Lessons from Mansfield Park

Bitterly did he deplore a deficiency which now he could scarcely comprehend to have been possible.  Wretchedly did he feel, that with all the cost and care of an anxious and expensive education, he had brought up his daughters without their understanding their first duties, or his being acquainted with their character and temper.

Jane Austen wrote Mansfield Park just one year after finishing Pride and Prejudice, but the two novels are strikingly different--most notably in their protagonists.  Fanny Price couldn't create a greater contrast to Elizabeth Bennett.  

That is why, in fact, Mansfield Park is frequently ranked least popular among readers of Austen.  Reserved, passive, timid, vulnerable, and physically weak, Fanny doesn't seem to possess the qualities of a heroine.  Yet, having now read both books, it is she I would much rather emulate, even over the charming and witty Elizabeth Bennett.

By all appearances, Fanny Price was the least fortunate--and least important--person residing at Mansfield Park.  Fanny, the eldest child of a large family, was taken in by her rich uncle, Sir Thomas, and his wife, Lady Bertram, to relieve her impoverished parents of an extra mouth to feed.

Upon her arrival, it was made perfectly clear that Fanny's position at Mansfield Park was one of lower standing, especially when ranked beside Sir Thomas's children: Tom (an irresponsible gambler), Edmund (a morally upstanding young man bound for holy orders), and sisters Maria and Julia (well-mannered and talented, but spoiled and lacking strong principles).  Fanny, naturally docile and reticent, accepted her standing, anxious to serve and please her new family, without harboring resentment for her mistreatment.  

Remember, wherever you are, you must be the lowest and last...

Originally pining for the home she left, Fanny acclimated herself to Mansfield Park with the help of Edmund, who was the one individual who offered her friendship and concern, and who advocated on her behalf.  As the children became young adults, Fanny was scared to recognize the secret lying in her heart: she loved Edmund.

When Sir Thomas sets sail for Antigua and the stern and stringent master of the home is absent, the stage is set for trouble to brew.  There are two new residents of Mansfield Park, come to live with their sister at the parsonage.  Henry and Mary Crawfield hail from London, bringing along with them a secular outlook, city fashion, and penchant for flirtation.

A series of romantic entanglements inevitably occur.  Henry soon wins the affection of both Maria and Julia Bertram--always offering enough attention to convince each he is interested, but never pursuing either directly enough to socially commit himself.  Maria, engaged to the foolish but incredibly wealthy Mr. Rushworth, becomes increasingly in love with Henry.  Meanwhile, Edmund is captivated by Mary Crawford's charm and wit, which blind him to her faults.  

Fanny, the silent observer, possesses keen insight into a person's character and quickly becomes wary of the Crawfords.

The sisters [Maria and Julia], handsome, clever, and encouraging, were an amusement to his [Henry's] sated mind; and finding nothing in Norfolk to equal the social pleasures of Mansfield, he gladly returned to it by the time appointed, and was welcome thither quite as gladly by those whom he came to trifle with farther...Fanny was the only one of the party who found anything to dislike...

When Tom and his friend suggest that everyone put on a play, all these emotions and attractions are soon on blatant display.  Edmund and Fanny both resist the idea of acting, especially considering that the play selection is morally inappropriate and places the actors in comprising positions (for example, Maria and Henry embrace as "mother" and "son").  Edmund later succumbs to the plan, not wanting a stranger to play Mary's love interest.  And so, he takes the role himself.

Interestingly, though the characters are all "acting" onstage, it is in these stage roles they can be more honest than in real life.  It is off-stage that they act in their relationships with each other.  Maria cannot act upon her feelings toward Henry Crawford because it is socially and morally wrong, as she is engaged to another man.  But on stage, it is perfectly permissible; there is a different set of rules here.  There are no rules, and that is what makes  it so dangerous.

It is only Fanny who resists joining the play.

...had she received even the greatest [role in the play], she could never have been easy in joining a scheme which, considering only her uncle, she must condemn altogether.

Fanny's greatest test comes from an unexpected source.  Maria Bertram, pride wounded from failing to receive what was an expected proposal from Henry Crawford, married Mr. Rushworth.  The Rushworths, along with Julia Bertram, moved to London.  Henry Crawford, always the flirt, set his sights on the sole remaining woman at Mansfield Park: Fanny Price.  It was a fantastic challenge: could he woo the upright, noble Fanny?  Could he capture her heart?

In an ironic twist of fate, in his pursuit of Fanny, it is Henry himself who falls in love.  Once Henry truly studied Fanny and acquainted himself with her personality and nature, he realized her beauty, value, and allure.  And so, quickly enraptured by her in a way unlike anything he had previously experienced, Henry was determined to attach himself to her and commit--until "death do us part."

