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Jesus presents the two men in the parable
this morning in a way that idealizes one quality in each. One claims superior
status for himself by comparing himself with and separating himself from
others; the other makes no claims to status at all but acknowledges his
position as a sinner who can take refuge only in God’s goodness and mercy.
Convinced of his righteousness, dependent on his own acts of piety, one asks
for and receives nothing from God. The other comes to God in humility and
receives that for which he asks, divine compassion.
These two figures called to my mind two
other but very different characters one, a young priest, the other a
16-year-old girl: central characters in the novel Under the Sun of Satan by
Georges Bernanos. Neither of these two lines up in a strictly parallel way with
the two characters in today’s parable. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the
comparison and decided to dig into it. Here’s what I have come up with at this
point.
The setting for the encounter of these two
is an early morning on a country road on the outskirts of a small village in
France after World War I.
The priest, Father Donissan, is described
by his dean as a poor student in seminary, clumsy in manner, tactless and gawky
but with obvious spiritual gifts. The girl is Germaine Malorthy, the daughter
of a local brewer, who at this point in her life has already acquired and lost
two lovers (one, the local Marquis, Jacques de Cardigan, the other, M. Gallet,
a public health officer and deputy for the district) become pregnant by the
Marquis, suffered a kind of break down, and was sent away to a nursing home
where she gave birth to a stillborn child. She bears within her a deep pain and a
deep secret. One morning shortly after 1am, she had slipped out of the house
and headed for the chateau of the Marquis. At one point she grabbed a shotgun
from the wall pointed it at him, and before he could warn her that it was
loaded, pulled the trigger killing him with a bullet to the neck at such close
range and at such an angle that the death was ruled a suicide. Unseen either
arriving or departing, her crime remains her secret.
When we first meet Father Donissan, he is
suffering from a deep anxiety over his adequacy for parochial ministry. He asks
his dean, Father Menou-Segrais, to have him recalled; since, by his own
assessment, with his limited experience, intelligence, and background, he finds
it a burden beyond his strength. “Whatever effort I make, how can I hope ever
to supply that in which I am lacking?” This tendency to despair over his
capacity to live his vocation is a constant plague. We see here too in the
young priest a tendency to trust in his own judgment regarding himself,
betraying a certain false humility, and a tendency to lack confidence and trust
in God to provide the grace needed.
Father Menou-Segrais calls him out on this:
“Admitting yourself incapable of guiding and advising others, how would you be
a good judge about your own cause?”
Father Donissan professes his desire to
submit to the opinion of Father Menou-Segrais, who challenges him once again:
“You have put yourself in the hands of a man for whom you have no use.” At
these words, Father Donissan’s face turned ashy pale. Father Menou-Segrais
continues: “The life I live here is in appearance that of a well-healed layman.
Admit it! My semi-idleness makes you ashamed…Have I expressed your feelings?”
“I must answer yes,” answered Father
Donissan, with apparent calm but great interior distress.
Father Menou-Segrais will show himself to
be a “masterly clinician of souls…steadfast in prudence” and possessed with
“sovereign good sense.” But he is not without limitations, which are apparent
to the young priest. Nevertheless, Father Donissan willingly moves from being
his own judge to humbly submitting himself to the judgment of another. This
humility and obedience lay a firm groundwork for all that follows. Later in the
novel, he expresses his mission to Menou-Segrais in this manner: “God has
inspired me with this thought, that He thus pointed out my vocation, that I was
to pursue Satan in souls, and that I should thereby inevitably compromise my
peace, my priestly honor, and even my salvation.” To this end, he has been
given the supernatural gift of reading souls. The reception and fulfillment of
such a special mission obviously demand great sensitivity to the promptings of
the will of God, to the false but clever promptings of Satan, and respect for
what is most intimate in others, in a soul profoundly formed in humility and
obedience.
Whereas Father Donissan has been set apart
by God, the Pharisee has set himself apart. Rather than humbly submitting to
the judgment of another he depends on his own righteousness. Rather than
following the idea God has for him, he has crafted his own idea of himself,
wholly illusory and deceptive, and rendered himself incapable of any genuine
encounter with anyone, not God, not himself, not his neighbor, upon whom he
looks down with contempt.
