Okay, I’d like to call this first meeting of the JimmyAkin.Org Literary Club to order.
(Bangs gavel several times. Waves it threateningly at one member of the crowd, who quickly settles down.)
Our story today is "Through and Through" by Catholic fantasy author Tim Powers.
If you didn’t do your homework and read the story (or if your time zone prevented you from doing so–drat these global forums!) then kindly read it now. It’s the post just under this one.
To prevent spoilerage, I’m putting my own remarks on the story in the below-the-fold part of this post. Please feel free to add your own remarks on the story and the issues it raises in the combox, and I hope you’ll enjoy this first-ever meeting of the JA.O Literary Club!
(NOTE TO OTHER BLOGGERS: If you like the story and the discussion of it, you might invite your own readers to join in!)
I first read "Through and Through" in the anthology Strange Itineraries
By far the most heavily Catholicly-themed story is "Through and Through," which occurs almost entirely in a confessional and raises numerous points of Catholic theology in a very short space.
Merely having Catholic themes is not enough for me to like a story, though. There’s a lot of Catholic-themed stuff out there that’s junk.
What I liked about this story was the way that it used the issues it raised to illuminate the human condition, which is one of the fundamental goals of literature.
The fact is that there are a lot of priests out there who are like the one in this story: They’re old enough that they used to genuflect and they got taught authentic doctrine in seminary, but in recent years they’ve let themselves drift into a kind of pious unbelief where they see their main goal as "helping people" by being reassuring and comforting and not making any demands on their belief or their behavior.
Taking this attitude toward others then lets them expect the same things for themselves, and so they are able to excuse their own sins–saying Mass daily in a state of mortal sin, drinking in the confessional, being willing to blame their drinking on someone else.
In fact, one suspects that it’s really the latter that is the horse which is pulling the cart: They want to excuse their own sins, and so they adopt a theology of "I’m OK, you’re OK."
But one day they’re going to get a comeuppance–either in this life or the next.
Fortunately, the priest in our story gets his comeuppance in this life. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of "A Christmas Carol," he’s visited by a ghost who confronts him with the reality of what he has done and offers him a chance for redemption.
For an orthodox Catholic, what this priest has done is terrible indeed: He selfishly and cluelessly uses a blanket of his comfort theology to smother a hurting soul–a soul who was in the process of finally coming to grips with what she had done, and she was taking the Church and its teachings seriously–and in the process he so alienates her that she walkes out of the confessional and dies unshriven.
That’s horiffic. (Which makes this a horror story.)
And its something that too many priests have done in real life.
Fortunately, this one gets a message from beyond before it’s too late, and as soon as he’s mugged by what he views as unreality, he starts to take things very seriously indeed.
His old, disbelieved theology comes out of the closet, and he starts wrestling with it–knowing that his life and his soul are on the line.
But like so often happens to us when we’ve gone down a bad path for a long time, he finds that there’s no easy way back to the right path! He realizes that he can’t absolve something that isn’t a human being, or who can’t repent, so he feels torn between the obvious need to provide some kind of absolution and the need to avoid profaning the sacrament by using it improperly and risk going to hell (or going deeper in hell) if he doesn’t make it out of the confessional alive.
His solution is to switch sacraments–to change to the anointing of the sick that is part of the last rites–which is a very appropriate and artistically satisfying choice (though if I were him, I’d be doing it as a conditional anointing).
Ultimately, he does what he can to both honor his preception of Church teaching and provide the healing that he (and we) know is needed for Jane (or what’s left of her) and for himself.
In the end, he learns his lesson, and at the end of the story he’s taking his job seriously as he listens to the next penitent’s confession.
This story raises a bunch of theological issues–more than I can comment on here. If I were to nitpick the story theologically, it could be pointed out that if this happened in the real world then the priest could have done a conditional absolution (and should have done a conditional anointing), but these could have further complicated the story and risked taking the dramatic tension out of it, so that’s just nitpicking. Also, since the priest has reason to think that this encounter isn’t occurring in normal space and time but in some kind of visionary mode, the need to make these sacraments conditional may not apply.
One theological issue that I will comment on is that the priest doesn’t have the ability to withhold absolution from some sins and not others. Though I can easily imagine a nitwit priest telling a penitent that he won’t absolve her from things he doesn’t view as sins but he will absolve her from others, in reality absolution does not work in that kind of dim sum manner. You either get absolved of all of your mortal sins or none of them. Thus if the priest absolves you at all, all of your mortal sins vanish, whether the priest viewed something you confessed as a sin or not.
