Lately I've been reading Grahame Greene's fantastic novel, The Power and the Glory, and it has really affected me. If I thought my posts to be more memorable, I would warn against spoilers, but since you probably will not remember any specific details from this even if you do end up reading the book, which I of course recommend, I will press on. In it the Catholic Church is being violently suppressed in a rural Mexican province, to the point where only two priests remain who haven't been executed or fled. One renounced his vocation and married in order to save his life and is now trapped in despair; the other, always refered to as "that whiskey priest", has serious moral failures, not least of them his alcoholism. As the only remaining priest however, he feels the weight of responsibility and the tension between his calling and his failures. He longs to be caught by the authorities at times because he feels unworthy, but knows it is his duty to avoid capture, visit the villages in his parish and minister the sacraments of confession.
Hopping to another novel and another writer, in Dostoevksy's The Idiot there is a similar tension in one of the female characters. The story revolves around two overlapping love triangles basically, the common point of which is the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin. It opens with Myshkin returning to Russia after years spent convalescing at a sanatorium in Switzerland. Upon arriving, he is quickly confronted with choosing between two women: Aglaia, a beautiful young girl he feels natural attraction to and the pitiful Natasha Filippovna. Natasha was orphaned at a young age and taken in by a wealthy noble who provides for her education. She grows into a strikingly beautiful girl herself and is the victim of what nowadays we call statutory rape by her "patron", and becomes a kept woman. At the start of the story, her patron, now looking to marry is trying to off-load her even offering to pay someone to take her, as she is "damaged goods". The two who eventually end up competing for her affections and making up the two legs of our second triangle are Myshkin and a man who is very nearly his antithesis, Rogozhin. All this complicated introduction is made to come to one main point (for my post at least), Natasha Filippovna must decide wheter to go with Myshkin who is sacrificing his high position and social standing to save her (she would basically be regarded as a prostitute at that time) or the wild, unprincipled Rogozhin who she perhaps thinks she deserves. The tragedy is that she really does love Myshkin, but fears she would ruin him; she feels the loving thing to do is to prevent her from loving him and choosing Rogozhin. This type of character occurs in several of big D's novels, including Notes from Underground, from which this blog partially takes it's name (along with the Herbert poem heading the page). All of them feel a call to goodness and life, but feel unable to live up to the standard they think they must meet to be saved. Rather than be caught between the two, they try to go Underground, to embrace wickedness and so become something- a wicked man. They always fail, they can't really becoming completely evil, they still feel the call to life, and this is a grace.
I see quite a bit of myself in both these characters, both with the relationship problems of Natasha Filippovna- if I, out of Christian love, want a good man for a girl I'm interested in and know I'm not a good man, what do I do?- and because I quite frankly don't feel qualified for my vocation. But then grace comes in. You can't fall to the temptation Natasha and the "whiskey priest" felt to sacrifice yourself- martyrdom can't be chosen and the Sacrifice has already been made. Christ came to bring new life to the dead. Man occupies the place as Luther said of being "simultaneously sinner and justified"; I know myself to be a pretty poor man, but in Christ I am declared to be otherwise. And this is not simply a vain, "Aww, you're not so bad!", but fully acknowledges my wrong, crucifies it, and actually creates that which it calls me to be. Justification is not simply a declaration of God's indifference to my sin, it is a collaborative effort through the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian to bring him into the newness of life. Despite all this, sin is still destructive, temporally at least, and human rebellion can at least change the way in which the God works to "interweave all things to the good." So what do y'all think, how gracious are we called to be? Is NAMB or the IMB, for instance, right in barring Christians with rough pasts from service? What about sins that people still struggle with? (Because we love victory stories- "I used to beat my wife and get drunk every night. Now look at my smiling family and our perfectly straight teeth. Gee, thanks Jesus! This abundant life is awesome!"- but we don't like so much to hear about people who still struggle or doubt). As far as forgiveness goes I think we all agree that grace covers, but at what point does discipline come in?
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