So Much Suffering

It's strange when a loved one being in the ICU feels familiar.  

Michael is my older brother.  He has a developmental disability and is the bravest person I know.

Five years ago I remember when Michael was placed in the Intensive Care Unit for bleeding in his esophagus.  Those three letters--ICU--sent a shockwave of terror through me.  The closed, locked doors to the entry to the unit ... the breathing tube and computer monitor carefully reporting my brother's vital signs ...everything about it screamed, "This is serious.  This is high level."

When my Mom told me on Friday Michael was in ICU for the same reason, my reaction was different.  I was far from nonchalant, obviously, but it was more, "I'm glad he's in the best hands."

Michael's health has always been complicated, puzzling, and saddening.  There was many a holiday or birthday celebration throughout my childhood when Michael was in his bedroom sick.  The list of his diagnoses is long: kidney disease, Addison's disease, achalasia...

It's the last one that has been the worst.  Achalasia is a disease of the esophagus.  The muscles stop working, so the esophagus can't push food down into the stomach.  But perhaps more damaging is that achalasia causes the sphincter between the esophagus and stomach to tighten.  

The opening narrows to such a degree that food, drink, and saliva can't pass into the stomach.  Everything sits in the esophagus, irritating and eroding.

Michael's esophagus is very damaged.  It's filled with ulcers and tears.  And sometimes those ulcers and tears begin to bleed, which happened this past week.  The bleeding was rapid, profuse, and almost uncontrollable.  At one point the nurses were running--running--my brother's hospital bed into the OR.

Yesterday Chris and I took the kids to a fall festival at a nearby parish.  Mary and Peter decorated pumpkins, jumped in a bounce house, and tried to score a basket.  

It was a beautiful, sunny, cool autumn morning.  Perfect for picking apples, which was our original plan.  It was supposed to be our annual family outing to Indian Ladder Farms.  Michael was especially looking forward to it.  

But instead he was in the ICU and he almost could have died the day before.

I sat with Chris and the children, eating lunch at the fall festival, and couldn't stop thinking about Michael.  He would have nothing to eat today.  Nothing to drink.  His esophagus is too fragile and the risk of another, potentially deadly, bleed is too high.  

My family has become so accustomed to these high-level emergencies that we cope by keep living, keep moving.  But sometimes the intensity of it hits me: he could have died.  Maybe I should be sobbing or shaking, but instead it's just a deep somberness inside.  

Somberness and profound puzzlement.  Why?  Why Michael?  Why is it that I could drive home, away from the hospital, windows down and music blaring, to enjoy a ham and cheese sandwich and warm cup of tea?  Why is it always Michael?  

So much suffering.  

And yet, he may be the happiest person I know.

He went five months with no food or drink, nothing except tube feeding overnight.  I cannot even fathom it, not for a moment.  No sip of water, no ice cream for dessert on Sunday, no warm bread with butter...  Nothing.  And Michael--not a complaint. No bitterness, no jealousy, no resentment.  Just acceptance.

The surgeon called my parents yesterday and related that, after Michael's breathing tube was removed and he could speak, one of the things Michael asked was, "What's your costume going to be for Halloween?"

I don't know why Michael has been given such a heavy cross.  But I do know that God is giving him the grace to carry it and that God is touching people through Michael's innocent and courageous witness.  

I still say, "Why?"  But maybe I should be saying, "Yes, Lord.  Yes to whatever You want."  

Because that is what Michael is saying.

Lessons from Death Comes for the Archbishop

This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape... Looking out over the great plain spotted with mesas and glittering with rain sheets, the Bishop saw the distant mountains bright with sunlight.  Again he thought that the first Creation morning might have looked like this, when the dry land was first drown up out of the deep, and all was confusion.

I remember with great disdain reading My Antonia by Willa Cather as a sophomore in high school.  It was all I could do to get through it (though, undoubtedly, I far preferred her work to the other assigned reading, namely, The Fountainhead).

So when friends of ours recommended another book by Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, I was doubtful.  Still, I thought Cather deserved another chance.  After all, the book is included in Time magazine's list of 100 greatest novels.

Set in recently annexed New Mexico in the 1850s, I presumed the book would be a kind of who-dunnit.  Maybe a suspenseful murder mystery.  I was prepared to enter into a terrible persecution of Christians in the Native American territory, followed by a stunning martyrdom.  Intrigue, action, conflict--I was ready for it all.

Except that is everything Death Comes for the Archbishop is not.

It is not a thriller.  It is not action-packed.  There is no mystery.  And I did not dislike it; I loved it.  My friends (and Time) were right: this is an incredible novel.