Fanny was stupefied and believed him to be playing a cruel joke.  But when she realized his genuineness, she found herself in a terrible predicament.  For Sir Thomas, such a match was ideal.  Ignorant of the previous misbehavior between his daughter and Henry, Sir Thomas felt Mr. Crawford would be a perfectly wonderful husband for Fanny.  She would have everything she could need; the world would be open to her.

Fanny knew her uncle's wishes.  She wanted to please him and prove herself grateful for his generosity, as well as obedient.  She thought of her family, struggling financially, and what a marriage to such an affluent man would mean for them.  

And yet she knew his character.  As heartfelt his declarations, she doubted the faithfulness that lay beneath.  She knew her own heart, too, and that it harbored no love for this man, but only for another.  

Though everyone she knew encouraged the match, though no one understood or agreed with her judgment, Fanny refused Mr. Crawford's offer.  

...she trusted, in the first place, that she had done right, that her judgment had not misled her; for the purity of her intentions she could answer; and she was willing to hope, secondly, that her uncle's displeasure was abating, and would abate farther as he considered the matter with more impartiality, and felt, as a good man must feel, how wretched, and how unpardonable, how hopeless and how wicked it was, to marry without affection. 

It is Fanny's heroic moment and, for a time afterward, she incurs punishment for it.  Her uncle is displeased.  He sends her back to her family, to live with them for a few months and endure first-hand the poor conditions in which she would live, if she were to still resist the offer of the affluent Mr. Crawford.  

Yet, in the end, Fanny's judgment is proven true.  Henry Crawford and Maria commit adultery and run off together, causing a tremendous scandal in the Bertram family.  Mary Crawford condemns their lack of secrecy--as opposed to the evil act itself--and thus Edmund's eyes are opened to her real nature.  As he later explained to Fanny,

No, her's [Miss Crawford's] is not a cruel nature.  I do not consider her as meaning to wound my feelings.  The evil lies yet deeper; in her total ignorance, unsuspiciousness of there being such feelings, in a perversion of mind which made it natural to her to treat the subject as she did.  She was speaking only, as she had been used to hear others speak, as she imagined every body else would speak.  Her's are not faults of temper.  She would not voluntarily give unnecessary pain to any one, and though I may deceive myself, I cannot but think that for me, for my feelings, she would--Her's are faults of principle, Fanny, of blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind.

Mary Crawford's flaw is a fault of principle; Fanny's advantage is a strength of principle.  

This is where I see the greatest lesson from Mansfield Park.  What is it that truly matters in the formation of one's character, in how a child is raised?  It isn't knowledge of history or science, nor is it talent in music or art.  It isn't charm, but constancy.  

Fanny is the only one who has judged rightly throughout, who has been consistent.

The goal in forming a child is to help him or her know the right principles and stay the course, no matter the storm.  Mary had the charm; Fanny had the constancy.  In the end, it is Fanny--once the least important person--whose virtue and principles elevate her to be the most important person at Mansfield Park.

Fanny seems the inactive character, a passive observer, unwilling to take the stage (literally and figuratively).  But hers is an inner activity of discerning another's character correctly and resisting temptation in order to stay the course.  This is what makes her the hero. 

Fanny's lack of charm is crucial to Jane Austen's intentions.  For charm is the characteristically modern quality which those who lack or simulate the virtues use to get by in the situations of characteristically modern life...And the charm of an Elizabeth Bennett or even an Emma may mislead us, genuinely attractive though it is, in our judgment on their character.  Fanny is charmless; she has only the virtues, the genuine virtues, to protect her, and when she disobeys her guardian, Sir Thomas Bertram, and refuses marriage to Henry Crawford it can only be because of what constancy requires.  In so refusing she places the danger of losing her soul before the reward of gaining what for her would be the whole world. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

When Fanny returned to visit her family after so many years apart, she was astounded to realize the manner in which they lived: house disordered and people equally disordered in conduct.  

She might scruple to make use of the words, but she must and did feel that her mother was a partial, ill-judging parent, a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children, whose house was the scene of mismanagement and discomfort from beginning to end...

Fanny realized then the incredible blessing of her upbringing at Mansfield Park, which was in fact her true home.  But how was it that Fanny grew to be a woman of principle and virtue, and her cousin Maria--raised in the same household--not?  

Fanny's upbringing was one that included hardship and discipline at a very early age.  She never knew the doting and praise Maria constantly received from their Aunt Norris.  Both girls learned the order and decorum Mansfield Park taught, but it was Fanny who learned virtue through her suffering.  

Too late did Sir Thomas perceive his error when he realized the daughter he always yearned for was actualized in Fanny, not Maria.  Their aunt, Mrs. Norris, encouraged his daughter's vanity and indulgence; he himself, stern and distant to counteract this behavior, never acquainted himself with her real nature.

