’Connor knew torn limbs lead to the best stories. She knew secret fires burned in her wintertime places.

At 27, she wrote a 2,182-word masterpiece: A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The story ends with The Grandmother bleeding out in a ditch after being shot three times through the chest by The Misfit. Few critics mention that O’Connor likely jackhammered parts of The Misfit from her very self. I imagine she felt every cell in her body ablaze when she wrote The Misfit’s words into existence, spoken moments after The Grandmother bled out beneath a sunless sky in the middle of the woods: “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

I imagine when the effects of lupus began to intensify, O’Connor saw it as a type of first fruit. The disease was a winepress within her body, crushing her into a libation of raw Catholic storytelling. In a way, when her doctor told her, It’s lupus, she may have heard his voice as a type of Angelus bell or saw it as the pointer finger of a Dickens-imagined ghost: Enter into your pandemonium. She knew her real writing was still out in front of her. 

As the years passed and the piecemeal smothering of her body began to cover her whole, I imagine she felt her soul, strangely, begin to broaden. It is easy to see Maximilian Kolbe feeling the same while singing to God on the fourteenth morning in the starvation chamber. I doubt, though, O’Connor and Kolbe paid mind to the phenomena unfolding in their souls, knowing that phenomena was best left for God to sort out. 

Many Catholic writers twist like Jesus on His first hour on the cross. When O’Connor arched her swollen torso over her typewriter and tapped away with arthritic fingers, she used her discomfiture as a form of catechism. Although her pain was magisterial, it was also handy in its instruction. It was in these wintertime places where she pulled out The Misfit, June Star, Bailey and her other accented rednecks and strange characters. As her body faded away, I have to imagine O’Connor’s eyes were aglitter as she watched another of her Southern-haunted characters take shape onto a white sheet of paper.

All this said, I imagine the language to describe one’s writing process is probably best left alone.

You might be asking, where is he going with all this? Well, if you’ve made it here, I’ve sunk the hook. Right now, Crisis reader—this instant—my fingertips dangle over my keyboard like small bothered cobras, not certain where to strike. Thus far—for 800 or so words—I’ve delayed taking you into my Molokai.

We’ll start with this: something odd happened to me a few years ago. It was as odd and mysterious as anything that has happened to me. I wrote a story I didn’t know I wrote. Something odd happened to me a few years ago. It was as odd and mysterious as anything that has happened to me. I wrote a story I didn’t know I wrote.Tweet This

The story I intended to write in 2022 would be about a priest-turned-hermit named Fr. Martin Flum (rhymes with bloom) who refused to shut down during Covid and ended up saving a marriage, a family, and a woman who had been binge drinking red wine for many years. The story would center on the 2020 Lenten season when a worldwide Catholic Church shut down, abandoning those trapped by addictions, woundedness, demons, and old ghosts rising from their pasts. When the universal machinery—panels of doctors, politicians, and Church hierarchy— megaphoned “isolate,” the family of this woman couldn’t imagine a more dooming word. Back then, her husband awakened most mornings with fear greeting him like sirens warning of World War I chlorine gas.  

It would be a true story.

One evening, in the dead of winter 2021, six months after Fr. Flum steered his high-mileage, silver Toyota truck from his sleepy parish for the last time to begin the remainder of his life in a hermit’s cell, Krista—my wife of 25 years—proposed a remarkable idea. She asked me to write the story of her once-sick soul and how Fr. Flum worked to purify it. Shy by nature, Krista told me she felt God had called her to expose herself so that the priesthood of Fr. Flum could be exposed. She wanted me to shine a bright light on her broken years—our broken years—and what a cassocked repairman did to piece her back together.  

No was my answer.  

As months passed, Krista occasionally asked me to reconsider. One day, I told her I would spend time in prayer about it. When, after a few more months, she told me that my “praying was delaying,” I told her I would try. So, with her blessing hand, I sat at my desk like a stone. When she asked how the writing was going, I said, How does a husband press down on a letter key to begin a sentence detailing the chaos of the one he loves and its effects on him and his family? 

“God might not want your story revealed,” I said. “Especially by your husband.”  

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Krista told me. “This story is about a priest who showed no fear during Covid. Show people what he did to save my life during the pandemic—how a man behaves. Now, write.” 

So, I began to write, daily taking the staircase down to Molokai from 4:30 to 6:30 a.m. After eight or so months, I finally came up—gasping a bit—with a book about the sacred work of the holy priest who healed my wife during Covid.

Then something mysterious happened. When I shared the story with four people—a theologian, an author, and two close friends—they each said the same thing. One by one, they told me I hadn’t written the book I thought I had. 

I had told them my book was about the imperishable gift Fr. Flum became to my wife and me when a pope, his bishop, and so many fellow priests conformed to protocol and caution and, with a few exceptions, seemed to fade away in 2020. My book was about the closing chapter for us, and of what we believed and experienced to be pastoral masterwork during a time when a crop-dusting of fear spread across an entire world.

But each said, “No. Your book is about marriage.”

I thought each of them had gotten it completely wrong, until I reread my story. Thereafter, letter by letter on the screen, I saw that the life laid bare was my own. True to his calling, the hermit faded into the background even in his own biography.  

I guess this all can be chalked up to the mystery of writing, the mysterious work of God in one’s Molokai. 

I had discovered Molokai was not just a writer’s cold and secret place to gather words—it was often just life itself. It is where a man—a writer in this case—pleads from a far-flung island for God and, after many years, watches a Damien—named Fr. Martin Flum—dock his boat.

The Hermit: The Priest Who Saved a Soul, a Marriage, and a Family is available for preorder now and will be released by Ignatius Press on August 12.