The novel, however, is far from simple hagiography, avoiding conventional narrative and pious language, Instead, it recreates the process by which Jean Sulivan discovered Strozzi's life and the meaning of his priesthood. Because the narrator is called "Sul" within the text, and the name Jean Sulivan appears on the cover, there is a mixture of genres, including a personal and intimate journal with a spiritual journey of its own. Indeed, the narrator has resisted Strozzi's influence on the book he is writing. Sulivan had started out to do a book about the reformed prostitute Elizabeth, anticipating a lurid underworld.

But Elizabeth kept speaking about Strozzi; from the outset Sulivan complains, "Strozzi stole my novel."

The psychological and spiritual journey that marks Sulivan's work is especially challenging for a Catholic writer who is aware of the rich but burdensome tradition of images and symbols that western Christianity has created. The art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance each provide a representation of the spiritual ideals, religious institutions, and historical actualities of their age; how can a Catholic writer invent a form and language that will reflect our post-Christian age? In his 1964 novel, Mais il y a la mer (The Sea Remains, 1969. o.p.), Sulivan embodies the problem in Ramon Rimaz, a retired Spanish Cardinal living in a cottage next to the sea. Rimaz has, in a sense, been stripped of his vestments, his office, and his function. As a man he must confront his present existence (a housekeeper, a chance friendship with a boy on the beach, an encounter with a neighbor) and make sense of a life devoid of the imagery and authority of his history. The anonymous narrator finds in the image of nature, spec ifically the sea, a basis for a lyrical reconciliation with the immanent God.

In a sense Eternity, My Beloved might be seen as an historical text, a novel about the state of religious life in Paris before and after World War II, seen from the perspective of a writer living in the 60s, shortly before May 1968 produced the rebellion of the young against an entrenched bourgeois system of education. Mauriac's Woman of the Phraisees had already attacked the rigidity and hypocrisy of bourgeois religious life. Although Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest is set in a poor rural parish, its description of the crisis of religion in France and its diary form obviously influenced Sulivan. (Like Bernanos, Sulivan writes in short units, from a few lines to several pages, 107 sections in 136 pages, arranged arbitrarily, without chronology, reflecting the fractured disorder of discovery.) Eternity, My Beloved, however, was written after Vatican II and reflects the renewed sense of hope that the Council engendered. With Latin no longer the universal language of the church, Sulivan attempts to find a new language for what the translator calls "that" -- the inexpressible, the mystical, the representation of the presence of God here and now - particularly in the character of Strozzi.

In this historical moment in the U.S., marked by a plethora of spiritual autobiographies, Eternity, My Beloved offers an unusual artistic experience and a challenging spiritual analysis. Whatever differences they are between the social and religious histories of France and the United States, we share the same post-Christian culture, at the heart of which, as Sulivan shows in this book, is the attitude toward sex. The epigraph, which provides the title, is from Nietzsche: "I have never found the woman by whom I would want to have a child, except this woman that I love, for I love you, eternity, my beloved." Strozzi is represented as a man beyond social and institutional constraints who faithfully maintains a spiritual presence among the marginalized members of his parish.