Charlie Cook Article
Dec 12, 2008
Literary seminary professor found spiritual insight in Walker Percy
Charlie Cook retires from Episcopal seminary after 24 years
By Elieen Flynn - Religion Writer for Austin American-Statesman
Saturday, December 27, 2008
I first encountered the Rev. Charlie Cook as a teacher. I had signed up for a night class on theology and the novels of the late Walker Percy at the Seminary of the Southwest. As someone who majored in English and minored in philosophy, this would be an ideal continuing-education course for me. And I had always meant to read Percy.
But it was like no English or philosophy class I had taken before. Cook, a longtime pastoral theology professor at the Episcopal seminary just north of the University of Texas, explored unexpected theological depths, pulling back the curtain on Percy's own spiritual struggle alongside an analysis of the various stages and ultimate "leap of faith" Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard argues is essential to accepting Christianity.
The class consisted mostly of gray-haired ladies from local Episcopal parishes, and Cook also challenged us to examine our own spiritual lives in light of Percy and his existentialist philosophy. I might not be able quote Percy or Kierkegaard, but I can tell you I knew a lot more about myself after completing that course.
After 24 years at the seminary, Cook, 64 , retired this month, heralded with a big bash and serenaded by Dale Watson & His Lone Stars and applauded by dozens of former students who had experienced their own awakenings in Cook's classroom.
Cook didn't set out to be a connoisseur of Southern literature. But he came of age in a place - a small town in the high plains of the Texas Panhandle - where existential crisis always lurked on the vast horizon and where his religious identity didn't find a natural fit.
"To be an Episcopalian in Pampa, Texas , is kind of to make a counterculture statement because it's not the dominant church expression in that culture," he said. "I think to be an Episcopalian there is to always be a little suspicious. You're not quite Catholic but you're also not Protestant enough either. So you take a lot of pride in that and that's what makes the Episcopal Church unique and a fairly close-knit community in that part of the world."
But growing up, he didn't see himself pursuing a life in the church. His dream: to get into the advertising business and write "super ad copy" for "the man in the Hathaway shirt" and Rolls-Royce.
He got his college degree in communications and advertising, but ended up working for a manufacturer of agricultural and industrial machinery.
Eventually, Cook returned to the endless plains of Pampa with his wife, Chris, an Iowa gal, and two children to work in the family businesses - retail and banking. They built a house they thought they would live in forever. Then one day, the infamous Panhandle wind picked up and tumbleweeds came rolling into the yard. Chris Cook couldn't open the back gate. She called her husband at work. Her Panhandle days, it was clear, were numbered.
"That's called culture shock," Charlie Cook said dryly.
Soon after, the family bade farewell to the tumbleweeds and rolled into Austin's Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, where Cook enrolled in the class of 1974 .
The would-be ad man had a new calling: priest.
But here's where the Charlie Cook I've gotten to know really emerges: His priestly vocation took him to a parish in Chapel Hill, N.C., where he fell in love with Southern writers, particularly Walker Percy whose writings were kept at the University of North Carolina. Percy is best known for his 1962 National Book Award-winning novel "The Moviegoer ," a novel that explores existential crisis, Southern manners and the author's Catholic faith.
Surrounded by college literature professors and students who were experts in or studying Percy's work, Cook began attending lectures and eventually "got hooked."
"I began to see the linkage and the bridge between a lot of what these existential writers in the South were saying through fiction and the study of theology and relationship between God and humankind," he said. "That was a real eye-opener for me. It was almost a renaissance moment because a whole other world began to open up for me: the relationship between faith and fiction."
Cook took what he learned in those academic circles and introduced dozens of seminarians - and lay people who took his classes for the public - to the great Southern writers.
Greg Garrett , a seminary alumnus who is now writer in residence on the campus and also teaches English at Baylor University , was already well-schooled in the literary giants of the South. But, he said, "Charlie Cook taught me that my love of writing and of great literature could have a pastoral value - that the stories I loved could also touch people who read or heard them."
Cook had discovered that for himself years earlier when he recognized the "holiness of the ordinary" in Percy's writing.
"He took life very seriously and so seriously that he believed that it's possible to experience the presence of God in the ordinary relationships that we have with one another as well as the crises we go through in life," Cook said. "It seems to me that what Walker Percy was up to was Christianity does not have at its heart an otherworldly character. It's possible to at least get a glimpse of the holy of God in this life.
"That spoke to me because I think a lot of people view life as something that's just preparation for something else. And it's only in the something else that the presence of God will be possible."
