AS I LAY DYING: Meditations upon Returning.

By Richard John Neuhaus. Basic. 168 pp. $22

It would be nice to forget all the baggage that accompanies Neuhaus’s lovely new book. For some, the book will have to carry the weight of its author’s famous conversions: from Lutheran vicar to Catholic priest, and from liberal social activist to one of our more temperate and stylistically gifted neoconservatives. For other readers, the weight of doctrinal purity implied by the nihil obstat and the imprimatur on the copyright page might compromise the book. The audacious literary allusion in the title could cause a few knowing heads to shake, and the book’s willingness to present itself as a quiet and well-informed selfhelp volume might prompt others to ignore it.

Almost hiding in the subtitle is the best clue to the book’s intent: meditations. Several years ago Neuhaus, whom the popular press labeled one of the most influential intellectuals in America, almost died. A misdiagnosed colon cancer ruptured his intestines, necessitating major surgery. During the operation, doctors unwittingly nicked his spleen, causing internal hemorrhaging that required a second operation a day later. One of his doctors later told him, "It was as though you had been hit twice by a Mack truck going 60 miles an hour. I didn’t think you’d survive."

In the tradition of great meditations, in which momentous events throw life into focus and place its purpose, or lack of purpose, under intense scrutiny, Neuhaus reflects on the meaning of death. He invokes Augustine, Michel Foucault, Hamlet, and Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among many others. On one page, he moves from a poem by W. S. Merwin (which he summarizes as "poetically pleasing, but not...a rewarding line of inquiry") through Descartes to Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, and ends up most comfortable, not surprisingly for a priest, with Thomas Aquinas. Although one might disagree with one or another of his summaries (for instance, I find the Merwin more interesting than he does), Neuhaus’s ease with a broad range of references can be breathtaking.

But the most vivid and memorable moments in As I Lay Dying come from his own experiences. Of course, there is his near-death experience, which he nicely relabels a "near-life experience," and which he recounts without self-pity and with a wonderful sense of humor. I was most moved, though, by those moments when his pastoral vocation takes him to the bedsides of the dying. I found myself wishing this little book were just a bit longer and carried more of this kind of authority.