The Homecoming.(Home)(Book review)

Growing up in a religious household, I got used to the sight of priests, but I always found them at once fascinating and slightly repellent. The funereal uniform is supposed to obliterate the self in a shroud of colorlessness, even as it draws enormous attention to the self; humility seems to be cut from the same cloth as pride. Since the ego is irrepressible--and secular--it tends to bulge in odd shapes when religiously straitened. The priests I knew practiced self-abnegation but had perfected a quiet dance of ego. They were modest but pompous, gentle but tyrannical (one of them got angry if he was disturbed on a Monday, the vicar's day off), pious but knowing. Most were ...