Here we skip to the encounter with
Mouchette on an empty country road in the early hours of the morning.
Father Donissan has been walking all night,
an extraordinary night that turned out to be pivotal for his life and ministry.
He had gotten lost, and encountered Satan in the form of a horse trader, then an
angel-like figure of simple purity and goodness in the form of a quarryman going
to work. In both, he was given for the first time the gift of reading souls.
Mouchette will be his third encounter, and the one for which the other two were
preparation. He was now passing the property of the Marquis.
Distracted, consumed by a pervasive sorrow, and unable to sleep, Mouchette has been drawn once again to the home of her lover,
who is no longer, the secret of the cause of whose death remains hers alone.
She hails him, not recognizing in the dark
who it is at first. Not happy with her discovery, nevertheless they walk
together. He sees into her and tells her what he sees. The narrator explains:
“What she heard from him was not the judge’s sentence nor anything that might
surpass the understanding of this lowly and sullen little animal, but – with a
terrible gentleness – her own story, the story of Mouchette, not dramatized by
a stage manager, adorned with rare and exotic detail, but indeed summarized,
reduced to nothing, seen from within.”
As they walk, a battle arises between God
and Satan for the soul of Mouchette, between hope and despair, in which at one
moment a small flicker of hope seems to emerge, and in the next she makes a
retreat back into the familiar comfort of darkness.
Along with Mouchette’s personal story, there
is given her family history, that of her relatives, and other significant
figures. In each of them, along with the humble facts of daily life, there is
uncovered the mystery of sin and its terrible monotonous unifying sameness:
“Everywhere sin was bursting its shell, was laying bare the mystery of its
procreation: scores of men and women bound together in the fibers of the same
cancer …And abruptly Mouchette saw herself as she had never seen herself, …She
had recognized herself in [this family history] and…no longer distinguished
between herself and that herd. What! Not one of her life’s acts which had not
elsewhere its double? Not a thought which was her very own, not a motion which
had not long since been made? Not alike but the same. Not repeated but one.
…she felt in her wretched little life the huge deceit, the huge laughter of the
deceiver.”
Mouchette had built her life around her
favorite imaginary character: “a girl of danger and mystery, with a unique
destiny, a heroine among the cowardly and the dim-witted… And yet, today, this
very moment… it was all collapsing. 178
At depth, the prayer of the Pharisee and the
life of Mouchette reveal themselves as one in their unreality. At one level
they may appear very different but, they are one insofar as each has
constructed and maintained a false image of themselves by which they have set
themselves apart from and above others. The huge deceit is that their efforts
never rise above the daily, dull monotony, the sameness, of sin.
The tragedy of Mouchette is that pierced by
this self-knowledge she flees from Donissan. It is too much for her. Back in her room, alone, she struggles with them, working
through them in order to find the key so that she may find peace for her
troubled, restless soul. Yet she had no means to “solve the puzzle she had
set herself. That is, “How would she raise herself by her own powers to the
height where the man of God had suddenly carried her?” [Given her wholly
secular upbringing] she is incapable of the prayer of the tax collector, for
she did not know the divine mercy and was even incapable of imagining it. She
chooses the only comfort she can imagine; the darkness offered by Satan and
slits her throat with a razor. This act will take her life, but not before
Father Donissan comes to her bedside and obeys her one last request – to be
laid on the porch of the nearby church, where she breathes her last.
How many souls today are in precisely this
situation; in some way or other they have glimpsed the divine light, which has
left its seal on their hearts but do not know the grace of the divine mercy,
which is the only thing that could bear them up out of their darkness and into
the freedom of that inaccessible light.
Let us choose the prayer of the tax collector and put away anything that would smack of the arrogant self-sufficiency of the Pharisee, that our monastic life may be a light for our world and show a path out of the consuming darkness.
Photographs by one of the monks. Today's Homily by Father Timothy.
