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	August 2003				Lines Of My Life, Journal Of A Year by Edmund Campion, Penguin Books, 2003
		Lines Of My Life, Journal Of A Year reviewed by Stuart Blackler
			In this inviting book, Edmund Campion refers to 'those magic words which every writer longs to hear: 'I liked it very much'.' I echo those words. Edmund Campion is a retired Roman Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Sydney, where he was born, educated, trained and ordained. Many may have read his book Rockchoppers: Growing up Catholic in Australia. He has long been well-known in Sydney's art and literary circles which provide many of the entertaining and also trenchant comments in this book. As the title indicates, this is a 'journal of a year'. Just before September 11, 2001, the author was due to go to New York. He went, and the early section of the book reflects on the aftermath of that ghastly event. However, this is no September 11 book, although the shadows of that day do appear. Loves and passion The book takes its title from Psalm 16:6- 'The lines of my life have run in pleasant places'. For Fr Campion the places are times as well as cities and towns. My impression of this book is that it is about loves and passion. The loves which are lines of thought are the arts, family and friends, and the Church. Of the last he is critical when he touches on the child abuse scandals, the arrogant episcopal covering-up and bigotry. He has a nice definition of a bigot as 'someone who thinks his own brand of watch is the only one that tells the right time and that people with a different timepiece must be evil'. Hear anything ticking away? But even for the Church he believes that there is hope, one sign of which is in the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. All people have two cities The loves - but where is the passion? It is that which is the setting and verve of the beginning and the ending of the book: New York City to which Fr Campion returned towards the end of the allotted twelve months. It has been said that all people have two cities, their home city and New York. Go there once and you are NYC-ed for ever, unless you are afraid to be truly alive. Holding it all together &endash; places, people, past and present &endash; is a view of being in which 'religion and life are totally blended' and that is thinking incarnationally. Those who open this book and like what they read in the first few pages will relish the remainder. Those who don't have my sympathy.