Though the story doesn’t tell us this, the priest appears to be a Tim Powers fan, since several themes that often crop up in Powers books show up in his stream of consciousness: He knows what the word "revenant" means, he has the idea that apparent ghosts may be the sloughed-off remains of a soul that has gone to its final fate, and he interprets the supernatural in terms of collapsing waves of quantum realities. All that is pure Powers.
But then he’s not the only priest to have Powers books on his shelf.
(He’s also sci-fi aware enough that he gets put off from the term "Communion" by a Whitley Streiber UFO book.)
Of course, the major focus on the story is on the priest, but the real engine moving the plot is Jane, the penitent.
I really like her character: She’s sinned–bad–and knows it, but she takes Church teaching seriously and wants to do what she needs to to get right with God. Unfortunately, she’s fragile, and she isn’t strong enough to deal with a priest who’s openly trying to subvert her faith.
Rather than have her faith subverted, she leaves–which is what so many of the faithful did when their priests went nutty.
Fortunately, we may still hope that God’s mercy is with her–despite her suicide. As the Catechism states:
We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives (CCC 2283).
If the priest in this story knew his Catechism better ("Sorry, but the Catechism is so pre-Vatican II," he might say) then he might have realized that he could have been looking at one of the ways God knows to provide the opportunity for repentance for people who commit suicide.
He also may have been looking at someone who died in a state of grace, but with a lot of answering to do, and thus someone for whom purgatory meant going back and wringing absolution from the priest that she didn’t have the strength to endure before–thus making up for what she should have done (stay in the confessional and get it out of him the first time) and help him, too, in a Jacob Marleyesque bank shot.
However that may be, the thematic core of the story–"Deliver us from evil"–gives us hope that not only the priest but the penitent ultimately found what was needed.
Now for some miscellaneous things I liked about the story:
I like the way the story contains authentic little touches about psychology and human life. Little children really do (so I am led to believe) have "Chinese-restaurant-style confessions" of the sort described in the story, and priests who try to get creative with penances (especially with children and the scrupulous) really do cause more problems than they solve.
I also like the way the priest has totally missed the point of confession (villains never see villains in the mirror). At one point he resents Jane for not wanting "help" from him, when the help he envisions giving is talking about the nature of sin and being comforted that she hasn’t committed it. He thinks derisively that what she needs is an 800 number where she can enter her sins on a numeric keypad instead of receiving psycho-spiritual counselling.
But this completely misses the point! Confession is not about psycho-spiritual counselling. It’s about confessing your sins and getting them absolved. The "help" that the sacrament is supposed to offer is first and foremost absolution from sins, not bland reassurances that they virtually don’t exist.
I also liked the psychological touches of the priest being relieved that Jane hadn’t left a suicide note which could have fingered him and the touch of imagining how he would defend to the bishop the fact that he gave the anointing of the sick to a ghost!–one of the moments of humor that often show up in Powers stories.
Humor was also on display when Jane is looking "through and through" the priest and how spiritually hollow he is and says "Hollowed be thy name."
The use of voices in the story was also nice, with the priest hearing his own voice confessing his sins at one point and with Jane’s voice sounding like it was at the other side of a hallway as she fades out.
This dreamlike character of the story was manifested in other ways, such as when the priest feels with "the intimacy of sore muscles" that he is responsible for the way Jane’s ghost is appearing to him. (Though I might have picked a different metaphor here, like "He felt it in his bones," though that might be viewed as too cliche.)
The way the priest is forced to think through different possibilities–including the fact that he may already be dead!–is good, as are particular images from the story, such as the way the anointing oil pools under Jane’s eyes like tears (of joy? relief? sadness? all of these?).
And I was very impressed with the idea of Adam’s fall locking in a violent, death-laden pre-history for the earth, whereas if he had come out of Eden unfallen it would have been a pristine, non-violent pre-history.
I don’t think that’s what really happened, of course, but it’s a marvellously imaginative idea.
So those are my thoughts on the story.
What are yours?
Incidentally, if you enjoyed "Through and Through," you might want to try some other Powers stories, such as those contained in Strange Itineraries or his Catholic-themed novel Declare (I haven’t read that one yet, but it comes recommended by other JA.O readers).
