Your daily Graham Greene fix

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

I was thinking about this passage from The Power and the Glory today. The book itself is a personal favorite, and this particular passage is powerful. For those of you who don't know the plot, the story concerns a "whiskey" priest during the 1930s persecutions in southern Mexico. He is one of the last priests in his state and is constantly tortured by his conscience, and torn between his desire to flee to safety and his desire to remain in the state and continue his work (which he thinks is a result of his pride more than his holiness). Towards the end of the novel he is captured and sentenced to death. This passages comes from his time in jail and is probably one of the best examples of Greene's writing from his so-called "Catholic works".

When he woke up it was dawn. He woke with a huge feeling of hope which suddenly and completely left him at the first sight of the prison yard. It was the morning of his death. He crouched on the floor with the empty brandy-flask in his hand trying to remember an Act of Contrition. "O God, I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins... crucified... worthy of thy dreadful punishments." He was confused, his mind was on other things: it was not the good death for which one always prayed. He caught sight of his own shadow on the cell wall; it had a look of surprise and grotesque unimportance. What a fool he had been to think that he was strong enough to stay when others fled. What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless. I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived - perhaps after all he was not 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 had missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew that at the end there was only one thing that counted - to be a saint.

[shrike]

1. That's a wonderful book

I'm a Graham Green fan.

[Joe Chi Minh]

2. A great passage. We can strive all our lives and never attain such

an awesome knowledge of our own nothingness in our own right, as that priest possessed. I think Fr De Caussade called such poverty of spirit, the "pearl of great price". The sovereign irony and paradox, of course is that the "whiskey" priest thought he'd missed the boat!

My favourite passage is where he's with a bandit, and being fired at by the police or army. The bandit's shot and badly wounded, maybe mortally - it' a long time since I read it - but he carries on calling out advice to the priest. What tickled me to bits was that I've known more than a few "rough diamonds" who'd have acted exactly like that. Time to worry about their immortal soul when they were dead!!!!There was the more pressing matter of helping a living soul to survive, in the meantime!

"The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of." Well, those "rough diamonds" are the supreme theologians, since charity must always become before any kind of "dedicated", religious duty, and is considered to be the one thing that can brook no delay.

Incidentally, Charles Peguy had written words to the same effect as those concluding ones, above: “Life holds only one tragedy, ultimately: not to have been a saint.” Though, as we know, he didn't mean of the canonised kind, necessarily.

[Joe Chi Minh]

3. Part of the beauty of the passage is that what he interpreted as his failure

was only an "outward" failure by the canons of this World, as perceived by his worldly, cerebral intelligence. Yet what had led him to arrive at that point was precisely that he had been obeying the promptings of the Holy Spirit in his heart, the seat of our wisdom and understanding, the place where our assumptions are formed,drawn from the synthesis of our whole life's experience.

In that, he had a lot in common with the bandit. In their own different ways, they were both tear-aways; not cerebral, calculating, immensely successful and powerful worldlings, designated as "fools" by Christ and "simple ones" in Proverbs, but, in the World's eyes, "losers" - just like the historical Christ. But how the words of the Apostle Paul in Colossians 2:15 resonate both in their parallel, abject failure in the World's eyes and in their glorious triumph in terms of the eternal, underlying reality of the spiritual economy:

"And when he had disarmed the rulers and the authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in the cross."
"The Power and Glory" could scarcely have been a more inspired title for the story, could it?