Can one be funny, and still be sincere? Hendra, although convinced of the wrongness now of adultery, took refuge instead in insincerity. His crime was no longer of passion, although he committed many extramarital sexual transgressions. His main crime was more of a lack of passion or love for God's world, and the good and believable things of God's world. As noted by Abraham Herschel in the book Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity on the subject of prayer, the "beginning of prayer is praise," while in Hendra's humor, the beginning of his wit was subversion and a lack of praise and prayerful attitude towards all things of the world, not simply the bad things. When Abraham Herschel notes, "the power of worship is song. To worship is to join the cosmos in praising God," Hendra only raised his voice in song to parody, not to express anything positive, only to critique the world and political life around him with a negative voice and limited vision.
This does not mean that to be a Christian, however, one must simply toe the party line of goodness without a sense of humor. Interestingly enough, Hershel also says that "prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and ruin the pyramids of callousness hatred, opportunism, falsehoods," such as the outmoded British class and political institutions Hendra despised and saw as limited the advancement of truly excellent people, particularly Catholics like himself -- and Father Joe.
But one must raise one's voice in prayers of subversion in a constructive way, to encourage action rather than a lack of action, thus "the liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision," of a better life on earth."
Both the authors of Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity and Father Joe thus see a search for meaning as the reason individuals...
Hendra frames his work as an autobiography, and so has a very different texture and tone to the collected, abstract essays of Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity. He is uncompromising in the analysis he shows for his own soul and his own spiritual development, even while he mourns his loss of innocence, his fall from an innocent young man entranced with Christianity, into a cynic who could only see what was wrong with life.
Hendra even had two children out of wedlock, but although Father Joe disapproved of Hendra's way of conducting himself as an artist, and in public and in private at times, he never abandoned the boy. Because he had consecrated himself to the young man's spiritual quest, he refused to give up on him. In Hendra's eyes, Joe is a true hero. Hendra sees himself saved by Joe, and now believes his prayer and artistic work has a moral force and 'heft' it lacked before his second spiritual awakening while an adult. Now, in contrast to the callow young fourteen-year-old in love with the monastic order, Tony Hendra states that he truly appreciates what Father Joe has given and continues to give him.
The Benedictine order bestows absolute acceptance for all of Tony's transgressions. Hendra praises the moderation of this order that allows Hendra, for instance, to drink wine for "let us agree to drink moderately and not to the point of excess," and "for self-mortification Benedict substituted prayer and coherent organization. Finally, after souring on the doctrine of satire and the mortification of others, Hendra takes up the cross of sincerity in prayer -- a sincerity that may be, in an ironic and spiritually disenchanted society, the most radical act of all.
Works Cited
Hendra, Tony. Father Joe. New York: Random House, 2004.
Hershel, Abraham & Susanna. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity.