Here had been grievous mismanagement; but bad as it was, he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education.  Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect.  He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting, that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers, by that sense of duty which can alone suffice.  They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice.  To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments--the authorised object of their youth--could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind.  He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them. 

As my husband and I raise our children, we hope to make them well-educated and well-mannered.  But even more important is to form them as children of principle.

I would be happy if my Mary is as charming and witty as Elizabeth Bennett.  But I would be even happier if she is as virtuous and steadfast in principle as Fanny Price.

Lessons from The Power & the Glory

He was a bad priest, he knew it: they had a word for his kind--a whisky priest--but every failure dropped out of sight and out of mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret--the rubble of his failures.  One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the sources of grace.

I had to read this book.  One day, through God's grace, I would like to be a published author--a Catholic author--and it seemed unacceptable that I hadn't read what is considered the most well-known work of Catholic fiction: The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.

I have already read one work by Greene, namely his Heart of the Matter.  In the end, he sold me.  I was a fan, even though for most of the book I couldn't understand how it was an explicitly Catholic novel.  But from the perspective of the final page, I could see the Catholic elements woven through and was struck by the unadorned veracity of the prose and the haunting gravitas of Greene's theme.

A paragraph into The Power and the Glory, I was thrilled to revisit Greene.  What I appreciated most about this author was present yet again, perhaps even more so, along with a suspenseful narrative that made this an unfortunately fast read.  I raced to finish it, desiring to know the fate of the principle character, and--while satisfied with the ending--was disappointed to have come to the conclusion.  At least there is still The End of the Affair!

Greene, a British author, chose somewhat exotic locations for the settings of some of his books.  Greene visited Mexico in 1938 to learn first-hand about the Catholic persecution occurring there.  In some states, churches were closed and priests were forced to marry.  Greene later described what he observed as the "fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth."

The background of the book, therefore, is this severe persecution.  The protagonist is a priest on the run.  He is the sole remaining priest in the state and the police, led by an unnamed lieutenant, are vowed and determined to hunt him down.  

The priest and lieutenant, the principle characters, are without proper name.  Such an anonymity provides a universality to their characters--perhaps anyone of us could be the face of the priest, or of the lieutenant.  Both are types.

The priest does receive a nickname, however: the whisky priest.  It's an adjective that illuminates his complex character.  On the one hand, there is the priest.  An ordained minister, part of the apostolic succession, he is alter Christus, ipse Christus (another Christ, Christ Himself).  After receiving Holy Orders, an indelible mark is imprinted upon his soul: he is no longer just a man, but a holy priest of God.  And as a priest, he is a servant to God's people.

This is precisely why he cannot simple escape into another adjacent state.  He must remain, because he is a priest.

"But can't you," she said logically, "just give yourself up?"

He had answers as plain and understandable as her questions.  He said: "There's the pain.  To choose pain like that--it's not possible.  And it's my duty not to be caught.  You see, my bishop is no longer here."  Curious pedantries moved him.  "This is my parish...In Mexico City now they are saying Benediction.  The bishop's there...Do you imagine he ever thinks...?  They don't even know I'm alive."

She said: "Of course you could--renounce."

"I don't understand."

"Renounce your faith," she said, using the words of her European History.

He said: "It's impossible.  There's no way.  I'm a priest.  It's out of my power."

The child listened intently.  She said: "Like a birthmark."

The Mexican people hunger for God.  As the priest ventures into their towns, they flock to him to have their confessions heard and children baptized.  For some, it had been years since they received absolution of their sins.  The priest--exhausted, famished, feverish, and under the duress of police pursuit--administers the sacraments to them.  

...soon the police would reach the clearing where his mule had sat down under him and he had washed in the pool.  The Latin words ran into each other on his hasty tongue: he could feel the impatience all round him.  He began the Consecration of the Host...; impatience abruptly died away: everything in time became routine but this--"Who the day before He suffered took Bread into His holy and venerable hands..."  Whoever moved outside on the forest path, there was no movement here--"Hoc est enim Corpus Meum."  He could hear the sigh of breaths released: God was here in the body for the first time in six years.  When he raised the Host he could imagine the faces lifted like famished dogs'.

When the priest speaks the words of consecration, it is Christ who is speaking and Christ fully present in the host held between his fingers. 

As I read these passages, I couldn't help but consider how incredibly blessed I am to have Mass offered multiple times per day, just a few minutes from my home.  Christ comes to me daily.  Do I really treasure and contemplate the greatness of this gift?  Do I hunger for this spiritual food, or does it become mere routine? 

Indeed, the priest is a holy man of God.  But Greene's priest is also a whisky priest.  

