The Elder Statesman

Golfing With God
By Roland Merullo
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Hardcover $23.95

By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review

It would come as no surprise to the millions of golfers around the world that God is an avid golfer, nor that God finds golf his only relaxation after minding the universe. Golfers have long known that golf is a spiritual game.

What may surprise them is that God is having problems with his putting, and that is when he calls on Herman (Hank) Fins-Winston, who had been a golf pro in a previous life. Hank is assigned to give God some golf lessons in Roland Merullo’s "Golfing With God," a serious treatise on the game of golf, and life itself, with a tongue in cheek approach to each tee. Fins-Winston is humbled when he is summoned to help a player in a slump only to discover his new pupil is God Himself — or on other days, Herself.

Hank (he hates the name Herman) is comfortable in his afterlife in his condominium on the 13th fairway of one of heaven’s 8,187 golf courses, but his life takes an unexpected turn when he is assigned as God’s instructor. As he plays the most heavenly courses in paradise, Hank suddenly realizes it is he who is learning the lessons of life — about fearing failure, taking second chances, the connectedness of all living things and especially about not taking the next breath for granted.

He begins to see golf as really the game of life.

"Golfing With God," is a most unusual novel from a most unusual writer. Merullo is better known for his Revere Beach Trilogy, three novels about growing up in a clannish community outside of Boston.

Readers will also know he is a golfing aficionado from his non-fiction book "Passion for Golf: In Pursuit of the Innermost Game."

He believes golf holds a secret within it, a mysterious series of life lessons, and his "Golfing With God," develops this theory. "Like life," he says, "golf gradually makes you grow up."

He was already deep into the mystique of golf when in the winter of 2001, he learned that his oldest daughter had cystic fibrosis. Boston winters were hard on people with the disease, so he and his family went south to escape the cold and as he says, "our worries."

During the trip he played the famous golf courses in the sunbelt while wrestling with the question of why children suffer.

"I tried to put all my questioning into the book, all my ideas about meaning and purpose, all my love of golf, people and life," he said.

"Because it seems to me that the spiritual drama isn’t a maudlin thing, I tried to make it funny."

He admits the book is irreverent in places, "but I hope in a playful way." For example, Hank, the narrator, notes that Jesus never bothers to keep score, Buddha never takes a practice swing and Moses doesn’t consider it cheating when he parts the water hazards.

Or even that God replaces His divots.

He doesn’t know if the way he describes golfing with God bears any resemblance to the way things are actually designed, but "the mystics of every tradition all seem to be seeing the same world in their visions and their descriptions ring true to me."

At some points in the book, Merullo seems to answer some of the big questions in his mind about things here on earth. In a dialogue with Jesus, Hank poses the question why does God allow all the suffering. Jesus answers:

"It’s like golf, my friend, that’s the sum total of it.  If life were too easy, most souls would flounder, sorry to say. Humans complain, but it’s really their troubles that move them toward grace."

Merullo notes that you can travel to almost anywhere in the world and find a golf course. "Even without a common language, you can fall into a strange intimacy with these people because, playing golf, you cannot help but occasionally humiliate yourself — taking a hard swing and knocking the little ball all of 60 feet."

Throughout the book, Merullo demonstrates his knowledge and love for golf. "Golf from the outside looks like a stupid activity," he said, "but from the inside it is playing out the triumphs and miseries of real life."

Perhaps one of the most telling parts of "Golfing With God" is when Fins-Winston is sent back to earth to do some good deeds and finds himself playing a solitary round. "I took a seven iron into that whipping wind and laced a shot that headed right for the flagstick…

and rolled into the hole as if guided by a divine hand." A coveted hole-in-one shot and there are no witnesses, but suddenly that didn’t matter. The achievement was his.

Merullo said golf, with its heartbreak and exultation, is kind of a metaphor for the spiritual adventure and he tried to convey that in his book as a grain of sand in the big sand trap of life.

Readers can sample the first few chapters of "Golfing With God," on the web at http://www.supportlibrary.com/nl/users/master3/mweb/path9-1.html

(Bill Duncan is the editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column each Thursday on Opinion Page.)

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