To describe Death Comes for the Archbishop in one word, I would say "peaceful."  Cather's writing is simple yet profound, eloquent yet factual.  She is a master writer.  Her sentences, regardless of the scene they tell, fill the reader with a sense of serenity and beauty.  

But the peace of this book does not mean it is boring.  It is not a page-turner, this is true, but it kept my total attention.  The whole book is very unique.  For instance, there is no outstanding, climactic scene.  Cather herself avoided calling it a novel; she preferred the term "narrative."  It has a little bit of everything.  As Guy Reynolds writes in his essay The Ideology of Cather's Catholic Progressivism, the book contains "folk tale, historical detail, anecdotes about Mexican and Indian life, the spiritual biographies of Fathers Latour and Vaillant."  

Cather's inspiration for the "narrative" was based on the historical figures of the first Archbishop of Santa Fe, Jean Baptiste Lamy, and his friend and vicar Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, who became the first Bishop of Denver.  Cather explained, "I never passed the life-size bronze of Archbishop Lamy which stands under a locust tree before the Cathedral in Santa Fe without wishing that I could learn more about a pioneer churchman."

Statue of Archbishop Lamy outside the Cathedral in Santa Fe

Cather renames her Archbishop Latour, which in French means "the tower."  It is fitting, as he is the fortress of the reinvigorated Catholic faith in this new area of the United States.  His long-time friend, companion, and fellow missionary is Father Vaillant who, as his name implies, is valiant in his efforts to spread the faith.  

The Faith, in that wild frontier, is like a buried treasure; they guard it, but they do not know how to use it to their soul's salvation.  A word, a prayer, a service, is all that is needed to set free those souls in bondage.  I confess I am covetous of that mission.  I desire to be the man who restores these lost children to God.  It will be the greatest happiness of my life.

The two personalities--Latour pedantic, refined, and shy while Vaillant passionate, energetic, and of the people--complement each other as they undertake the task of rebuilding and growing the Catholic Church in New Mexico.

Their task is not an easy one.  The climate and geography of the new diocese is their first obstacle.  Travel is slow and precarious.  The route between towns is sometimes barely discernible and one must contend with extreme heat, lack of water, sand storms, and rocky terrain.  To put things in perspective, consider that it took Father Latour one year just to reach his diocese.  

Then there is the matter of the inhabitants of this desert.  The Native Americans have their own belief system, held from the beginning, that is quite foreign to Latour.  And then there are the Mexicans, converted by the Spanish friars long ago, but hardly educated in the faith.  

This settlement was his Bishopric in miniature; hundreds of square miles of thirsty desert, then a spring, a village, old men trying to remember their catechism to teach their grandchildren.  The Faith planted by the Spanish friars and watered with their blood was not dead; it awaited only the toil of the husbandman.

In addition, the Mexican priests, entrenched in their parishes, are filled with avarice, intemperance, and lust--and do not welcome the interference of foreign, French priests.

The book opens with Father Latour almost dying of thirst in the desert, repelled by this hostile territory and daunted by the task before him.  He survives and decades pass until, as the title indicates, Latour does pass from this life.  Yet this death is a peaceful death of old age and, through struggle and perseverance, he dies at home in this land of desert and pueblos.  

He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it.  Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!

Cather, an Episcopalian, does an incredible job in describing the Catholic faith of Latour and Vaillant.  Consider the following passage regarding Our Lady:

He sat down before his desk, deep in reflection.  It was just this solitariness of love in which a priest's life could be like his Master's.  It was not a solitude of atrophy, of negation, but of perpetual flowering.  A life need not be cold, or devoid of grace in the worldly sense, if it were filled by Her who was all the graces; Virgin-daughter, Virgin-mother, girl of the people and Queen of Heaven: le reve supreme de la chair.  The nursery tale could not vie with Her in simplicity, the wisest theologian could not match Her in profundity.

Cather describes the great pains both priests take to minister to the sheep of their widespread, diverse flock.  Risking their lives, they prevail through storm, illness, and distance to administer the sacraments.  To do so, they leave their families and home, abandon familiar food and native tongue.  
Their sacrifice bears much fruit.  With their presence comes culture and civilization.  Indicatively, the French priests bring fruit trees and cultivate gardens.  Archbishop Latour has religious sisters accompany him back to this diocese, where they begin a school to educate the illiterate natives.  As Mitchell Kalpakgian remarks in his article in Crisis magazine, "The Jesuits, then, bring to the New World what the Church always brings with the Gospel--a human way of life that raises man from the primitive to the refined, from the ignorant and superstitious to the rational and educated, from the meager and the dreary to the abundant and the beautiful.  The Church concerns herself with the whole man, body and soul, and performs both the spiritual and corporal works of mercy in its evangelization."