In many ways, the protagonist is an anti-hero.  He is a self-professed bad priest.  Quite likely an alcoholic, he has an inordinate fondness for brandy.  He is also the father of an illegitimate child.  Guilt and sorrow grip him as he flees from the authorities.  He is, after all, the only priest left.  Mortal sin weighs upon his soul, but there is no one to hear his confession.  

The priest's journey across the state in a game of cat and mouse with the police is also a profound spiritual journey.  Greene's novel was also published in the United States under the title The Labyrinthine Ways.  The priest's journey toward God is very labyrinthine indeed--sometimes approaching that inner room where God dwells, only to veer off again to the edge where sin and darkness dwell.  But all the time there is suffering.  

The suffering the priest must endure is truly a refiner's fire.  It changes him.  Illustratively, the lieutenant has a picture of the priest on his wall to identify him, taken from a First Communion at the priest's parish years ago.  But now, after his journeying through the wild, the priest looks nothing like he used to--gone is the portly, self-possessed man.

That is why I tell you that heaven is here: this is a part of heaven just as pain is a part of pleasure...Pray that you will suffer more and more and more.  Never get tired of suffering.  The police watching you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from the jefe because you are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger...that is all part of heaven--the preparation.  Perhaps without them--who can tell?--you wouldn't enjoy heaven so much.

For most of the novel, I desired to see the priest reach safety.  He is, after all, a relatable, sympathetic character.  Which one of us can't see ourselves in him: a person flawed, somewhat broken, sinful yet trying to strive for what is good and true?  I wanted the best for him.  And then, surprisingly, I got my wish.  The priest, remarkably, under the very nose of the lieutenant, escaped!  Freedom was just within his grasp!  

The suffering removed, the whisky priest immediately began to descend the slippery, sinful slope back to what he used to be.  For example, he begins calculating how much brandy he can purchase, based on the number of children needing to be baptized.

Then I saw.  The point was never about the priest escaping from the police; it was about his escape from sin, from Satan.  I began to desire that the priest be caught.  The suffering was making him better; he needed it.  We need it.

He was a man who was supposed to save souls: it had seemed quite simple once, preaching at Benediction, organizing the guilds, having coffee with elderly ladies behind barred windows, blessing new houses with a little incense, wearing black gloves...it was as easy as saving money: now it was a mystery.  He was aware of his own desperate inadequacy .

About to take the road to freedom, the priest is confronted by a Judas figure with a message.  The other criminal the police had been tracking (a murderer) is on his deathbed and desires to have his confession heard.  The priest goes, knowing it is his death sentence.  He goes in the effort to save the soul of the criminal, but the question remains: can the priest save his own soul?

And that becomes the central question of the novel: is the priest saved in the end?  He is captured by the police, but that is of little matter ultimately.  Is he saved from his sin?

Tears poured down his face: he was not at the moment afraid of damnation--even the fear of pain was in the background.  He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all.  It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint.  It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage.  He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place.  He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted--to be a saint.

I think the greatest lesson of the book comes back to this point.  Greene entitled his novel The Power and the Glory.  Well, whose power?  Whose glory?  The phrase is taken from the doxology proclaimed after the conclusion of the Our Father at Mass.  We pray, "For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, now and forever, amen." 

The power and the glory belong to God and--this is key--are manifested profoundly and powerfully even in the sinful, imperfect, muddied hands of the whisky priest.  There is a Latin phrase ex opere operato, meaning "by the work worked."  The sacraments confer grace solely because of the power of God; they are not dependent on the disposition or sanctity of the priest.

We are all weak instruments, but we are each made in God's image.  This is what the whisky priest comes to see.  As he spends a dismal night in a cramped, dank prison cell with fellow inmates, he comes to love and have compassion for those around him.  God was present in each one of those prisoners, even though His image had been sullied and twisted and deformed through sin.  

...at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery--that we were made in God's image--God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge.  Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex.  He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated and dirty ingenuities which God's image had thought out: and God's image shook now, up and down on the mule's back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip; and God's image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats...He said, "Do you feel better now?  Not so cold, eh?  Or so hot?" and pressed his hand with a kind of divine tenderness upon the shoulders of God's image.

From all outward appearances, the priest's life has ended in failure.  His death is far from a courageous stand as a soldier of Christ; he is carried by the police, unable to walk due to his shaking legs, and is shot before he can utter a word.  He dies with his sins unconfessed.  

Yet, God's glory and power elevate what seems a failure into a channel of grace.  Paralleling the narrative of the priest is a mother reading her children the story of St. Juan, a martyr for Christ.  Unlike the whisky priest, Juan was a man of outstanding virtue and died proclaiming his faith in God.  However, her eldest son is untouched by the account and, in fact, seems rather intrigued by the cause and stance of the lieutenant.  