P.S. A special thanks to Tim Powers for giving permission to reprint the story!
Waaal, Jimmy, you kinda took all my comments away! All that’s left is “caring and sharing” about my own personal Confession horror stories…. 🙂
Seriously, though, I really enjoyed this story. It talked about real stuff that means something. It also made a sly kind of point — that sometimes those of us who are intellectual sf types can use our musings about how things work to paralyze ourselves — to avoid thinking about what we should be doing, or feeling uncomfortable emotions.
Clearly, I need to read more Tim Powers.
Sorry to be nitpicky, but the post just under this one is about a polar / grizzly bear hybrid. 🙂
The story really struck me especially because my son is making his first confession tomorrow!
It spoke to the “it’s all good” mindset that can be found in various confessionals and in many Catholics in general today.
The aspect which struck me the most however, was in the area of the priesthood. Priests really need prayers because many of them have lost the Faith along with the rest of society. Our shepherds have become the “lost sheep” and the story illustrates that God goes wants to bring them back too. We need to be asking for graces for priests because they are under major attack and thus leading others astray as well.
Cheers! As it is now edging toward lunch in my time zone, I can lift my frosty mug of Rolling Rock without qualm.
I will comment more later, but for now I will note two things:
First, I really enjoyed the shift in what looked like an ordinary dramatic short story turning into a ghost story.
I have never read Tim Powers before. When it became apparent that the little girl was the same woman who had killed herself earlier, I was almost as surprised as the backslidden priest. Powers didn’t “telegraph” this ahead of time, and so it had a good, solid dramatic punch that I truly appreciated.
Secondly, like Jimmy, I was ” …very impressed with the idea of Adam’s fall locking in a violent, death-laden pre-history for the earth, whereas if he had come out of Eden unfallen it would have been a pristine, non-violent pre-history.”.
This is a very powerful and poetic way of exploring what scripture really means when God says “Cursed is the ground (earth) for thy sake.”.
The idea that, when Adam and Eve fell, they took all of Nature down with them, is a common theme in Christian thought. Powers gives our fallen parents dominion over, not just the physical territory of the earth, but over its history, as well. Sin became like a seismic wave that rippled through space-time, altering and polluting even the past.
Good stuff.
I find myself wishing that the woman in the story had lived. She sounds like someone who would be interesting to know. Might have made a formidable nun.
Thanks, Jimmy. This is an inspired idea!
More later.
“Abruptly he remembered that the door to the confessional opened outward.”
This line gave me the feeling you have when in a dream you are running but can not get anywhere and something wicked this way comes.
I really enjoyed the story and emailed it to my family. I hope it scares the purgatory out of them.
Looking forward to the next JA.O Literary (Pub) Club selection.
Doood, I think I confessed to that guy once. Ugh.
Good story. I read it in the dark at about 1 a.m. so when the girl reveals herself I got creeped out.
Lot of issues brought up. I still want to know how such a man (a priest with no faith) comes to exist, but, as I eluded to in the first sentence, I know they do, and that creeps me out the most. That’s the worst horror story of all–the one that’s true.
After my first reading I had a couple of nitpicking observations, but after reading Jimmys take on it I went back and read the story a second time And thought perhaps that I was reading to much into the story. They had to do with the validity of the sacrament and whether or not the priest was recieving communion in a state of mortal sin (wouldn’t he know? or was it perhaps something he no longer gave any thought to?). But on the second reading these seemed a little more vague so perhaps I am bringing more to the story than I should.
One of the things that has not been touched on yet is as catholics what do we consider to be the nature of a ghost? Exactly what is it? All the traditional writings I can find seem to lean towards what it is not. I cannot remember what book or article I read but the author stated flatly that whatever else a ghost may be it is not a spirit of a deceased person. Now if the church has not given a definitive view on this, and I do not remember that it has, then we are free to explore this question and storytelling is a perfectly valid way to do so. The thinking seems to be be that if a ghost is not a spirit of a deceased person then is it perhaps a demon (a spirit in itself) trying our faith by appearing in the form of the deceased. So in that light could we read the story as a demon or devil forcing the priest to confront his faith or the problems of his faith?
Thank you Jimmy for posting that story, and thank you Tim for letting him. I’m a long-time Tim Powers reader (I’ve read “Anubis Gates” and “Last Call” so many times I can’t count) and it was such a treat to read this story.