Latour's evangelization is charitable and respectful: he upholds and admires the beauty and meaning of the culture of the Indians.  He is sensitive to their traditions and customs.  As Cather writes, describing Latour's relationship with his Indian guide:

There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him.

It is the diversity of the many Indians that is another gripping aspect of the novel.   I was especially intrigued by the Acoma Pueblo.  Seeking refuge from neighboring Navaho and Apache tribes, the Acoma built their pueblo on top of a mesa, 365 feet off the ground.  A single staircase, carved into the rock, granted access to the top.  God is our rock.  St. Peter is the rock upon whom Christ built His Church.  But for the Acoma, the literal rock is their safety.

The Acoma Pueblo

And so Fathers Latour and Vaillant labor, bringing the Good News to the people of New Mexico.  Their missionary work, born on the back of mules, is inspiring in its fervency, extensiveness, and consequence.  Their friendship is inspiring in its longevity and complementarity.  Through them and the people they minister to, Cather creates an incredible narrative, one I would like to revisit again, perhaps while driving along the mountains and mesas of the southwest.

"I shall not die of a cold, my son.  I shall die of having lived."

Lessons from The End of the Affair

She had said to me--they were nearly the last words I heard from her before she came dripping into the hall from her assignation--"You needn't be so scared.  Love doesn't end.  Just because we don't see each other..." She had already made her decision, though I didn't know it till the next day, when the telephone presented nothing but the silent open mouth of somebody found dead.  She said, "My dear, my dear.  People go on loving God, don't they, all their lives without seeing Him?" 

This was my third time reading Graham Greene and my admiration and enjoyment of his writing has increased with each successive novel.  Greene wrote many books, but there are four especially "Catholic" novels: The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, and Brighton Rock.  Thank goodness I still have Brighton Rock left to read--I really enjoy Greene that much.

It is hard to say, but I believe The End of the Affair may be my favorite Greene novel yet.  Out of all the books I have read and are listed on this blog, it is this one that comes closest to my novel.  Both are first-person point of view--an intimate introspection.  Both also trace a character's conversion, and the demise of a romantic relationship.  Furthermore, the connection between love and hate is explored.

Our books share similarities.  But I wish I could write more like Greene.  He can compose a four word sentence that just hits you with its raw veracity and power.  Greene is coarse: his images are unsettling, his characters flawed and sinful.  Yet his underlying theme is refined and supernatural.  The mixture of base human emotions and actions (hate, jealousy, adultery) and the break-through of grace amidst the muck of sin is riveting. 

In The End of the Affair, Greene takes corrupt human love and from it--perhaps through it--points to the perfect love of God.

In many ways the book is based on Greene's own life.  The protagonist is an author and sometimes reflects on the art of writing.  The End of the Affair is dedicated to a certain "C," which in the United States' edition of the book is spelled out as "Catherine."  This is the woman with whom Greene had an affair for eleven years.  He wrote this book toward the very end of his own affair with Catherine.

The person who tells the story is Maurice Bendrix.  His last name points to something that is bent--what should be straight is forced into a curve or angle.  What is bent in Bendrix is his understanding of love, for his love is one crippled by jealousy.

Maurice, a writer, was studying the life of Henry Miles, a government worker, to glean background for a character in one of his novels.  Through Henry, Maurice became acquainted with Mrs. Sarah Miles, who immediately captivated him.  They began a three year affair, which was frequently poisoned by Maurice's extreme jealousy. 

"Wouldn't you want me to be happy, rather than miserable?" she asked with unbearable logic.

"I'd rather be dead or see you dead," I said, "than with another man.  I'm not eccentric. That's ordinary human love.  Ask anybody.  They'd all say the same--if they loved at all."  I jibed at her.  "Anyone who loves is jealous." 

The affair abruptly ended during the bombing of Britain in 1944.  Sarah and Maurice were together when Maurice decided to go downstairs to investigate whether they should seek safety in the basement.  A bomb hit his apartment and Maurice found himself buried underneath his front door.  Gaining consciousness, he went upstairs to find Sarah, who looked disappointed to see him alive.  It was the last day of the affair: he never heard from her again.

Maurice (and the reader) are left with a resounding question: Why?  Why did Sarah end the affair?  Did she ever really love Maurice?  


They live two separate lives, until nearly two years later when Maurice happens upon Henry late one rainy night.  They go out for drinks and Henry admits to Maurice that he suspects Sarah is cheating on him.  (Henry, naive and trusting, never had an inkling of Maurice and Sarah's affair.)  His jealousy aroused, Maurice puts into action Henry's discarded plan to hire a private detective.

