By James
V. Schall, S.J. TUESDAY, JULY 21 2015
David Brooks (“The Next Culture War” NYT,
June 30), noted that Christianity is rapidly declining or being eliminated.
Brooks’ phrase for what is left – “social conservative” – is unfortunate. As
Chesterton saw over a century ago, such people “left over” will be the only
“heretics” left. They alone will affirm that the grass is green (marriage is
marriage) but not, like our voluntarist perception of reality, whatever we
choose to call it: “The sexual revolution will not be undone anytime soon. The
more practical struggle is to repair a society rendered atomized, unforgiving,
and inhospitable.” This admonition sounds uncannily like Pope Francis.
After Brooks, I finished Daniel James
Brown’s The Boys in the Boat, an account of eight crewmen who won the Gold Medal at the 1936
Berlin Olympics. In the “Author’s Note,” Brown wrote: “Finally, this is, in
many ways, a book about a young man’s long journey back to a place he calls
home; writing his story has reminded me again and again that no one is more
blessed by his home than I am.” Brown has a wife and two daughters.
This is not a “review” of this excellent book.
A book club in Maryland wants everyone in that state to read it. Good advice.
This book, however you look at it, is quite counter-cultural. I hesitate to
point this fact out, lest someone hesitate to read it.
Brown pays particular attention to the home
life of Joe Rantz, the book’s hero, and to the other boys in the boat, as well
as to what happens to them down to their deaths. All but one marry, have
children, homes, memories. The book depended on the recollections of Rantz’s
daughter. This book is about men, good young men, who, like most tourists, may
drink too much beer in Germany on their first visit. Yet, in many ways, the
book is about wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers, none of whom row. This
book understands marriage, its relation to the sexes, to children, to fathers
and mothers. The relationships can sometimes be agonizing, but no doubt is left
about what they ought to be.
An Englishman by the name of George Pocock is
the philosophic protagonist of the book. Each chapter begins with a remark of
Pocock’s about the majesty of rowing. Pocock builds the finest cedar eight-man
sculls. He is also a major figure at the University of Washington crew
headquarters where he builds and sells his boats. The drama of the book deals
with Joe Rantz, a leading oarsmen on the crew. His family life was disrupted by
the death of his mother and his father’s remarriage, from which Joe has four
half brothers and sisters. His talented stepmother and father in effect abandon
him as a boy.
In analyzing Joe’s psychology, his fitting
into the team, Pocock figures out what is bothering Joe. It is his troubled
relation with his father, who, like Joe, is dirt poor. The following passage is
central to the book:
It helped that Pocock’s own mother had died
six months after his birth. His father’s second wife had died a few years
later, before George’s remembering. He knew something about growing up in a
motherless home, and about the hole it left in a boy’s heart. He knew about the
ceaseless drive to make oneself whole and about the endless yearning. Slowly he
began to close on the essence of Joe Rantz.
What kind of strange doctrine do we have here?
A boy needs a mother, his mother?
Joe Rantz had one girl friend in his youth. He
married her the day both of them graduated from the University of Washington.
Joe’s wife Joyce, who had a hand in bring up his own half-siblings, was a
devoted wife. This is how Brown describes her:
Over the years, Joe and Joyce raised five
children – Fred, Judy, Jerry, Barb, and Jenny. In all these years, Joyce never
forgot what Joe had gone through in his early years, and she never wavered from
a vow she had made to herself early in their relationship: come what may, she
would make sure that he never went through anything like it again, would never
again be abandoned, would always have a warm and loving home.
Joyce died before Joe. In his old age and
death, Joe is looked after by his children.
“The next culture war?” Man, wife, fidelity,
vows, work, children, home, glory – these are the things we have been
destroying, the things that men and women, boys and girls, want most, if they
want anything at all, except for this one thing. Why, Chesterton asked, are we
“home-sick at home?” If “the boys in the boat” teach us anything, it is that to
be what we are, we must know, in experience or in hope, what a home is –
father, mother, their children. Transcendence passes through the home.
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