Wilfred Sheed

on incense, mystical experience, and “pinprick visitations of grace”

Britannica.com

Readers may recall a post from last August, Frank Zappa's Crinkled Shoes.

My source was Once a Catholic (Peter Ochiogrosso, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987). The book is subtitled Prominent Catholics and Ex-Catholics Reveal the Influence of the Church on Their Lives and Their Work.

Here’s another reveal from the book—this from the late novelist and essayist, Wilfred Sheed (1930-2011).

He was born in London and spent his early childhood in England before the family came to the US in 1940. His parents, Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, authors themselves, founded Sheed & Ward, a leading Roman Catholic publishing firm. Wilfred returned to England to attend Oxford before settling in New York.

Here we get his take on incense, mystical experience, and “pinprick visitations of grace.”

“I was a big Benediction man. There was plenty of music and all the incense your tiny lungs could handle. English anti-Catholics have, by the way, a particular thing against incense, which may have fueled my own taste for it. They used to call us ‘bloody incense burners.’ not realizing that when they purged their own services of the exotic and the strange, of ‘otherness,’ nobody went anymore. And if I ever happen to smell that noveau, non-Catholic incense coming from Hare Krishnas or worse, I just bless myself and hurry down the road. That’s our smell, boy.

“As to mystical experience, or intuition of Being, whenever I have come remotely close to it, it has not been in a spectacular religious context, which I think is as it should be—and in my youth more or less had to be. Metaphysically the Church was never just about the Church, but about God and His whole creation; practically and diurnally, I found it to be mostly about things like being a good Catholic (who sounded like, and usually was, a dull good fellow not much given to spiritual adventure). Mysticism was simply not on the menu of the quotidian Church; in fact, it was generally distrusted, so you had to send out for it—probably at your own peril. A good many free spirits, of course, never came back.

“All the old Church really did for most of us was to keep us alert and on our toes for the unpredictable pinprick visitations of grace, which was not nothing. Beyond that, its trappings were bathetically richer than the daily life it proposed for us—us lay people at least. Now of course they’ve flattened out the trappings as well, but I think Catholics are marginally freer than we ever were—if they have the wit—to live interesting lives that are authentically Catholic.”

Among his many books (nearly three dozen) there are two I’ll mention here. In Love With Daylight, a memoir of recovery from disease (polio) and addiction (booze and pills), and The Boys of Winter, a comic novel about two writers tasked with organizing rival softball teams—made up of other local writers; the staging ground is a watering hole in the Hamptons where most of the action takes place.

Sheed died in 2011 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Sadly, Frank Zappa never realized what Wilfred Sheed knew: that crinkled shoes can lead to pinprick visitations of grace.