NONFICTION
A weirdly wonderful journey in search of holy relics
Let’s start with this: when I was carrying this book around with me, while reading it for the purposes of this review, someone who knows me well noticed the cover — with the title, and the picture of a praying skeleton — and started laughing. “Boy,” he said, “is that ever up your alley.”
And it is. That’s the truth about “Rag and Bone”: it is a very specific, narrowly focused sort of book, and if this is your sort of thing — poking among the religious curiosities of the world, with an eye for the mystical, the mythic and the mundane— then this book will really be your sort of thing. Because it can’t be faulted in approach or in execution; Peter Manseau is too canny a reporter, and writer, for that. Subject matter is what this one boils down to, friends, and you will either love it or recoil from it. If you love it, you will love it a lot.
Manseau is the author, born Roman Catholic in Boston, who previously wrote “Vows,” a book about his uniquely faithed family: his father, a former Catholic priest who kept some of his ministerial duties even after leaving the clergy; his mother, a former Catholic nun; and his siblings (all of whom experienced difficulties with the faith, though his parents remained in it). That book, which illuminated in new ways both the Vatican II-era changes to Catholicism and the priest sexual abuse scandals that, more recently, rocked the Catholic Church in America, won a decent share of critical and public acclaim.
For an encore, Manseau, who now lives in Washington,
D. C., with his wife and two daughters, plunges into an area of the faith experience nearly as hard to explain. He takes for his subject the phenomenon of relic reverence: the practice, which spans faiths from Catholicism to Buddhism and beyond, of honoring and displaying the mortal remains and possessions of holy men and women.
Manseau takes up “Rag and Bone” as a sort of journey story: his concept is to travel the world, viewing the scattered remains of saintly humans and divine beings, and try to understand why those objects are held up for public veneration — and why they receive it, in great abundance. He is not trying to convince, but to see more clearly. “Those who believe in relics,” he writes at one point, “will rarely be persuaded they are anything other than what their faith says they are; those who suppose all relics are frauds will likewise rarely be persuaded that there is any value in the belief they inspire. Yet for the vast majority of relics, it is impossible, not to mention impractical, to learn much about their authenticity. The best way to view them, then, would seem to be with a skepticism that remains aware of the very real role they have played in both individual lives and our common history.”
The pursuit of this understanding — called “A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead” in the book’s subtitle — takes Manseau far afield, from churches in the United States to the shrine of St. Anthony’s tongue in Padua, from the Eastern travels of St. Francis Xavier — whose corpse is on display in
Goa, India — to Jerusalem, where Manseau searches in vain for a reliquary dedicated to the display of the foreskin of the divine Infant Jesus. In California, he stops by a yoga center where relics related to the life of the Buddha have been put, as part of the “Heart Shrine Relic Tour,” on public view. In Kashmir, he searches for a holy whisker. In France, he gazes into a lab test-tube at what might be the rib of St. Joan of Arc.
Manseau’s tone, through all of these wanderings, is even-tempered and genial. He does not wear the scornful smile of the skeptic, but he does not write from a place of gullibility, either. Instead, he is respectful and good-humored — a just-about-unbeatable combination, when dealing with a topic such as this. Of the Buddhist relics on view in California, Manseau writes: “Unlike Christian relics, which tend toward the macabre, Buddhist relics are fairly easy on the eye. They come, for the most part, in the form of small gemlike pebbles, which are said to take shape when a holy person is cremated. They look a bit like Pop Rocks, or the occasional malformed mint one finds in a Tic-Tac dispenser...” And of St. Francis Xavier’s fancily casketed, and publicly displayed, corpse, in Goa, he puts a bit of historical context both simply and pithily: “At the time of Francis’s death, incorruptibility was all the rage.”
Manseau’s book isn’t for everyone. It’s definitely weird. But weird can be good, and if you are the sort of person who can’t resist peeking behind curtains at dusty artifacts in old curiosity shops — well, you’re in luck, with this one.
Rag and Bone:A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead By Peter Manseau Henry Holt 304 pages, $26
Charity Vogel is a News Features reporter and columnist.
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