It made me cry.
It hits me very close to home right now with its theme of Jane urgently wanting to “get right” with God before her death. My mom has been very ill for a year, and is near death now, and yet she refuses to admit she is dying or even talk about death. Also her medical condition makes her very confused and disoriented, so it’s even harder to talk about serious things. I wish she had some of the urgency that poor Jane had.
When I got my copy of Strange Itineraries a while back and first read the bit that goes, “clouds of evicted sins polluted the air afterward, interfering with TV reception and making cars hard to start,” I remember thinking that it was such a very Tim Powers notion. At the time, the priest’s obvious sci-fi background never clicked with me, but now that Jimmy points it out it is a bit entertaining to think that the priest in the story might be a Powers reader.
Of everything I’ve read by Tim so far, this story is among my top three favorites. Partly because it’s so well done and evocative, and perhaps also partly because it’s so darn cathartic for those of us who have had to deal with the occasional evasive, minimizing confessor.
I like the story. The worst point: I found the collapsing quantum waves portion to be a bit too pretentious for the character. It took me right out of the story for a moment.
The best part: The moment when the priest WAS the old woman.
I also wondered about his sister, the one who baptized animals. Was she insane, or did this happen when they were kids. For some reason, I started picturing a grown woman with some sort of disorder that made her think that animals were people…
Lawrence: Hmm. While the apparition needn’t be exactly what the priest character supposes it is, I don’t think the story easily admits that particular interpretation. While the apparition, whatever it is, isn’t exactly safe, in the framework of the story I wouldn’t expect a demon to react so placidly to the blessed oil.
Now, in real life, I understand that occasional people (including saints) have had encounters with ghosts which would seem to preclude a demonic hypothesis because of the particulars of those cases; it may be that there are different sorts of ghosts as e.g. Peter Kreeft proposes. But demonic deception is always a possibility, and certainly not one to lightly discard.
At the start, the priest’s character seemed a bit 2-d to me. His theology was cliched, and drinking in the confessional seemed like characterization on the cheap.
Then I realized:
1. Lots of priests really are this 2-d, especially the ones who have bought into the theology of this priest.
2. This is a horror story. It’s the engagement with horror that fleshes out the 2-d characters. The characters who don’t develop and adapt are killed off.
I’m glad I read it. Thank you both.
When I first read this story a few months back, my first impression about the priest anointing the ghost was that he was making a mockery out of the sacrament, in spite of his vague qualms about it, but since the priest didn’t believe in the power of the sacraments anyway, it was just all academic. One more sin to add to his own confession, once he finally realized his own errors and sinfulness.
But Jimmy’s explanation turns on the light bulb for me. I am sure now that Powers meant it exactly as Jimmy explains it. The solution to the quandary was to switch Sacraments, and as long as it’s done conditionally, then there is no mockery. I feel much better with this understanding!
That said, I still cried the first time I read the description of the Anointing of the Sick–and I cried again just now. How beautifully this shows the real and actual healing power of this Sacrament. The priest’s own healing is coming about in the process of administering it. Which was the real purpose why God allowed this ghost to appear to this priest in the first place, I thought as I was reading it.
I sure have known priests I’d wished would have seen a ghost in Confession, or something supernatural to jolt their faith back in place, at any rate.
I also love the concept about the things not yet perceived being affected by the moral and spiritual state of the first perceiver! His comparing of the different appearances of the new Jane-ghost being based on the poor spiritual state of the priest, who is the first to perceive her, to that of sinful Adam stepping outside the Garden for the first time is a brilliant intertwining and explanation of the two types of sin: Original Sin and Personal Sin! This was just poetic.
I think this story, along with Jimmy’s excellent explanation, should be taught in all Catholic high schools! What a terrific segway for apologetics discussion!
Thanks for doing this, Jimmy! And thanks, Tim, for your fine writing, as usual!
MenTaLguY:” wouldn’t expect a demon to react so placidly to the blessed oil.”
You’re right of course, all the of the accounts of our encountering demons would indicate that would send them back to where they came from, I do remember reading Peter Kreefts article on the subject. Different types of ghosts does seem to make the most sense. I am not saying that ghosts are not manifestations of the dead, God can certainly do whatever He wants for His own reasons. But it’s interesting to speculate what else they may be.
ppsshwaaawwwwfffhh—-
shoot!… Tim J.
frosty mug of Rrrrooolllling Rok!
you made me spew my Guiness out my nose and all over my keyboard and moniter.