In the final chapter, his mother informs them of the whisky priest's death.  The son is startled--the whisky priest had previously stayed with them one evening during his flight.  Had he really encountered a martyr?  

The boy contemplates that notion and, as he sleeps, dreams of the priest.  He is laid out in a coffin for burial, but the boy is shocked to see the priest wink in his direction.  Immediately after that, the boy awakes to the sound of knocking at their door.  He opens it to find a stranger, who asks for housing for the night.  He is a priest.  Before the stranger can reveal his name, the boy excitedly grasps his hand to reverently kiss it.

One soul has been converted due to the whisky priest's death for Christ.  Perhaps it was just the first of many.  Greene does not tell us, nor does he definitely answer whether the whisky priest has experienced salvation.  (My wager, however, considering the mercy of God is yes.)

But Greene does make clear that the priest's witness has produced the fruit of conversion in the heart of a young boy.  And the priesthood has not died with the whisky priest's death.  Governments cannot stymie God's power and glory; neither can human weakness.  

In fact, maybe it's precisely in those moments that God's power and glory are best revealed. 

Lessons from Crime & Punishment

Kill her and take her money, so that afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind and the common cause: what do you think, wouldn't thousands of good deeds make up for one tiny little crime?  For one life, thousands of lives saved from decay and corruption.  One death from hundreds of lives--it's simple arithmetic!  And what does the life of this stupid, consumptive, and wicked old crone mean in the general balance?  No more than the life of a louse, a cockroach, and not even that much...

Rodion Raskolnikov has a lot of time on his hands.  He can no longer financially support himself as a student, so he withdraws into the narrow confines of the single room he rents.  In melancholic isolation, an idea which has long been in the back of his mind takes root and begins to ferment.  Idleness is the devil's workshop, as they say.  

The idea is the crime in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.  Raskolnikov had peddled a few items to a niggardly old woman named Alyona Ivanovna.  He happens to overhear a conversation about the pawnbroker, which confirms thoughts he had already been considering--namely, that Alyona Ivanovna is a miserly louse who doesn't need to live; her money would be put to much better use if she were dead.  The notion becomes more concrete when Raskolnikov happens to overhear another dialogue, which confirms that the the old woman would be alone on such a day at such a time.  

He now has the rationalization and the perfect opportunity.  What were the chances everything would fall into place so neatly...so conveniently?  Even when Raskolnikov is unable to secure the axe from his landlady's kitchen, the plan is unhindered: he finds another in the caretaker's room.

"When reason fails, the devil helps!" he thought with a strange grin.

So Raskolnikov goes to Alyona Ivanovna's apartment and kills her with the axe.  As he tears through her chest, looking for money, he hears footsteps.  The dead woman's sister, who is mentally disabled, has entered the unlocked apartment and stares aghast at the crime.  Raskolnikov, desperate to protect himself, murders her as well.  He narrowly escapes the crime scene and returns to his apartment, suspected by no one and leaving no incriminating evidence behind.

But though is free, he is not.  Thus the punishment begins.

Dostoyevsky is brilliant at writing in such a way that the reader feels as though he or she is in the mind of Raskolnikov.  Crime and Punishment is a psychological work of literature.  The agony, torment, suffering, and pain Raskolnikov endures from his crime are almost entirely internal.  And you, the reader, feel it by the way Dostoyevsky writes.

I have never murdered anyone, but I am a sinner and I could eerily recall some of the same sentiments and feelings Raskolnikov experienced.  Perhaps you have known them, too--having to pretend around others that everything is perfectly fine when, behind your mask, you know that you have done something terribly wrong.  The heavy weight of guilt bearing upon your conscience.  Walking among others and feeling divided from them, as though an abyss exists between you, because you have been marked by your own evildoing, which has set you apart.  Sin leads to isolation--from God and from the people around you.

"...if the room were now suddenly filled not with policemen but with his foremost friends, even then, he thought, he would be unable to find a single human word for them, so empty had his heart suddenly become.  A dark sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly rose to consciousness in his soul...he sensed clearly, with all the power of sensation, that it was no longer possible for him to address these people in the police station..."  

"It seemed to him that at that moment he had cut himself off, as with scissors, from everyone and everything."

No matter the sin, no matter the crime, those feelings are identical because--in all its variety, sizes, and shapes--the root of the act is evil.  And intrinsic evil is always evil.  There are no mitigating circumstances.

Raskolnikov had tried to rationalize his crime.  He saw himself as a kind of Napoleon, a "super" man, who could "step over" the law.  

I merely suggested that an 'extraordinary' man has the right...that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to...step over certain obstacles, and then only in the event that the fulfillment of his idea--sometimes perhaps salutary for the whole of mankind--calls for it...In my opinion, if, as the result of certain combinations, Kepler's or Newton's discoveries could have become known to people in no other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, or a hundred or more people who were hindering the discovery, or standing as an obstacle in its path, then Newton would have the right, and it would even be his duty...to remove those ten or hundred people, in order to make his discoveries known to all mankind.

