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Swimming
with Scapulars:
"Matthew Lickona’s Swimming with Scapulars: True Confessions of a Young Catholic (Loyola Press) is a sometimes funky, sometimes lyrical explanation of how a cradle Catholic, who buys the whole package, thinks, prays, struggles, and manages to have a lot of fun while being self-consciously counter-cultural." "An engaging case study is now on offer in Matthew Lickona's Swimming with Scapulars: True Confessions of a Young Catholic(Loyola, 278 pp., $19.95). I will not be surprised if this becomes something of a niche classic. Lickona and his wife Deirdre are graduates of Thomas Aquinas College in California and live with their four (as of this writing) children in La Mesa, California, where he is staff writer for the San Diego Reader, an alternative newspaper. "Alternative" is the word for the ever-ancient, ever-new way of life they are striving to live, a life of self-discipline and spiritual struggles joined to the hilarity and high adventure of Catholic fidelity. (Four days into the honeymoon they were still virgins because, being committed to Natural Family Planning, the time was not right for Deirdre.) Thomas Aquinas is among the more prominent of alternative Catholic colleges established in recent decades, and this charming and frequently crazy book serves as a report card on what such schools are producing. If the Lickonas are representative, a rigorous (they would say vigorous) orthodoxy results in a way of being Catholic that has left behind the stale liberal-vs-conservative squabbles about what went wrong and what went right after the Second Vatican Council and has moved on to living the life of the faith in all its fullness. Theirs is not a return to the Catholic "ghetto" or "subculture," nor are they part of an angry counter-culture. Rather, Lickona provides a delightfully high-spirited and candid account of living Catholicism as though it were true, scapulars included. The author is in lively engagement with the surrounding culture and the problems encountered by those who have chosen another way. "Let's be open and clean," he writes. "Let's drag this out into the light and discuss. Let's not be shocked and resentful; let's love the lonely. Perhaps, coming from a fanatic, the message of God's love will regain some of its wonderful outrageousness. 'Listen. I have a secret. I eat God, and I have His life in me. It's the best thing in the world; it leads to everlasting life. But first, you have to die to yourself.' There is a good deal of Matthew Lickona's self in Swimming with Scapulars, but with the guidance of St. Augustine, C.s. Lewis, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church a new man is manifestly a-bornin. This book may not be a portent of the Catholic future, but it is a compelling account of the Catholic present as experienced by a growing number of young people who have dared to accept Christ's invitation to "put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch." In catching, Matthew Lickona has been caught, and with winsome enthusiasm he recommends the experiment to others. The times they are a'changin." - Father Richard Neuhaus in First Things Review at Relapsed Catholic "As personal faith stories go, Lickona's is a breath of fresh air, thoughtfully written and happily absent of platitudes and pious moralizing. A 30-year-old husband, father of four and writer for the San Diego Reader, an alternative weekly, Lickona lives a Catholicism that is orthodox, but also dynamic and relevant to modern culture. He reads Salon and The Onion and gleans life lessons from contemporary film and fiction even as he embraces beliefs and traditions rejected by his parents' generation. He admits to being a virgin when he married, and he and his wife practice natural family planning in keeping with their church's ban on artificial birth control. Lickona also wears a scapular, fasts during Lent and has a statue of St. Joseph in his front yard. In writing about these beliefs and practices, he explains how he came to accept them, often after a period of questioning. As he navigates the realm of Catholic faith in the 21st century, Lickona reflects candidly on his failures, foibles and doubts. He confesses to "parish-hopping" in search of a Mass that will not disturb his peace of soul, to personal struggles with "constant wanting" and anger, and to his weakness in communicating his faith. Most readers will disagree with Lickona's assessment that he is a poor communicator, and will find themselves captivated by this winsome story of a soul." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) Review in Homiletic and Pastoral Review: "Pastors, bishops, sociologists and others who want to get some insight into the minds of young, practicing Catholics today should read Matthew Lickona, a writer for the San Diego Reader who has produced a short but charming book, winsomely written...Young Catholics want to be strengthened and challenged by Tradition, which is rich and satisfying when presented in all its beauty and rigor. As T.S. Eliot put it in his famous 1931 essay, “Thoughts After Lambeth,” “you will never attract the young by making Christianity easy; but a good many can be attracted by finding it difficult: difficult both to the disorderly mind and to the unruly passions.” Profile in U.S. News & World Report Excerpt at Godspy Interview at Godspy Review in the San Diego Union-Tribune Self-interview at the San Diego Reader Blog interview at Open Book "A thirtysomething practicing Catholic, Lickona was raised in a conservative Catholic family and academic atmosphere. He attended Thomas Aquinas College, where he "encountered practices, beliefs and traditions that had withered away in the more arid, post-Vatican II climes" of his ambient Catholic culture. In this book he offers an autobiographical account of how traditional religious symbols and practices can get in the way or get lost in the swirl of today's culture. Lickona considers questions of sex and courtship, death and redemption, marriage and parenthood, interiority and secularity. He uses Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas to construct his viewpoint and employs novelist Walker Percy to refine his views. Using simple but elegant writing style and carefully correct theological language, Lickona makes his argument with grace and humor. Ultimately, the book is enjoyable but may have limited appeal. It is most suitable for Catholic parish libraries and community libraries with strong circulation of books on the Christian life." -David I. Fulton, Coll. of St. Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ. - Library Journal
"Ever since Augustine groaned over his sins (to his readers' secret delight), the best spiritual memoirs have laid bare the contours of the soul in ways that burst the seams of words like “sin” and “salvation." Matthew Lickona and Patton Dodd, though new to the genre of holy self-exposure, are already proving their knack for it. Each burrows into the innards of his Christian experience as a 20- to 30-something to uncover—or recover as the case may be—the inherited truth for himself. Lickona’s Swimming with Scapulars skewers the matter head on: what does it mean for a Roman Catholic to root himself in a premodern faith in the postmodern world? There’s no shilly-shallying for Lickona, whose neighbors describe him as “Catholic all the way.” He dives deep into tradition and up again into the world of cinema, literature, politics, and his ripening experience as a young father. We get a picture of a soul alternately relishing the Eucharist—“‘Listen. I have a secret. I eat God, and it’s the best thing in the world”—taking itself to task, and twining its convictions around the day-to-day: Lickona brands his seven-year-old a “tremendous materialist,” recounts the agony of an extra four days of abstinence after marrying his ovulating wife, and blunderingly shares the good news of Flannery O’Connor with a fellow Catholic. It’s all done in precise, sometimes rollicking language that is charged with a taut energy that comes with tying the firm line of formal religious practice to the anchor of devotion. Moving from the ancient to the emerging, Patton Dodd rolls onto the charismatic scene in My Faith So Far to skillfully depict the turning of his own spiritual season. From the ravenous glee of a new convert to the suspicious mind that drops into full-fledged doubt at Oral Roberts University, each moment is expanded with care and wit. Dodd shunts us into the unbridled joy of pulsating bodies dancing in worship and spontaneous plunges into prayer on the ORU campus. His is not a bitter razing of faith, but a poignant shedding of a version of it that claims to be untouched by its surroundings. The niggling questions that leave him stranded in the “rambling middle” of a tale with no “Over” are less bulldozers of faith than chisels that test for fracture lines in the constantly shifting relationship between religion and culture. In the end, it’s the recognition of that complexity that beats at the heart of both Lickona's and Dodd's spiritual memoirs, a recognition that bodes well for the genre as a whole." - Image Journal
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