Book Review: Always on the “Road to Emmaus”

The book’s cover is a full-color copy of “Landscape with Christ and His Disciples on the Road to Emmaus” by Jan Wildens (1586-1653); the original oil painting is located in The Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, Russia. A classical piece of art that hangs in a world-class gallery is an appropriate adornment for Father George William Rutler’s book, “He Spoke to Us: Discerning God in People and Events.”
 
Father Rutler is a man with a classical education, and this self-described parish priest from New York can be seen to be endowed with world-class intellect and charm.
 
He is a Dartmouth graduate and has degrees from Johns Hopkins and the Gregorian and Angelicum universities in Rome. He has a number of honorary degrees as well, has published more than 20 books and has written many articles for both scholarly and popular periodicals.
 
This book is a collection of 40 essays on a wide variety of topics, and in each one, Rutler shows how in all the events of our lives, the mundane and the momentous, we can be “discerning God in people and events.” The disciples on the road to Emmaus were happily surprised to realize that Christ had been walking with them. Rutler, whatever his topic, returns to God’s presence in our midst as the Lord speaks to us, making Scripture plain to us.
 
Luke 24:32, which describes the scene on the road to Emmaus, is the book’s inscription. In “Author’s Note,” Rutler explains that the “Emmaus Road … stretches for all of us from the start of our lives to its setting.” We must not be “too dull to recognize Christ on those occasions when he appears in the events of each day and in curiosities we stumble upon.”
 
He is a wonderful writer. He quotes Scripture, popes, the Fathers of the Church and the saints. His is equally familiar with TS Eliot, described in his essay, “The Quintessential – and Last –
Modern Poet.” He quotes Washington and Lincoln and Churchill and Reagan. In “The Shores of Tripoli,” he draws a bead on Obama.
 
In “The case of Mrs. Jesus,” he goes after The New York Times for what he calls “invented anthropology.” In “The Moral Exploitation of Penguins,” he admits that his “contempt for the unfitting things that the Times prints is not effortlessly concealed.”
 
His scholarship shines in “Governor Pliny and Governor Cuomo” when he points out that “Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus was governor Bithynia–Pontus in present day Turkey from AD 111 to 113.” In “Abbe Edgworth,” he tells us that it was Abbe Henri Essex Edgeworth, who accompanied King Louis XVI to his execution (in 1793).”
 
Rutler will send his readers running for a dictionary with his easy use of apophasis, bibulous, coruscating, pastiche, acronychal, incarnadine, antimonial and prelapsarian.
 
This is not to say that Father Rutler is stuffy. In “The Christian Boxer,” he tells about finding “someone breaking into my church’s poor box.” The villain knocked the poor priest unconscious. Father decided to take up boxing and still tries to keep up with lessons “about once a week.” He shares his opinions on other sports such as baseball, tennis, squash and bullfighting and says that “wrestling is the only real competition for boxing.”
 
He likes Saint Paul. In “The Awkwardness of Advent,” he decries “the inappropriateness of poinsettias around cathedral altars starting after Thanksgiving (because the tourists expect that).”
 
“As Saint Paul wrote in his Epistle to the New Yorkers,” Rutler recalls, “Fuhgeddaboudit.”
 
Father Rutler looks at all manner of things in his essays, and in all of it, he invariably returns to the Gospel, to Christ, to faith. This deep faith that anchors the essays is what makes them so well worth reading, more so than his shining intellect or his charming wit. This is a true man of God who continues on the Emmaus Road and takes his readers with him.
 
J. E. Helm is a freelance writer for the Sooner Catholic.