: )
nothing like a good mug with interesting mental intercourse.
Cheers to you, Tim J and to all!!!
good call, Jimmy on the literary club!!
Wonderful story!
I especially liked the symbolism involved in the door of the confessional, which usually opened outward, opening inward when the ghost entered. Sacraments are outward signs instituted by Christ to confer grace; when the confessional in the story works properly, the door opens outward, the focus on those outside (both literally and ‘outside the state of grace’) and how they can physically enter in and spiritually re-enter the state of grace. When the ghost enters, the door opens inward, signifying at least two things: one, that the priest has been forcing penitents to enter into his reality, where words like sin and grace have little meaning, thereby depriving them of the opportunity to be restored to a right relationship with God, and two, that the principle recipient of God’s grace on this occasion will be the priest himself (though the ghostly penitent may also benefit).
How marvelous! Not only is there usually a lot to chew over in his writing (I’ve read his novels “The Drawing of the Dark” and “Anubis Gates”, but his brother has taught English to two (soon to be three) of my children. (And a very good English teacher is Mr. Powers!) That connection is how we got our books autographed.
So I wholeheartedly endorse this first choice of the Jimmy Akin Literary Club — and have invited my readers to join in.
Great story. All of the things I wanted to write were already written. I think I’ll read some of Powers’ other works and urge my brother to do the same as he likes to read horror/fantasy works.
There’s a lot to admire in this short story, and much of it has already been said.
I admire the way Powers hooks the reader from the start with the way he brings his scenario into focus over the first few grafs. We don’t learn right away that the man is a priest. All we see at first is a no longer pious man who finds himself in a church on a Saturday, a man perhaps reflexively looking for a woman he once knew, perhaps someone he had a history with. Then, oh no, something else is going on here. The penitents lining up as he enters the church aren’t just looking to protect their place in line.
The business about rote penances has a nice double-edge quality to it. On the one hand we see the priest’s disillusionment and disaffection for his sacramental duties, but OTOH the illustration of the boy who was terrified to tell his parents he loved them certainly gives us some sympathetic insight into how he got that way.
Whether or not one approves of “creative” penances isn’t the point, any more than whether one supports bastardized Dylan Thomas penances for cast-off spectral shells. The point is, before the priest at least cared and was idealistically trying to help, and now he’s checked out, and we see why.
Although there is clearly a level of theological critique here, the story is very sympathetic to the protagonist who represents the point of view being critiqued. He’s not a straw man to be knocked down. As a critic I get so tired of sloppy writers who don’t bother to care about characters they disagree with — it totally turns me off. So that’s something I really admire about this story.
The door swinging inward. This is as unsettling as anything that follows, precisely because it makes no sense at all, and cannot be explained as such even within the framework of the subsequent developments. It’s something that’s just wrong, something that doesn’t fit, that gives you the uncomfortable feeling of being up against something that will not be figured out. The poster who compared it to a creepy dream was dead on. (FWIW, I know some people who believe that they once suffered supernatural harrassment in a particular house they lived in, and one of the things that happened involved a reversal of hardware that was permanent and unexplained, and this made me think of that.)
The psychological special effects when the priest first sees the ghost — the whispered screech, the wailing blood pressure, and especially the narrowing peripheral vision — really stand out. It’s hard to write another rug-pulled-out-from-under-one “jump” scene like this without falling back on cliches, but this one feels fresh and new to me.
I really enjoyed the story—it reminded me a bit of Bernanos, only post Vatican II. I’ll have to read more of Powers’ works!
Great story! A little veering on the “could promote superstitions” side, but probably nothing that could be done to deminish that, like making it occur in the distant past, would be worth it. The priest has to be like so many that that really exist today and ruin people’s confessions. Probably most any Catholic has met priests like this.
Most of my thoughts have already been stated by Jimmy or others. I will add that the priest’s hoping irrationally that the woman will be among the penitents that day was a neat touch. First it gives you insight into his emotional state, then later it makes you (or at least me) wonder, did he perceive on some subconcious level that she really was there? Was the apparition (or whatever) connected to or even the result of that desire? After this woman’s death some part of her still wanted absolution, but some part of the priest also still wanted to give her absolution. It makes you wonder what mysterious interaction there could have been between the two desires, which led to both of them being fulfilled, though not in the way either had been thinking of.