What Maurice learns is that there is a new love in Sarah's life.  But it isn't who he expected.  When the private detective hands Maurice Sarah's diary, he has the key to the mystery.

Greene deftly switches from Maurice to Sarah as narrator, jumping from past to present and back again.  Sarah has the opportunity to explain the situation from her perspective, through her diary.  

The day of the bombing, she found Maurice under the door and returned upstairs, certain he was dead.  Terrified and desperate, she found herself praying, begging God to spare Maurice's life, offering to believe in God in exchange.  But that wasn't enough of a sacrifice, so to make the deal more enticing, Sarah promised not to see Maurice again.  At that moment, Maurice entered the bedroom alive and practically unhurt.

The end of their affair was the beginning of a new love for Sarah.  At first she hated God and the vow she made to him, and longed for nothing other than to be with Maurice again.

I'm tired and I don't want any more pain.  I want Maurice.  I want ordinary corrupt human love.  Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don't want it now.  Take it away for a while and give it to me another time.

To find a way around her vow, Sarah begins to visit a professed atheist, Richard, who spends his life trying to convince people that God doesn't exist.  In their visits, however, quite the opposite occurs: the man's disbelief leads to her belief.  For how could this man hate someone who didn't exist?  Doesn't hate necessitate an object for that hatred?  

Even though her visits serve to only build her faith (the faith that keeps her away from Maurice), Sarah continues going to see Richard out of pity: she feels sorry he has no one else to hear his arguments.  Her pity also leads Sarah to stay with Henry, even after preparing a letter for him stating she was going to be with Maurice.  

What Sarah realizes through these experiences is that, if she loves as God loves, she can love more than just Maurice.  She can love the boringness of her husband.  She can kiss Richard's disfigured cheek.

In fact, perhaps her love for Maurice was actually an attempt to love God.  For Maurice was the one who paved the path for this greater, perfect, unconditional love.  Maurice encouraged Sarah to search for the truth, just as he tried to present the details of his stories accurately.  Her love for Maurice led her to God.

Did I ever love Maurice as much before I loved You?  Or was it really You I loved all the time?...was it me he loved, or You?  For he hated in me the things You hate.  He was on Your side all the time without knowing it.  You willed our separation, but he willed it too.  He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love.  For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn't anything left, when we'd finished, but You.  For either of us...You were there, teaching us to squander, like you taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You.  But You are too good to me.  When I ask You for pain, You give me peace.  Give it him too.  Give him my peace--he needs it more. 

Sarah and Maurice's love could never satisfy.  There was constantly the poison of the realization that what they had must end.  But God's love was different.  

If one could believe in God, would he fill the desert?

After finishing the last page of Sarah's diary, Maurice realizes that Sarah has always loved him--and still loves him.  He immediately seeks her out.  She evades him, but finally he tracks her down in an empty church and promises her they will leave together to start a new life.  But before anything can happen, Henry calls Maurice a few days later to tell him that Sarah has died of pneumonia.

Now Maurice's hatred is directed to God, the lover who has finally and eternally claimed Sarah.  Little miracles, seemingly the work of Sarah, begin occurring in the lives Sarah has touched.  Maurice and Henry even become good friends.  Instead of comforting Maurice, these instances terrify him.  For if Sarah could make that leap of faith and even maybe become a saint ... could he, would he?

Hatred began the book; hatred ends the book.  Maurice closes with a prayer of animosity, telling God to leave him alone.  But the reader remembers Sarah's insight: one cannot hate someone who does not exist.  Hate and love work together and the path to Maurice's conversion, though perhaps long and filled with bitter struggle, has begun.

They say God is a jealous lover.  He will use many means to capture our hearts.  Even the evil of something like adultery can become the means to a great good: conversion.  God works through our corrupt human love and hate and, instilling His grace, raises us to supernatural height.  

Lessons from War and Peace

It was a Wednesday evening and I was sitting in my military history class.  Mr. Vallely, our dynamic professor who magically made that three-hour class seem shorter than some of my other one-hour classes, was standing by the white board.  He had written in large, bold letters: FRICTION.

Friction, he explained, happens in every battle of every war.  You can't avoid friction.  It's the unplanned, unforeseen happenings that get in the way of your plans.  The battalion that shows up late, the division that gets the command wrong and fails to seize the all-important high ground, the fog that prevents a clear view of the enemy line: friction.

No matter how diligently the battle strategy is planned, how strong the military force, how powerful the ammunition, friction will inevitably and unavoidably happen.