Could we call this the "right to choose?"

But, of course, this rationalization fails because each person--even a miserly "louse"--has dignity and worth.  

As I was preparing to write this post and was thinking about Crime and Punishment, I couldn't help but notice the interplay between Dostoyevsky's work and the anniversary of Roe V. Wade on January 22.

"The little old crone is nonsense!" he thought, ardently and impetuously.  "The old woman was a mistake perhaps, but she's not the point!  The old woman was merely a sickness...I was in a hurry to step over...it wasn't a human being I killed, it was a principle!"

How eerie it was, to be reading Raskolnikov's thoughts and to consider that in light of the evil that is abortion...how incredibly similar the rationales and assertions.  But maybe I shouldn't have been surprised.  Assassinating an old woman and having an abortion are two sides of the same coin: murder.  Evil.

"There was something else I wanted to know; something else was nudging my arm.  I wanted to find out then, and find out quickly, whether I was a louse like all the rest, or a man?  Would I be able to step over, or not!  Would I dare to reach down and take, or not?  Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right..."

"To kill?  The right to kill?" Sonya clasped her hands. 

One of the themes that struck me the most throughout this brilliant work is the value of each and every life: innocent and guilty alike.  What Raskolnikov had done in killing two people was evil--and he suffers for it.  He has his punishment.  And though his thinking is incredibly wrong and he has done something abhorrent...Raskolnikov's life has worth.  

At the start of the novel, I detested Raskolnikov.  I remember saying to my husband, "I have to stay with this character for the whole novel?!"  But somewhere along the way, Dostoyevsky touched my heart.  I could see the good in Raskolnikov, along with the bad, and I wanted the good to win.  I wanted him to be redeemed because, no matter how great the evil he had done, he still had worth.  His life mattered.

There is a fascinating interplay between Raskolnikov and one of the other main characters, Sonya.  Sonya comes from a destitute family and her parents force her into prostitution so she can help support them.  Raskolnikov feels great pity for her and believes that they are similar in the sense that they have both done great wrong.  (Though he fails to see at first the degree of culpability for Sonya, who does her evil with great sorrow and only to help others, is very different compared to his act of selfishness.)  

Sonya's evil is clear to everyone.  She is known by all as a prostitute.  And when Sonya is accused of stealing, everyone save a few is quick to condemn her.  

Yet Raskolnikov sees the beauty and goodness within her. 

"Listen," he [Raskolnikov] added, returning to her [Sonya] after a minute, "I told one offender today that he wasn't worth your little finger...and that I did my sister an honor by sitting her next to you."

"Ah, how could you say that to them!  And she was there?" Sonya cried fearfully.  "To sit with me!  An honor!  But I'm...dishonorable...I'm a great, great sinner!" 

In contrast, Raskolnikov's guilt is hidden.  No one knows of Raskolnikov's crime...save Sonya.  Raskolnikov, overcome with the weight of his act, unloads his guilt, anxiety, and suffering on Sonya.  She is the only one who knows that he is the murderer.  Even with this knowledge, Sonya loves him.  She responds with pity and sorrow.  She sees how much he has suffered and how urgently he needed to confess his guilt.

It is this ability to see the inherent value and goodness within each other that allows for Raskolnikov's redemption.

Sometimes evil appears as the "easy" path.  Raskolnikov's plan to murder unfurled itself almost effortless before him.  Sometimes an abortion seems the easiest way.  

Doing what is right almost always requires suffering.  But, the key is that this suffering--contrary to the suffering that accompanies evil--will bring forth new life.  Raskolnikov is a Lazarus figure.  He was dead and, by the epilogue, through the help of Sonya who encourages him to confess, he is brought slowly to life.  He had killed Alyona Ivanovna, but in reality, it was he who had been dead.  

And suffering is a good thing, after all.  Suffer, then...I know belief doesn't come easily--but don't be too clever about it, just give yourself directly to life, without reasoning; don't worry--it will carry you straight to shore and set you on your feet.  What shore?  How do I know?  I only believe that you have much life ahead of you...So, go and do what justice demands.  I know you don't believe it, but, by God, life will carry you.

I read these words as I thought of marchers gathered in Washington D.C. to mark the anniversary of the legalization of abortion.  May the crime of abortion be completely eradicated by the conversion of hearts to the truth that every life--old, young, innocent, guilty--is beautiful.

Give yourself to life.

Lessons from the Moviegoer

...when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness.  Everydayness is the enemy.  No search is possible.  Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength.  Now nothing breaks it--but disaster.  Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in a ditch.  

