![]() For Fate, listening to the monks pray and not knowing the words to join in highlights his “distant looking at, rather than the riskier seeing with. In “Weekend Monk,” Fate confronts a shade of imposter syndrome-that same anxiety which prompts young globe-trotters to wince at the word tourist. In these stories, Fate finds glimpses of the Divine-the idea of religion as a tie that binds together all creation, living and dead.įate’s spiritual search leads him to go on a retreat with Trappist monks at New Melleray Abbey, near Dubuque. Preaching a sermon in Ames, Iowa, in 1964, against Barry Goldwater and the war in Vietnam that would prompt such a backlash he would have to leave that church. Rushing home from the Navy, at 19, to be with his dying father. Until his hands bled during the Dust Bowl. Referring to Doris Grumbach’s idea that God is found through absence, Fate connects this negative theology to the “growing absence” of his father caused by the disease: “the widening gaps between thoughts, the nonsensical unfinished sentences, the angry outbursts at nurses.” Watching his father forget his Social Security number and the days of the week, Fate takes comfort in the stories his father retains: The next essay, “The Presence of Absence,” poignantly fast-forwards to the experience of an adult son caring for his father with Alzheimer’s disease. “Maybe the problem is that you were the only one who was listening,” his father says, accepting his son’s departure from expectations. As a teenager, Fate is hesitant to get confirmed in the church and realizes that his skepticism comes, ironically, from his father, whose Sunday sermons encouraged him to question Christian teachings. In “Fishing for My Father,” he describes growing up as the son of a Congregational minister and learning that his own faith is tempered by doubt. ![]() The narrative starts with Fate’s idyllic childhood in rural Iowa.
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