And that's one of the reasons I became a history major.  I was fascinated by this concept of "friction," because I didn't see solely chaotic happenings; I saw the hand of God.  The role of Providence in the unfolding of world events.  That invisible, but omnipresent, divine touch.  

I wasn't sure quite what to expect when I picked up War and Peace.  I enjoyed Tolstoy's other works (Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich) and wanted to tackle that powerhouse of a novel, which is often ranked as the greatest literary work of all times.  

I was prepared for monotony.  Why, I'm not sure, since I was never really bored by his other writing.  I suppose the simile is to blame ("It's as long as War and Peace!").  But in many ways, it wasn't long and certain sections were absolutely gripping.  

Battle of Borodino1812

Tolstoy painstakingly researched the history behind his novel, which covers the period from 1805-1812, when Napoleon and his eight hundred thousand men army invaded Russia.  

On the twelfth of June, the forces of western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began--that is, an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature.  Millions of people committed against each other such a countless number of villainies, deceptions, betrayals, thefts, forgeries, and distributions of false banknotes, robberies, arsons, and murders as the annals of all the law courts in the world could not assemble in whole centuries...

Interspersed and interwoven with the lives of five Russian families is Tolstoy's philosophy of history: how should history be reported, who makes history, what causes historical events to happen?

Tolstoy views history and its causes as fluid and constantly unfolding.  The cause of the French invasion of Russia in 1812 cannot be pinpointed to one event, decision, one concrete moment: it the culmination of many events and many decisions, all piling on top of each other and propelling things into the trajectory of an invasion.  

In the same vein, who makes history?  In Tolstoy's time, historians often credited action to the most conspicuous and easy to pinpoint people: the leaders.  Tolstoy begs to differ.

Tolstoy posits that the leaders, such as Napoleon, are the least free of all.  Napoleon rode a wave of movement that he neither initiated nor directed.  

A countless number of free forces (for nowhere is a man more free than in a battle, where it is a question of life and death) influence the direction of the battle, and that direction can never be known beforehand and never coincides with the direction of some one force.  

Frequently, contemporaries of Tolstoy would laud the military genius of Russian commander Kutuzov and others for their brilliant strategy.  No, Tolstoy argues: in hindsight we can retell history as the result of the profound deliberation and strategies of generals.  But such was not so in the actual moment itself.

In offering and accepting battle at Borodino, Kutuzov and Napoleon acted involuntarily and senselessly.  And only later did historians furnish the already accomplished facts with ingenious arguments for the foresight and genius of the commanders, who, of all the involuntary instruments of world events, were the most enslaved and involuntary agents.

Incredibly, both the Russians and the French, in the course of the 1812 invasion, acted contrary to their best interests.  The Russian army tried its utmost to stop Napoleon's advance deeper into Russia--the very thing that would actually destroy his army and save Russia.  Meanwhile Napoleon, advancing late in the year with no winter preparations for his army, continued his invasion further and further, extending his supply train and causing his ruin.

Tolstoy makes many cogent and legitimate points.  But he also is not very consistent.  Sometimes he is quite fatalistic: these events were predestined before all time, so there is nothing you can do about it.  He also tears down the idea of a leader to such an extent--almost a mere puppet of the forces beneath him--that you are prone to forget one person...one exceptional leader...can make a profound difference.

Consider the death of one of Tolstoy's main characters, Prince Andrei.  At the major battle of Borodino, the battle that begins Napoleon's undoing (and single bloodiest day in the Napoleonic Wars), Andrei is hit by a shell.  He is not hit leading a major offensive or performing a feat of bravery.  No, he is mortally wounded while waiting in the reserves, pacing back and forth.  His death feels so needless, his influence in the battle so inconsequential.  Maybe this was Tolstoy's attempt to relate the horror of war, which claims lives like the snuff of a candle.  But it also left a feeling of meaningless, of powerlessness.  

In the end though, Tolstoy argues that history is the mysterious interworking of countless people (leaders, followers, and everyone in between) and Providence.  Fate, free will, friction: the mechanisms that turn the pages of history.

"If there is God and if there is a future life, then there is truth, there is virtue; and man's highest happiness consists in striving to attain them.  We must live, we must love, we must believe," said Pierre, "that we do not live only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and will live eternally there, in the all" (he pointed to the sky).  Prince Andrei stood with his elbow resting on the rail of the ferry, and, listening to Pierre, did not take his eyes off the red gleam of the sun on the blue floodwaters.  Pierre fell silent.  It was completely still.  The ferry had long been moored, and only the waves of the current lapped with a faint sound against the ferry's bottom.  It seemed to Prince Andrei that this splash of waves made a refrain to Pierre's words, saying: "It's true, believe it."

