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Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.1 (2002) 115-118



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Book Review

The Barn at the End of the World:
The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd


The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd. By Mary Rose O'Reilley. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2000. xiv + 323 pp. $15.95 (paper).

I was fully prepared to dislike this book. Would this be another wearying book perpetrating the falsehood that Quakerism is a religionless religion, indifferent to whether one is a Buddhist, a Wiccan, or an agnostic? Another glib, happy denial of a three-hundred-year tradition of deeply Christocentric spirituality of Providence rooted equally in the Cross and in the Holy Spirit? [End Page 115]

O'Reilley's book courts these flaws, but wins admiration simply because it is so beautifully written, so funny, and so wise. The Barn at the End of the World is a memoir of sorts. O'Reilley is a college English professor who used a leave to undertake an internship in animal husbandry, "shepherding" at the University of Minnesota's laboratory farm, and to spend long months at Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village Community in France. The only coherence in the narrative is provided by "the tin of nuts and bolts and mismatched bicycle parts I seemed to have been issued instead of a self," yet it is self-reflective without being self-indulgent or self-obsessed. It is almost a cross between Jim Corbett's Goatwalking and Kathleen Norris's Cloister Walk.

Not a scholarly book, The Barn at the End of the World will appeal nonetheless to academics as primary source material for the study of postmodern spirituality, where religion is broken, meta-narratives discredited, and spirituality only the struggle of the fragmented self in the cafeteria of spiritualities offering themselves for sale at market. O'Reilley traverses this territory with remarkable grace, and finds in the fragments of Christianity and Buddhism a very old lesson: that God desires us as much as we desire God, that we are likely to find one another in the ordinariness of the world's work, and that redemption from the most troublesome of our sins requires a combination of grace, free will, and the acceptance of our limitations. O'Reilley is unselfconsciously eclectic: Vietnamese Zen, Teresa of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jalaluddin Rumi, and Augustine appear here side by side with little to tell the difference, yet despite the title it is as much a Christian as a Buddhist narrative.

Complicating the narrative is the warm pathos of the two and a half years O'Reilley spent as a novice in an unnamed order of nuns in the early sixties, and of her eventual departure from the Catholic Church. With a mixture of admiration, disappointment, and some old anger, she furnishes glimpses of the sublime mysticism that Gregorian chant made possible and the human ugliness that ultimately, for her, made monastic life impossible. O'Reilley has spent much of her religious career looking back to the heritage in which she was raised, drawing the occasional gem out of its treasure chest, as often as not finding as much regret as joy there, yet never able or needing to leave it behind entirely. "I love the Catholic church with an emotion one can perhaps only feel about one's family religion . . . . Most importantly, I could find God there, at least until 1972." What drove her away, and into the arms of Quakerism, was the war. "I had to . . . find a church that would consistently support a peace testimony."

Yet one of the great disappointments of the book, for this formerly Catholic Quaker anyway, was the comparative absence of a substantial Quaker spirituality. The author evokes on occasion a Quaker platitude or practice, and includes a few anecdotes from her brief time as a Quaker pastor. Otherwise Quakerism seems to have made little dent in her spiritual journey except perhaps as an empty vessel to...

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