I also liked the idea of the forgiven sins feeling like they were hanging around the confessional or building after the confessions. Theologically impossible of course, but I could immediately imagine a priest feeling this. In fact I wonder if it is in fact a common feeling, weird stuff about TV reception etc. aside that maybe was Powers going to far. There seems to be at least a possibility of some connection between this feeling of the priest and the ghost, but what that is who can say? Likely that kind of mystery was part of Powers’.
I did think it odd that the shallow priest would have such profound thoughts about Original Sin and the nature of this being he was confronted with, especially in a scarry situation like this. I got the feeling the thoughts were somehow being revealed to him from outside. That he was a Tim Powers fan might also help explain it. But added a strange, seemingly unrealistic aspect to the story that hurt at least my suspension of disbelief, rather than adding to the sence of mystery. A story need not at all follow the rules of the real world, but it should be internally consistent.
I’m very glad I got to read it though.
MissJean,
My thought about the sister who baptized animals was that this is a very “liberal” person who believs (as more than one “Catholic” I know does) that animals, or probably indeed everything in nature has a soul, or that you there is no distinction between “spirit” and matter,” that that is a false duelism born of human pride.
Both views are an attempt,stemming from a legitimate distaste for human pride and overly hierarchical thinking, the perception of the spiritual in physical nature (the spirit is really God who is distinct from but reflected or represented by the beauty of nature), and a mistaken imagining of rational decision making behind animal actions. From either false standpoint, baptizing animals becomes an understandable action, and I would be supprised if it were not sometimes done. I have heard of a woman who gave her dog the Eucharist. What do you bet she baptized it first?
I not only enjoyed this story and all the comments made about it, I’m looking forward already to the next story picked by Jimmy!
He knew that he was responsible for the form she took; when she walked in, she had been an uncollapsed wave of possible appearances, all the appearances she’d ever had; it was his guilt that had collapsed all the percentages of possibilities down to this small “one.” . . .
Writing like this seems to be a bit on the nose. I wish he could have conveyed his points through the actions of the priest rather than having the priest sit in the presence of the ghost and muse about supernatural phenomena as “collapsing waves of quantum realities.”
The beginning and the end of the story were strong, but it seemed a bit saggy around the middle where it focuses on the priest’s metaphysical stream of consciousness.
Thanks, everybody, for all the nice comments! Jimmy has found the perfect audience for this story — though it’d be fun to hear from some offended progressive Catholic who believes Hell and Purgatory, and even Heaven, are leftover medieval fictions that we need to discard. A friend of mine has said that modern catechesis at his Catholic school consists of two precepts: Don’t judge anybody, and Recycle your aluminum cans.
My wife got very tired of a local priest forever telling her, “That’s not a sin,” or “Since Vatican II we don’t consider that a sin anymore,” and finally she told him in the confessional, “Just don’t talk, okay? I don’t need help coming up with rationalizations, I can do that myself better than you can. Absolve me or not, but don’t talk to me.”
Incidentally, the family that would have taken “I love you, Mom and Dad” as evidence of insanity was my own! Even to this day, now that we’re all middle-aged or worse, if one of us said anything like that, the rest of us would charitably assume he was maudlinly drunk.
Several commenters are probably right in saying that the business about Adam collapsing reality like somebody looking into Schrodinger’s Cat-Box is not something that would have occurred to this priest. But it is a neat idea! I’ve always wondered about that — why did animals die horribly for millenia _before_ Adam sinned?
I’m glad people didn’t find the priest a flat character. I’ve known priests who thought the way he did — C. S. Lewis said somewhere that it used to be the case that the man in the pew was ashamed to let the priest know how much less he believed than the priest did, but these days the man in the pew finds it awkward to let the priest know how much _more_ he believes than the priest does.
I hope that’s not overly optimistic! That is, I hope the people in the pews do still believe in the Real Presence, Heaven & Hell, the Resurrection, and all the rest of it!
And what I figure ghosts are — I got it from Chesterton, I believe — is animate cast-off shells of a dead person, left behind while the person himself has gone to Heaven or Hell. I think Chesterton said, “If you’re being haunted by the ghost of your Uncle George, your Uncle George doesn’t know anything about it.”