Lessons from Till We Have Faces

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words.  I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer.  Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean?  How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

C.S. Lewis considered Till We Have Faces his best work.  His good friend and fellow author, J.R.R. Tolkien, concurred.  I am of the same opinion myself.  This was an incredible book! 

Till We Have Faces is a reimagining of the myth of Cupid and Psyche.  Though a myth, never once does the narrative seem false--Lewis brings the story alive with fascinating details about this fictional place and its customs.  

Lewis sets his book from the perspective of Psyche's older sister Orual.  It is Orual's written accusation against the gods, full of bitterness and resentment.  Lewis began writing the book as an unbeliever; 30 years later he finished the book as a believer.  The spiritual conversion he underwent in that course of time is reflected in Orual's own journey.

Orual is determined to set out a clear indictment against the gods for their injustice toward her.  The substance of her grievance concerns her youngest sister Psyche, who is as astonishingly beautiful as Orual is appallingly ugly.  

Glome, the fictitious city-state that their harsh and unloving father rules as King, has been suffering calamity upon calamity.  The priest of the house of Ungit, the local god who also goes by the name of Aphrodite in Greek, asserts that a human offering must be made to the gods to restore good will upon the land.  The offering must be the very best--pure, good, lovely.  It is Psyche.

Orual, who has raised Psyche almost like a daughter, is beyond tormented.  Her sister, however, is strangely at peace, explaining to Orual that she has often longed to live on the mysterious mountain that belongs to the god ... that she has felt a pull to that home.  

After the great offering, Orual enlists the help of one of the king's soldiers (Bardia) to travel to the tree upon which Psyche was chained and believed to have died.  (There is, of course, overt symbolism of Christ here.)  Orual expects to find bones, but to her great joy and astonishment, she travels into the nearby valley and finds Psyche, alive and well--in fact, even better than she has ever seemed!

Orual is mystified and even more so as Psyche relates her tale: the god of the mountain has chosen her as his wife and they live together in an amazing palace.  Orual questions who this god and husband is, but her sister cannot say more than that he is wonderful and good.  He has commanded her not to see his face and comes only in the dark of night.  Psyche embraces the sacred mystery; she trusts in the goodness of this god.  

Orual, who complains about the darkness of holy places, wants concrete, definite, and defined.  She does not trust.  Considering her sister mad, asks to see this great palace.  Psyche stares at her, her face aghast with disappointment and grief.  It was there, where they sat.  They were in the palace.  But Orual could not see it.  

For the world had broken in pieces and Psyche and I were not in the same piece.  Seas, mountains, madness, death itself, could not have removed her from me to such a hopeless distance as this.  Gods, and again gods, always gods...they had stolen her.  They would leave us nothing.

Faith can be divisive.  It can turn "man against his father, a daughter against her mother..." (Matthew 10:35).  For Psyche, she did not need to see her god's face: his love was clearer and more certain to her than anything else.  Yet, Orual could not see, no matter how much Psyche explained or reassured her.  

Faith is indeed a gift--one needs to have an open heart and soul to receive it.  No matter how hard one might try, you cannot make someone see God, even though He is all around and within.  The sight comes only from faith and sometimes one has to tread through great pain and sorrow to be able to finally see. 

As she departed, Orual thought she could almost discern the outlines of a palace in the distance, but quickly dismissed these fantasies.  There had to be another explanation.  Fearing her sister the prey of some vile mountain men, Orual developed her scheme.  She would save Psyche, even if to do so, she had to kill Psyche herself.

Those who love must hurt.  I must hurt you again today.  And, Psyche, you are still little more than a child.  You cannot go your own way.  You will let me rule and guide you.

So Orual returned to the valley and lay a bitter choice before Psyche.  Either Psyche would take a lamp and light it before her husband that night to reveal his true identity, or Orual would commit suicide.  In great anguish, Psyche took the lamp and agreed to betray her husband's trust. 

You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know.  It is like looking into a deep pit.  I am not sure whether I like your kind better than hatred.  Oh, Orual--to take my love for you, because you know it goes down to my very roots and cannot be diminished by any other newer love, and then to make of it a tool, a weapon, a thing of policy and mastery, an instrument of torture--I begin to think I never knew you.  Whatever comes after, something that was between us dies here.

  

Shortly after, the valley is torn asunder by driving rain, thunder and lightning.  Psyche--like Eve in the Garden--is banished from the valley and her god, set forth to labor and toil.  Orual is separated from Psyche and set for her own life of suffering.

