Andrew Krivak: Looking Back at the Priesthood
By Marcia Z. Nelson -- Publishers Weekly, 3/25/2008
Andrew Krivak has written a story of the tensions and demands of the priesthood from the inside, but his memoir A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is no sensational expose. Instead, the story of Krivak’s eight years in the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) provides a searching look at the interior of a man’s religious life during the intense process of spiritual formation and discernment about vocation.
“I didn’t want it to be a seminary story,” said Krivak, and it’s not. Now married and the father of two young children, the author portrays through his story what might motivate someone to choose the priesthood today. Krivak presents his own process as a long conversation with God. “The story became moving into and out of the Jesuits,” he said, speaking to RBL from his in-laws’ home in New Hampshire (he and his family currently live in England). “I realized I was speaking very interior-ly to God.”
Krivak has published a small chapbook of poetry and short pieces, but A Long Retreat is his first substantial work. It began as a story he wrote for his wife, but he’d also fielded many questions from others over the years about what his experience had been. “I would tell people it was a world I loved very much, and also a deeply human world,” said Krivak, now 44. He may have left religious life, but he’s still religious. “I find my faith much deeper now as a Catholic,” he said.
Paul Elie, senior editor at FSG, had known the author during graduate school and found his spiritual path “interesting and uncommon.” Krivak’s book is singular in that, unlike many other books written after revelations of priestly sexual abuse, it doesn’t concern itself with the church or with seminaries. The book takes its title from a 30-day period of silence that is part of the training to become a Jesuit. “There’s room for you to look over his shoulder as he goes on this journey,” Elie said.
Naturally, lots of material didn’t make it from several earlier drafts into the final book. Krivak’s next book will deal with his upbringing in Pennsylvania and his Eastern European grandparents. “It will be an attempt at a novel set in a fictional town in Pennsylvania, which I will imagine is--and isn’t--the Pennsylvania I grew up in,” Krivak said.