I don’t think these “cast-off shells” are very bright, which would explain the moronic statements mediums get when they try to channel ghosts. I once saw a book of sonnets by Percy Shelley, written through a medium after Shelley’s death, and he had just lost all his skill.
Thanks, Tim P! It was good AND Catholic rather than “good, for a Catholic story”.
This was a great idea, Jimmy. I hope somehow you will be able to continue to do this on a semi-regular basis.
Mr. Powers seems to have penned a well-written and surprisingly spine-chilling story. In an age where most writers substitute gore or cheap suspense for true horror, it is heartening to finally see an author who is able to compose a story that is genuinely creepy (and it is rare for me to find anything creepy, these days).
The Catholicity of the story is apparent without being overbearing. Rather than reading like an apologetic tract disguised as fiction, the religious elements are woven directly into the fabric of this tale, thus making it effective even for someone who is not Catholic (though some of our more wayward Catholic friends might find some flaw in it; but they find flaws in everything beautiful).
As for the cleric in the tale, he is quite a recurring character in real life. I have always felt rather betrayed by his ilk. Priests who say things like “receiving the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin is not sinful” are like medical doctors who say things like “ingesting cyanide is not harmful to your health”; they fail in their duty to look out for their patient’s health. For the medical doctor, the health is physical; for the priest, the health is spiritual.
In regards to the actual apparition herself, I could not decide if it was supposed to be (1) an actual ghost (2) an hallucination brought on by guilt or (3) something else altogether. In this sense, this story bears comparison to Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart”, in which the reader is left to decide if the beating of the heart was the result of madness, supernatural inference, etc.
All in all a good story. Keep up the good work Mr. Powers! I hope to read more of his writing someday soon.
Randolph, yes, a doctor is a good comparison. I smoke, but if I ran into a doctor who told me, “Hey, smoking’s not going to hurt you,” I’d ask for my money back. There are some professionals from whom we don’t want to hear what we want to hear.
(Neat sentence!)
Just a couple of things.
I have had priests for confession who are just like this guy, and I really hate it. First of all, treating something sinful like it isn’t sinful precludes any sort of help from the priest in dealing with that problem. Secondly, a priest saying something like that really plants doubts in my head, because they’re supposed to have a better handle on sin than I do – after all, they’re part of the institutional Church, not me! Deference, respect, and reasonable obedience to priests (which we are supposed to observe) really open us up to getting sent off the straight and narrow by priests like this one. I know my sins are absolved – I just become less sure which ones to look out for.
Secondly, the priest’s interior conversation as the story went on reminded me very strongly of “A Canticle for Liebowitz” by Walter M. Miller Jr. I highly recommend that anyone who enjoyed this story take a look at that book.
Keep up the good work Jimmy!
Just a couple of things.
I have had priests for confession who are just like this guy, and I really hate it. First of all, treating something sinful like it isn’t sinful precludes any sort of help from the priest in dealing with that problem. Secondly, a priest saying something like that really plants doubts in my head, because they’re supposed to have a better handle on sin than I do – after all, they’re the ones who are part of the institutional Church, not me! Deference, respect, and reasonable obedience to priests (all of which we are supposed to observe) really open us up to getting sent off the straight and narrow by priests like this one. I know my sins are absolved – I just become less sure which ones to look out for.
Secondly, the priest’s interior conversation as the story went on reminded me very strongly of “A Canticle for Liebowitz” by Walter M. Miller Jr. I highly recommend that anyone who enjoyed this story take a look at that book.
Keep up the good work Jimmy!
I’m a priest, and I know priests with similar ideology. (I won’t even call even call it “bad THEO-logy”. It isn’t theology at all.) When I’m in the presence of priests like this I feel like we come from different planets. Talk about science fiction.
Fr. Gabriele Amorth, Rome’s chief exorcist, documents his experience and knowledge in “An Exorcist Tells His Story”. He says some persons are simply pathological, not really beset by a demon. However, he acknowledgtes as objectively real some experiences of “ghosts”–but he says they are NOT the “ghosts” of human beings, but always demonic manifestations. The devil even “disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14).
I am not suggesting the young woman who came to confess before she died was a demon.
However, the “apparition” the priest received after she died would be classed by Fr. Amorth either as a demonic manifestation or as a psychopathological experience of the priest himself.
Phantasms or demons aside….