Though Orual eventually became Queen of Glome--and an exceedingly successful one at that--her life is empty.  She wears a veil over her ugly face, hiding the truth of her emotions and locking her heart from love.

My second strength lay in my veil...the wildest stories got about as to what that veil hid.  No one believed it was anything so common as the face of an ugly woman... The best story was that I had no face at all, if you stripped off my veil you'd find emptiness.

All the while, her bitter rage against the gods simmers.  When Orual hears her experiences with Psyche retold as myth by a stranger--with herself cast as a jealous sister envious of Psyche's joy and love--Orual determines to set the story straight.

As her narrative ends though, a new, unexpected one begins.  For in the midst of "lifting the veil" of her heart and allowing the memories and emotions to return, Orual begins to see things a little differently than she had remembered.  The process of writing is a process of re-seeing her past, and her part in it.

Orual had resented the gods--Ungit in particular--because she believed the god snatched people and used them for her own good selfishly.  What writing her complaint against the gods makes Orual realize is that she, herself, is Ungit ... or, at least, who she believes Ungit to be.  

Orual used people for her own personal pleasure and good.  She seized Psyche's love and wanted it exclusively.  She had similarly used her mentor and Bardia, whom she secretly loved.  When Bardia dies, exhausted from tireless, selfless service from the demanding Queen, it is his widow who reveals the deformity of Orual's love:

Oh, Queen Orual, I begin to think you know nothing of love.  Or no; I'll not say that.  Yours is Queen's love, no commoners'.  Perhaps you who spring from the gods love like the gods.  Like the Shadowbrute.  They say the loving and devouring are all one, don't they?...You're full fed.  Gorged with other men's lives, women's too: Bardia's, mine, the Fox's, your sister's--both your sisters'.

Orual's love was a selfish, consuming love.  Finally, through a series of visions, Orual comes to realize that the blame her accusation rests on falls upon her.  Why had the gods not answered her?  Why had they been silent?  Why were holy things in dark places?

In order to really speak with God, we must take off our veils.  We must speak with him "face-to-face"--stripped of our pretentiousness and pride.  If God seems silent, it might be because we are talking to ourselves, about ourselves.  With our masks off, we can look upon Love.

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer.  You are yourself the answer.  Before your face questions die away.  What other answer would suffice?  

Lessons from The Diary of a Country Priest

It is here that the idea of this diary first occurred to me, and I don't feel I could have thought of it anywhere else.  In this country of woods and pastures, streaked with quickset hedges and all grown over by apple-trees, it would be hard to find such another place from which to overlook the whole village, gathered together, as it were, in the palm of a hand.  I look down, but it never seems to look back at me.  Rather does it turn away, cat-like, watching me askance with half-shut eyes.  What does it want of me?  Does it even want anything?...Whatever I were to do, were I to pour out my last drop of blood (and indeed sometimes I fancy the village has nailed me up here on a cross and is at least watching me die) I could never possess it. 

Georges Bernanos wrote The Diary of a Country Priest in 1936, ten years after publishing Under Satan's Sun.  The first book was well-received; the second, even more so--it was the winner of the Academie Francaise's Grand Prix du Roman.  

The novels share many similarities.  The protagonist in both is a young, awkward, unassuming priest who self-sacrifices on behalf of his parishioners.  But I think what primarily sets this novel apart from Bernano's first work is its format.  As a diary, it's a much more intimate, introspective work.  In many ways, it served as a kind of spiritual reading for me.  

Plot takes a back seat in The Diary of a Country Priest.  It is the unnamed priest's struggles, reflections, thoughts, and prayers that fill the pages, frequently in a scattered, seemingly haphazard manner--snapshots of life.  There are several people with whom he interacts and their dialogue is reported at length, but for most of the book, these separate strands of interaction seem unrelated and unresolved.  

Reading the diary is entering into the mind and heart of this priest who sets out to report as candidly and truthfully as possible.  This is unedited, full-disclosure, the opening of one's soul.  The priest writes that, "Petty lies can slowly form a crust around the consciousness, of evasion and subterfuge."  This diary works at combatting the habit we all have of proudly inflating our notion of self-worth.  

The very reality of a diary is the intimate sharing of one's story and person.  But this isn't just any person; it is the diary of a priest, and that does make for a difference.  A priest is someone set apart, marked by the Lord as one of His holy ministers.  A priest is another Christ, Christ Himself even.  The dignity and the demand of that vocation shine through the writing in the diary.  

The author of the diary is a guardian of souls and he has an intimate relationship with his parish.

