Book review: Compelling essays contemplate faith in many forms

In his most recent collection of autobiographical essays, Rodriguez contemplates the “God who happened upon Abraham,” the father of three desert religions: Judaism produced Christianity, which birthed Islam, whose radicals turned on all three in the name of their one God on Sept. 11, 2001.

Yearning to return to the roots of these faiths, Rodriguez goes to the desert and finds lyrical images, mostly male, like the old man who climbs the mosque’s tower under the “flicker and sizzle” of a green neon light and “picks up the microphone to rend our dreams asunder” with the 4 a.m. call to prayer.

In the dark church of a Greek Orthodox monastery that dates from A.D. 532, he gazes through glass at the shrunken corpse of Saint Saba, the founder. Another case holds the skulls of monks killed by the Persians in A.D. 614. “The desert creates warriors,” warns the monk escorting him with a flashlight.

Rodriguez describes the “two temples” of his youth — his Roman Catholic parish church in Sacramento and the Alhambra Theatre, where he sat in the balcony, “portioning a small box of Milk Duds to last through the Crucifixion.” It was there, he writes, through the power of cinema, that he became a Christian and a Crusader.

His hagiography includes warmly human portraits of Cesar Chavez, Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day, with contempt for the homophobic, hate-mongering televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. He reveres the Sisters of Mercy in the Americas while decrying “decades of cruelty” by their founding order in Ireland. He has begun to take a more positive view of San Francisco’s “order of gay drag nuns,” the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. He loves being a gay Hispanic Roman Catholic. He adores women and counts on them, like the dying friend he calls “Darling,” to “protect the Church from its impulse to cleanse itself of me.”

Some of his vague allusions drive me to Google or YouTube. But Rodriguez’s virtuosity takes us places we would have missed without him.

“Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography,” by Richard Rodriguez. Viking. 257 pages. $26.95.

Anne Grant (ParentingProject@verizon.net), a retired United Methodist minister, writes about abuses of psychotherapy in Rhode Island’s Family Court.

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