Playing the holy fool

“Being pious is easy and pleasant, go ahead and make yourself hated,” one holy fool advises another in Eugene Vodolazkin’s 2016 novel Laurus. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, holy fools are “exhibited” in the divine spectacle and, like Christ, are even “sentenced to death” (4:9–10). As a literary archetype, holy fools are subject to contempt and scorn.

Laurel Mathewson plays the contemporary holy fool in An Intimate Good. To suggest as much is to grant what she risks in narrating the mystical prayer encounters that led her to the work of the 16th-century Spanish Carmelite nun. There will surely be raised brows and condescending smirks. Readers who share Mathewson’s “postmodern and materialistic formation” will be scandalized by the piety. More pious readers will be suspicious of her ecstatic experiences, in which prayer progresses—on occasion—from arousal to feelings of penetration.

Mathewson understands her narrative risk—and faces it squarely with the desire to be “diligently truthful,” even if she shares some of Teresa’s literary hesitation. The famed saint had her own run-ins with the proverbial gatekeepers: inquisitors who seized and disposed of every extant manuscript of her first autobiography, The Book of Her Life (also called The Autobiography of Teresa of Ávila). Mathewson understands that to write her own book—and absurdly claim the physical closeness of a good and loving God—is to leave behind an “old model of faith, quite well-suited to the skeptic, the agnostic, the deist, the perfectionist, or the meritocrat of any stripe.” But she will not be the first woman or man or mystic to have gambled with reputation: “Fools for Christ singing praises on street corners or in the fields have had a hard time in every generation.” As with all holy fools, what is revealed is not simply what is seen but also those who see.