In a sudden rage and, as if I had been seized by a fit, I roll over and fall in a heap on the floor and lie shivering on the boards, worse off than the miserablest muskrat in the swamp.  Nevertheless I vow: I'm a son of a bitch if I'll be defeated by the everydayness.  

(The everdayness is everywhere now, having begun in the cities and seeking out the remotest nooks and corners of the countryside, even the swamps.) 

Jack "Binx" Bolling is the Moviegoer.  He enjoys watching movies, making money, and romancing his secretaries.  He is selfish, unfeeling, and uncommitted.

He sits back in his theater seat to casually watch the unfolding of life, an observer rather than a participant.  Most people mark their memories by critical, moving events in their lives: births, marriages, deaths.  Binx, on the contrary, recalls the movies he has seen.  They are an escape from reality, from responsibility and ownership.

Yet, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Binx feels the nudge of the "search."  Something is missing.  Something is not quite right.

The idea of a search is the basis of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.  The novel was Percy's first and most well-known work.  It was published in 1961 and won the U.S. National Book Award.  The narration is definitively Southern in tone and detail, the events of the book taking place within the week of Mardis Gras in New Orleans.  

Percy was a reader of Kierkegaard and begins his novel with a quote from the philosopher: "...the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair."

On the surface, it seems like Binx has everything he needs.  He leads a comfortable life, has a secure job, enjoys the company of his interchangeable secretaries--romances with no responsibility or commitment required.  Yet, he is a man riddled with despair, constantly plagued by "the malaise."

Upon entering a movie theater, Binx must speak with the ticket-seller or owner of the theater, to ground himself in the concrete "here" and "now."  Otherwise, he fears slipping into the mercurial "anywhere" that threatens him, for this very movie he will watch could be seen in any city in any state by any person.  He doesn't want to be Anybody in Anyplace.

He wants to have meaning.  And therein begins the search.

Binx describes one morning looking at the collection of items loosely scattered across his dresser's surface: his wallet, a notebook, pencil, keys.  They are objects he fingers every day, places in his pocket each morning and carries along with him.  Yet he never stops to truly examine them, to note their details or individual qualities.  Though with him at all times, they are for the most part, invisible.  

It seems to be an insignificant scene of little weight, but I think it points to the lesson Percy addresses in his work.

What do we carry around with us, each day, without ever being fully aware of its presence?  How often do we stop to examine grace?  Grace keeps us alive.  It is our life-source.  But are we even aware of it?

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life...To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.  Not to be onto something is to be in despair.   

To realize that there is a search...that there is something more...is the first step.  Without a search, there is despair: the daily grind, the wheel of time spinning day in and day out.

The Moviegoer is a book about existentialism.  What's the purpose of existing?  Are we all just movie-goers, set to watch life unfold?  The despair of apathy, of lukewarmness is the enemy here.  "So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth" (Revelation 3:16).  In a passage with similar meaning, Percy writes:

Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something.  They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it.  There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise.  The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human being (Look at us, Binx--my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me--we're sinning!  We're succeeding!  We're human after all!) 

Percy's novel is highly subtle.  It is not plot-driven and there isn't much resolution.  It seems, in the end, that Binx has changed a little, in the sense that he isn't wandering but now committed in marriage to someone else.  

There is no St. Paul conversion moment for Binx.  Like I said, the book is quite muted in its message--very nuanced.  Maybe it harkens to Percy's own religious experience.  Percy was no stranger to tragedy, both of his parents having committed suicide.  Over time, Percy was drawn to Catholicism by the example of his roommate, who faithfully attended daily Mass. That quiet witness was the spark of conversion.

Percy may have written The Moviegoer as a critique of contemporary America.  It certainly is relevant today, fifty-four years later.  So many Americans live affluent, comfortable lives and are utterly depressed.

The Moviegoer isn't a "feel-good" book.  I don't know if Binx lived "happily ever after."  But  life isn't a movie and things don't always wrap up perfectly in the end.

Maybe, however, that's the point.  Things aren't supposed to be tied together and solved.  It's all about the search.  And the minute someone abandons the search, he or she is already lost.

Lessons from Ivan Ilyich

Maybe I didn't live as I should?

A friend once said that we should pray for final perseverance at least once per day.  Final perseverance is the gift of remaining in a state of grace--of being united with God--until the moment of death.  As Our Lord said, "He that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved" (Matthew 10:22).

So, upon this wonderful recommendation, I've acquired the habit of praying for final perseverance right before I fall asleep.  As my head hits the pillow, I close my eyes and pray to God that mortal sin will never separate me from Him.  I pray that my husband, our children, our parents, my siblings, all our family & friends, and those souls most in need of God's mercy...that all of these people will know God's friendship and be reconciled and united with Him before death comes.

