Peter Costello
A Song for the Way,
by Ben Harrison
(Dominican Publications, €12.00 / £10.00)
Over the years parts of this book have appeared as articles in journals, but being brought together here they provide readers new to the author’s work with a very vivid reading experience. In a strange way it recollects the Beat Generation for rather than a settled calm experience it describes a long life spent as the Beat Generation 1950s would have had it, “on the Road”.
Where the road was leading him to did not matter much to Harrison at first. Just being on it was what was important. As he describes it, his life has not been an easy one.
He was born and reared in the Shenandoah Valley in West Virginia, and grew up with an interest in life outdoors. But his mother died when he was young and life afterwards with his step mother seems to have been difficult.
In the Vietnam Years, 1955 to 1975, he was called up for two years of military service. This in the American Army of those days was never intended to be a pleasant experience, and though he never saw combat, he did not care for the militarised form of regulated life.
After this he travelled around, which gave him, to say the least, a very different view of the experiences that life can give an individual. However, his life then took a definitive turn, when he joined the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by St Mother Teresa in 1950.
He knew that he was himself an addictive personality. This gave him insight in to the lives of others he met on his mission, especially in prison work, which he very much favoured. Many of those who ended in jail he found were homeless, addictive, and abused by life in one way or another.
He sees himself here as being in the service of others, of following in a very modern way, the essential nature of Newman’s motto, of heart speaking to heart”
In an era when religious life seems to many observers to be in permanent decay, the appeal of monastic life is very striking. Just like the army it is a regulated and strictly ordered life, but to the ends of giving life and hope a chance to flourish rather than aiming to destroy it through brutal action.
But in that ordered life he has found, as he describes, a personal encounter with Jesus. He describes this in what you might call a very impious way. Indeed what he had seen and heard of life as whole makes him a singularly impious man.
He sees himself here as being in the service of others, of following in a very modern way, the essential nature of Newman’s motto, of heart speaking to heart. Indeed in one passage he describes the experience of seeing his very own heart beating away on the screen during a medical examination which will be familiar to many readers, I suspect.
That experience of seeing inside a person pertains to other aspects of his career, or rather his vocation, for what he describes is very much a call in the life of the world today, a different sort of Route 66 to a different kind of promised land.
Many readers will find this a revealing and deeply felt book, which will inspire them too to see this vagrant life which so many lives today in a very different light, even the light of love.