This morning I prayed hard for my parish, my poor parish, my first and perhaps my last, since I ask no better than to die here.  My parish!  The words can't even be spoken without a kind of soaring love...But as yet the idea behind them is so confused.  I know that my parish is a reality, that we belong to each other for all eternity; it is not a mere administrative fiction, but a living cell of the everlasting Church.  But if only the good God would open my eyes and unseal my ears, so that I might behold the face of my parish and hear its voice. 

His love for his flock is ardent, but the fervency of his devotion and attachment is far from reciprocated.  The parishioners are lethargic in spirit with a boredom that is rotting their souls.  The priest feels that though he would pour out his blood for his people, he will never possess them.  It is the thirst of Christ on the cross, thirsting for love that will satiate His Sacred Heart.  When a young child remarks on the sadness on the priest's face, present even when smiling, he responds, "I'm sad because God isn't loved enough."

The task is daunting, but the priest commits himself to visiting every family in his parish, traversing the French countryside to make his calls.  He encounters lust, hatred of God, denial of God, sin in its myriad of ugly forms.  

A priest can't shrink from sores any more than a doctor.  He must be able to look a pus and wounds and gangrene.  All the wounds of the soul give out pus...

Like Christ, the priest takes the wounds of the people upon himself.  The spiritual illness that is killing their souls metaphorically becomes the stomach cancer that is threatening their pastor's life.  The priest's diet is reduced to a meaningful bread and wine (heartless rumors begin to spread that he is a drunkard) and as his diary progresses, death looms before him.

Still, the priest continues with his work.  First impressions are not favorable: he is sickly appearing, impoverished in dress, his cassock even at times covered with dried blood.  His social graces are lacking.  When engaged in a discussion with an atheist doctor who expounds the reasons for unbelief, the priest is left speechless, uncertain how and what to respond.  

...what could I have said?  I am no philosopher--Deity's mouthpiece, I am the servant of Jesus Christ.  And I fear the only defense which would have sprung to my lips would have been powerful in one way, is yet so weak in another that I have long been convinced by it, yet never really at peace.  There is no Peace save in Jesus.

Walking through a dark night of the soul, the priest has no inner peace, but devotes himself to bringing peace and prayer to his people.  Bernanos modeled his country priest after St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower who also suffered a night of faith.  

The same solitude, the same silence.  And no hope this time of forcing or turning away the obstacle.  Besides, there isn't any obstacle.  Nothing.  God!  I breathe, I inhale the night, the night is entering into me by some inconceivable, unimaginable gap in my soul.  I, myself, am the night. 

St. Therese also kept a diary, which contains a treasury of spiritual wisdom.  She wrote of her Little Way, the simple and childlike way of drawing near to God.  The country priest is, at his core, an innocent.  He is unassuming and unpretentious--so lowly, in fact, that Bernanos never gives him a name.  He walks Therese's Little Way.

Though the country priest abases himself, it is this seeming incapability and insufficiency that make him strong.  There is great power in simplicity.  When one stands at the lowest rung of the ladder, there is no where else to go--there is, therefore, a great freedom in expression.  When you can't be thought any less than you already are, speaking the truth to another cannot harm you.   

“Your simplicity,” Monsieur le Comte says perceptively, “is a kind of flame which scorches them. You go through the world with that lowly smile of yours as though you begged the world their pardon for being alive, while all the time you carry a torch which you seem to mistake for a crozier.”

As the country priest notes in his diary, it is precisely God's simplicity that damned Satan.  Similarly, Our Lady, Mother of all grace, is "our little youngest sister" in her great innocence.

Whether all of the priest's evangelizing is fruitful is uncertain.  But there are conversions that God works through his hands--souls are saved through his simple, truthful intervention.

In the end, even the priest's death is simple.  

What I had believed was so far away, beyond imaginary seas, stood out before me.  My death is here.  A death like any other, and I shall enter into it with the feelings of a very commonplace, very ordinary man.  It is even certain that I shall be no better at dying than I am at controlling my life.  I shall be just as clumsy and awkward.  So often have I been told to be 'simple.'  I do my best.  It is so hard to be simple.  Worldly man talk of "simple people" as they do of "humble people," with the same indulgent smile.  But they should speak of them as of kings.

His struggle between despair and hope ceases with joy, with a simple but profound acclamation of St. Therese's, affirming light even in the darkest of places: "Grace is everywhere."

The Diary of a Country Priest is a story of a soul--a priest's soul.  It's an apt reminder to pray for our priests.  Satan attacks them with a particular fury.  Bernanos writes in his book, "The mediocre priest is ugly."  Let us pray, therefore, that every priest be made beautiful in the passionate love of Christ, which thirsts for souls.