This has been on my mind frequently as I recently finished Leo Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich.  Tolstoy wrote this short work in 1886, after his religious conversion.  I enjoyed his Anna Karenina so much (and was still awaiting my next book from interlibrary loan!) that I decided to read about Ivan Ilyich.

The book opens the day of Ivan Ilyich's funeral.  A friend and coworker, upon paying his respects, notes:

He had grown much thinner and was considerably changed since Piotr Ivanovich last saw him, but his face, as with all the dead, was more beautiful and, more important than that, more meaningful than it had been in his lifetime.  The expression on the face suggested that what needed to be done had been done, and done as it should be.

The reader's curiosity is immediately piqued: what, exactly, needed to have been done?

Tolstoy then moves back in time and, starting with Ivan Ilyich's childhood, narrates the dead man's life--much like one would read in an obituary.  There emerges two clear pursuits of his life: pleasure and propriety.  He marries, but doesn't love his wife.  They have children, but he seeks his pleasure outside the family--often in playing cards.  Ivan Ilyich enjoys his career as a judge, but mostly from the power it affords him to ruin another man's life.

Things take a turn for the worse when Ivan Ilyich, attempting to hang curtains in his family's new, high-society  home, falls and injures himself.  His pain increases, medical help is sought, but no remedy relieves his discomfort.  Instead, it only becomes more acute.  He who once enjoyed the power of directing someone else's fate finds himself powerless over his own.

Ivan Ilyich saw that he was dying and was in continual despair.

Ivan Ilyich cannot reconcile the notion of death with himself.  Death is natural, of course, but certainly not something that should happen to him...not now, not in this way.  I am sure many of us might feel the same.   

But soon Ivan Ilyich can pretend no longer.  Ivan realizes the dreadful truth and suffers from the baneful lies offered to him by the doctors and his family and friends.  His wife chastises him for not taking his medicine properly--that if he only did this or that, he would get better.  His doctors offer false hope.  Conversation at his bedside politely side-steps the blatant truth that Ivan Ilyich is dying, the subject matter instead revolving around trite and trivial matters.

 Ivan Ilyich suffered most of all from lies--the lie that everyone accepted, for some reason, that he was just ill, not dying, that he need only keep calm and take his medicine and something splendid would come of it...this was the propriety he had served all his life.  He saw that no one would pity him, because no one even wanted to understand his position.

There is greater suffering to come for Ivan Ilyich, though not of a physical sort.  His pain grants him some insight and, for the first time, as he lays on his deathbed, Ivan Ilyich begins to see that he has not lived as he should.  

He once, as a young professional, donned a medallion inscribed with respice finem: look to the end.  Ironically, this is the very thing Ivan spent his life not doing, as he was intent on pleasure and propriety.

Ivan Ilyich searches his memory, recalling the moments of his life, questioning what is missing.  As he is dying, Ivan Ilyich sees with great clarity that his life was not what it should have been, but still he listens for the answer as to what he had done wrong.  The answer is given to him when--through his immense pain and affliction--he feels his sons's compassionate kiss on his hand.  

It was jut as this point that Ivan Ilyich fell through, saw the glimmer of light, and it became clear to him that his life had not been what it should have been, but that it could still be put right.  He asked himself, what is it, and fell silent, listening.  Here he felt someone kissing his hand.  He opened his eyes and glanced at his son.  He felt sorry for him.  His wife came up to him.  He glanced at her.  She was gazing at him, with a look of despair on her face, her mouth open, unwiped tears on her nose and cheeks.  He felt sorry for her...He was sorry for them, he had to stop them suffering.  Free them and free himself from all this pain.

His whole life, Ivan Ilyich lived for himself.  But he died for others.  He died with compassion in his heart.

I was grateful Ivan Ilyich found his answer before it was too late.  I am grateful God seeks out every possible means to bring back the lost sheep.  So many points when reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich I was reminded of Relient K's song "Deathbed."  

Yet, it is tragic to reflect that here is an individual who spent his entire life living the wrong way.  Thank goodness he corrected his error before death, but how different would things have been had Ivan Ilyich lived the right way originally?

In our culture, Christmas crowds out Advent in so many ways.  But we need Advent: the sobering, quiet time preparing one's soul for Christ's coming...on Christmas, yes, but also for His Second Coming.  Am I living as I should?  If death should meet me today, would I be ready?

That's why I am so grateful for the habit of praying for final perseverance at the end of the day.  Each night, as day ends and darkness comes, I am reminded: how am I living?  

And I recall the end for which God created me, the end for which Christ was born on Christmas and died so that I may one day know the eternal bliss that is heaven.  Am I striving for that end?  Is that my focus...or is it pleasure and propriety? 

Respice finem.  This Advent and always.