| | Book Reviews by Rev. Joseph A. Grenier, Ph.D. 
Rev. Joseph A. Grenier, Ph.D. is the current presiding bishop of the Celtic Christian Church and has been co-director for Good Tidings since 1986. His doctoral work is in Church History and he is a professor with Global Ministries University. Joseph also works as a counselor and spiritual director with Spiritual Care Associates. He reviews books for us that we sell here for the benefit of Good Tidings, or at The Rose of Sharon Shop Online Bookstore. 
by
Beryl Singleton Bissell
New York: Counterpoint, 2006
I’d like to tell you about this book, which is directly concerned with the human relationships with which Good Tidings works.
Beryl Bissell entered a contemplative monastery, left it, fell in love with a priest and he with her, he was laicized, they married and had two children. After only five years of marriage he died of cancer.
Those are the are bare bones of Beryl’s story. But the book is a thousand times more than that. Beryl does not look at her life through rose-colored glasss. With unflinching honesty she describes the various stages of her life, the people in it, the events that marked it, in the process revealing herself to be a person of deep passion, whether that passion is directed at God or at her husband and children. Add to that a style that is eminently readable, and the book is one you can’t put down. You come away from it with a deeper understading of God’s often mysterious ways with us human beings, and also with a deeper appreciation of the pain and suffering that can accompany a human being’s attempt to respond wholeheartedly to God’s will.
In Beryl’s case that suffering started at a very young age. She was born, the third of four children, into a family in which the father was both a successful banker and an alcoholic, and a mother, a very beautiful woman, who went into a frenzy of rage when her husband was going through an episode of drinking.
Within that family life, and perhaps influenced by it, Beryl started to experience a desire to enter the convent, and more particularly a contemplative convent. A the age of 18 she entered a monastery of the Poor Clares, a strict contemplative order, in Bordentown, New Jersey--another source of suffering, since her parents were dead set against it.
For the next twelve years Beryl put all of her passionate nature into becoming a saint as a Poor Clare. She went through a bout of anorexia and a time of inordinate attachment to her Mistress of Novices. She describes these candidly, making no excuses for herself. And she describes the rituals of the monastery--senseless ones and all--as well as the other nuns, the large majority very good ones, and the few selfish and insensitive ones. It’s a compelling picture of an extreme form of life in which ones seeks God alone--and of the human weaknesses that get in the way of that seeking.
Toward the end of that period her father suffered a very severe stroke, and her mother, who cared for him with devotion, really needed help. Beryl’s sister Judi had also entered the same monastery of Poor Clares, and her two brothers had their own families to care for. Beryl was told to go to Puerto Rico, where her parents had lived for many years, to help her mother. For the next few years she went back and forth between the monastery and Puerto Rico, living several months at a time in each place. In Puerto Rico she tried to live according to her religious obligations; in the monastery she tried to rekindle her vocation--and inevitably that dichotomy caused trouble.
In Puerto Rico she met a priest, Father Vittorio Bosca, Italian, friendly, outgoing, very attractive, and also a good priest. He ministered to her father, among the many other ways in which he served. Inevitably they fell in love. And there began the cycle of attraction, feeling guilty, pulling back, seeing each other again, recognizing their love, denying it, misunderstanding each other, hurting each other, and so on--what we’ve called in Good Tidings the roller coaster type of relationship, one which we’ve seen over and over again.
What is important here, in my estimation, is that both Beryl and Father Vittorio were good people, honestly trying to be faithful to their respective vocations, including the celibacy that was part of it. Despite that they came to love each other deeply. And as Beryl describes with her typical candor her roller coaster relationship with FatherVittorio, one begins to wonder whether she had a true vocation to a contemplative religious life. Are there such things as temporary vocations, by means of which God draws a person to religious experiences that will affect for the good that person’s later life? I for one believe there are such vocations. But that’s a whole other topic....
Be that as it may, Beryl did finally leave the Poor Clares, and a careful reading of her story gives the impression that it was a correct decision. Her true vocation was marriage and a family.
In the case of Father Vittorio, the decision to leave the priesthood, though very painful, was in one sense easier. He had never really wanted to be a priest. He was searching for a father figure, and found it in the priests of his parish. He entered a religious order at a very young age, was told that wanting to return home was a temptation, and was ordained young so that he could not leave. But he did leave the order so as to work with people as a secular priet. His deep love for Beryl led to his decision to leave the priesthood, and his conscience led him to wait for his dispenstion before marrying her. He obtained it through the help of a sympathetic Roman Catholic bishop in New Jersey, and he and Beryl were then married by that same bishop.
It would be wonderful to say that they lived happily ever after. But that was not to be. Even before they were married, Vittorio had developed cancer. There followed bouts of serious weakness when he truly seemed to be dying, and surprising combacks that allowed him to live a practically normal life. The couple had two children, and Vittorio was a loving and happy father. Then, when he and Beryl had only been married five years, that cancer claimed him.
It was not the end of tragedy in Beryl’s life. When her beloved daughter Francesca was only 24, she was shot and killed--a homicide that remains unsolved to this day.
In our work with the women who contact us in Good Tidings, we always encourage them to resolve their relationships with integrity. Beryl and Vittorio did that, painful though it was for each one to sunder his or her previous commitment. In that they remain a model of faithfulness in searching for and doing God’s will, no matter what the exterior circumstances may seem to say.
Joseph A. Grenier
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