Notes on the Little Red Book

The freshmen who thronged campus this fall all received tours of O'Neill Library, in which they will spend hundreds of hours in the years to come. They all received instruction in the computers, as if they needed such a thing. Nearly all made pilgrimages to Fenway Park and to the shrine to capitalism that is Boston's Newbury Street. And, for the first time in the 137-year history of the University, all BC freshmen were handed the Little Red Book.

What Are We? An Introduction to Boston College and Its Jesuit Tradition, or "the BC prayer book," as it is also called, was created last summer at the request of University president William P. Leahy, SJ, produced by the University's Center for Ignatian Spirituality, and edited by two creative Jesuit scholars (Howard J. Gray, SJ, director of the Ignatian Center, and Joseph A. Appleyard, SJ, the University's vice president for mission and ministry). The Little Red Book is indeed little and fire-engine red. It's also useful, graceful, thorough, and refreshingly open to all religious traditions, even as it is firmly grounded in the Jesuit tradition of Roman Catholicism.

"We wanted a book in which there are prayers that would help students discern the direction they want to take in their lives," says Fr. Gray. "And we wanted a book that would also provide the mission and history of Boston College, so that freshmen could plug into the University's mission right away." Attuned to a campus that is both proudly Catholic and enlivened by women and men of a dozen faiths, Gray and Appleyard included prayers and quotes both "genuinely Catholic," as Gray says, and of spiritual power and eloquence from other traditions.

Thus the Little Red Book brings some of the most interesting, piercing, and substantive Catholic writers and thinkers to bear on new BC students--Dorothy Day, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Daniel Berrigan, Thomas Aquinas, Carlo Cardinal Martini--while also introducing the freshmen to the Torah, the Qur'an, the Buddhist Dhammapada (a scripture attributed to Gotama Buddha), the Islamic Hadith (the sayings of the prophet Muhammad), the voices of Rabbi Moses Maimonides, the Persian poet Rumi, Mohandas Gandhi, and more.

The curious cumulative effect of so many voices from so many spiritual traditions is to illuminate the Catholicity of Boston College; a friendly and respectful catholicity reflects well on Catholicism, and is, attentive Catholics will remember, a clear mandate from Pope John Paul II. Or, in the succinct favorite phrase of the recently beatified Pope John XXIII: "Open the windows."

The book is also invigorated by great poets and thinkers without specific religious labels--Rainer Maria Rilke, Simone Weil, and the fine American poet Anne Sexton, for example, who was born a stone's throw from the BC campus. "I cannot walk an inch without trying to walk to God," she writes (in the book The Awful Rowing Toward God). "He is in the swarm, the frenzy of the bees. He is in the potter who makes clay into a kiss. Is not God in the hiss of the river?"

And the haunting remarks! "Being a little fragment of particular truth," writes Weil, a genius modern mystic, "every school exercise . . . is like a sacrament." "Lord, give me a sense of humor, and I will find happiness in life and profit for others," says St. Thomas More. "Was not Jesus an extremist for love? . . . Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel?" asks Martin Luther King, Jr., from his jail cell in Birmingham. "So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist we will be. . . . Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice--or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?"

Structurally, what seems awkward at the start--the quoting of prayers and remarks on the left-hand pages, and a book-length narrative about BC and Jesuit history, ideas, and practice on the right-hand pages--turns out to be a fine idea after you get used to it. A reader can browse the left and ignore the right, or dip into the organized sections of the right, or leap about haphazardly, or even read the book back to front--a subtle compliment to Hebrew tradition, perhaps, in which texts are read right to left.

And the sections on Jesuit education and spirituality, as evidenced in the life and work of Boston College, are alone worth the effort. They are pithy and gracefully written summaries of very complex ideas that have filled hundreds of books.

There are some mistakes and miscalculations in the Little Red Book, of course--no human enterprise is without its flaws--but they are generally minor: The type is too small, the selection of a faint yet lurid lime-green for a second color (in which the book's explanatory italic notes are printed), is unfortunate, and the very few typographical errors include the interesting news, on page 30, that Dorothy Day was born in 1997 and died in 1980--a miracle that will strengthen her candidacy for beatification.

The only serious flaw is the "Further Readings" section, which is mighty weak soup. Instead of a brief lecture about Catholicism and a smattering of quotes from Jesuit documents, a useful appendix ought to propose a huge pile of books and writers and thinkers and films and plays and music and Web sites to which the curious young reader might turn for further illumination about Catholicism and prayer and spiritual search--not only the great texts already cited in the book, but sources like Commonweal magazine, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dave Brubeck's jazz Mass, Catholic Worker, Andre Dubus, the Vatican's Web site (www.vatican.va), the film Dead Man Walking. Having inspired the urge to spiritual travel in its students, BC should also give them a plethora of destinations.

But, as editors Gray and Appleyard note, the book is a work in progress, with an initial press run designed to cover only two years' worth of freshmen. They plan a second edition, and they are already accepting suggestions for the sequel.

"The deeds which yield immediate fruit and continue to yield fruit in time to come," says a prayer from the Babylonian Talmud (quoted on page 138), include "probing the meaning of prayer"; and in the Little Red Book, Boston College probes with an admirable breadth and humility. Not often does a whole university's meaning and effort distill into such clear elixir; that it does here, in a book to be found in every freshman's room, is an occasion for quiet delight.

A well-made book is a joy forever, and this sturdy little creature "is a book to be used, not just read and tossed on the shelf," as the preface says, pointedly. You could carry this book into a rugby match and it would emerge intact. You could even give it to a freshman.

Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle is the editor ofPortland Magazine, published at the University of Portland, Oregon. He is the author of two collections of essays: Credo and, with his father, Jim Doyle, Two Voices.


top of page