Integrité

12 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Wolff describes him as being always ―a kind, dignified, forbearing man. He read the Bible every night before he went to bed‖ (29).

Just as in This Boy’s Life, Wolff reserves his most important statement on the matter for the end of the story. After the war, having worked diligently to earn a place at Oxford, Wolff is astounded by the contrast it provides to the warravaged insanity of the preceding years. He describes his life at the time, saying, ―It was the best the world had to give, and yet the very richness of the offering made me restless in the end. Comfort turned against itself. More and more I had the sense of avoiding some necessary difficulty, of growing in cleverness and facility without growing otherwise. Of once again being adrift‖ (216). The answer comes to him as he works through a translation of the gospels from Old English, and the words come upon him with a freshness and an insistence that is a revelation to him, telling him of ―the wise man who built his house upon a rock and the foolish man who built his house upon the sand. ‗And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell, and great was the fall of it‘‖ (Wolff 216; Matthew 7:24-27). He concludes with the conviction, humbly but sincerely stated, that ―I would do well to build my house upon a rock, whatever that meant‖ (217). Since Christ implies that he, himself, provides that firm foundation, these lines reveal that Wolff‘s true conversion to Catholicism caps his second memoir.

Despite the fact that they have largely failed to attract comment on the matter, a number of Wolff‘s works engage directly and overtly with faith and its practitioners. His first collection of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, published in 1981, includes the story ―An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke,‖ in which two English professors, both practicing Catholics, must determine how they will treat one another in light of their differing values and personal shortcomings. The volume‘s eponymously titled concluding story alludes to, draws on, and finally specifically references the struggles of the North American Martyrs, a dedicated group of Jesuit missionaries who were slaughtered in the strife between the Iroquois and the Huron in the 1640s.

Wolff‘s second published collection of short stories, Back in the World (1985), includes ―The Missing Person,‖ a story concerning Father Leo, a priest adrift in a church that he does not quite know how to serve and a man in search of how he can best fulfill his vocation. Its closing story, ―The Rich Brother,‖ tells the story of Pete and Donald, the latter of whom is most noteworthy for a life-long search for spiritual meaning, embodied, at the time the story takes place, in Donald‘s membership and residence at a communal Pentecostal farm and clearly proclaimed through the lettering on his T-shirt, ―Try God.‖ Although the collection‘s title has most often been understood, and rightly so, as a reference to the way Vietnam veterans styled their return to the U. S. and to civilian life, it has deeper, more theological implications as well. As Wolff explains in an interview with Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver, ―It wasn‘t just Vietnam. ‗The world‘ is what people in religious orders—nuns and priests—call secular life. That‘s the way Jesus talks about it: The world‘s yoke is heavy, my yoke is light. So ‗back in the world‘ is an expression which has many connotations‖ (9). The title story of his third published collection, ―The Night in Question,‖ features a sermon illustration