Who is Tony Hendra?, you may ask. I didn't know either. His major claim to fame was that he was one of the creative forces behind National Lampoon magazine, Saturday Night Live, Lemmings and Radio Dinner, as well as numerous scathingly satiric smaller pieces of the same ilk.
Father Joe was a Benedictine monk at an English monastery named Quarr. Tony is forcibly introduced to Father Joe at the age of 14 by an irate husband with whose wife Tony was beginning an affair.
From this inauspicious beginning, a story of faith won and lost and reclaimed. Hendra, like so many of us in the 70s, descends into self-centered existence of drugs, sex and rock-n-roll. I subscribed to National Lampoon in the 70s and recalled several of the pieces he wrote described. I even had a 'Father Joe' in my life, though he died much too soon.
Sometimes it seems that the zeitgeist into which we are born can overwhelm all but the strongest of wills. In my study of stock equities, the market sentiment about a particular sector or industry affects both good and bad stocks alike. Oil stocks, for example, will all move in the same direction for a period of time, even the high-quality ones which are earning money, growing and increasing market share. Only a truly exceptional stock seems able to resist these trends. All of this is to say I see a parallel in my life to Tony Hendra's, not in all the details, but in faith during the last decades of the twentieth century. Father Joe was like an Exxon, steadfast in faith, growing, not faltering to the very end of his life.
This is an amazing little book, well worth the read.
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