The priest does badly in this story. I try to take confessions at face value: someone says to me “I committed sin Z”, I believe him. If he offers me some of the situation or circumstance of sin Z, I might offer some brief counsel (though I avoid this if there is a line waiting outside the confessional).
“Creative” penances. In the years leading up to my ordination, I didn’t like the idea of assigning multiples of this or that prayer as a penance. However, I’ve come to think instead that prayer is one obligation of a relationship with God, and since sin attacks that relationship (indeed one form of sin is the failure to pray), a repentant sinner does well to return to prayer. So, I usually assign as a penance the “Our Father” (just one) AND the “Hail, Mary” (just two).
I will often attach an intention to that penance–an intention related to the sin. “Offer it up for your mother and father” (a penance for a child who confesses having talked back to them). Or, “Pray for those affected by your sins–say the ‘Our Father’ and the ‘Hail, Mary’ for those people”. Perhaps better, “Pray for those who have sinned against you….” To a man who has been unchaste with a woman: “Pray for her….” Or to a husband who has masturbated: “Pray for your wife….”
In offering the sacrament, the priest must remember: the SACRAMENT is what should offer comfort to the sinner. However, if there is no forgiveness, there is NO sacrament. It’s my role to offer FORGIVENESS through the sacrament. It’s not MY role to offer comfort. It’s the SACRAMENT’S role to offer comfort.
If I have occasion, reason and time to offer some other (possibly comforting and possibly challenging) words to the penitent, then I might–but I do so knowing that I’m there to take sin seriously so as to offer God’s forgiveness simply.
I often wonder how “comfortable” the adulteress felt with the flat statement and the flat command she got from Jesus: “Neither do I condemn you” … “Go and do not sin again.” End of story. Go home. Who’s next in line?
I’d like to focus in on the idea in the story about original sin and what I will for simplicity call nature, though some quarrel about that concept. I hope doing this in multiple posts is not considered cheating to get around da rulz, and that I won’t be deleted due to da unritin rulz.
If I understand it, Mr. Powers suggests that the universe might have had any history depending on the state Adam was in when he entered the world. To simplify it in a way that would avoid removing Eden from Earth, one might suggest that the Earth’s history was changed by Adam’s sin from one of peace and happiness to one of violence and suffering. This stems from the Catholic idea of “physical evil” being related to “moral evil.” The Church’s teaching on this matter seems to be rather cryptic and mysterious, as is Gen. 3:18, making it natural material for this genre.
I believe a classical understanding of the matter would be that thorns ant thistles, and death, desease, and decay, and dangerous beasts, and extremes of whether, and probably nasty swamps and mosquitoes and the like. Tim Powers seems especially concerned with animal suffering.
However, a modern scientific viewpoint would preclude this interpretation, since we know preditors and death and volcanos and all of that has existed for millions of years. Mr. Powers finds a way to explane this while keeping the basic premise of how the world was “meant” to be.
I am reminded of something I read by Thomas Merton, to the effect of “Maybe people see nature the way they see people.” He was reflecting, I suppose, on how those who saw a dog-eat-dog world in human society tended to project that picture onto nature, while those who see interrelationship, cooperation, selflessness, kindness, in human society tended to project that image onto nature.
I think that is an oversimplification, though it is certainly to be observed in the competing ideologies in ecology and even the new debate over whether lichins should be considered a case of parasitism or mutualism (or some perhaps more realistic people say we should call them parasitic on the cellular level and mutualistic on the ecological level). Perhaps it is safer though to say that we frequently percieve the physical world through the lens of our own ideas and prejudices.
Some people hate to see an animal suffer and die, hate to see maggots, hate to think of fly larvae eating carabou brains, hate forest fires ’cause they kill stuff and even people and destroy property.
However, think: what would the world be like without lightning striking or tornados spinning, without wolves or lions on the prowl, and taking down their prey, without charging rhinos or roaring forest fires, without proud kittens bringing their mothers their first kills?
It would be a pretty diminished world, if you ask me. Could it have been God’s original plan?
J.R.R. Tolkien’s interpretation (if we may take The Silmarilion to represent his own views on the specific subject not just a metaphor for how God brings good out of evil) seems to be that the things in the physical world classically regarded as bad were indeed not in the ordaining will of God, but that he allowed them to come to pass as a result of moral evil in order that greater beauty (snowflakes and the fall of rain are specifically mentioned) may come to pass.
This seems more complete than Powers’ idea (while not excluding it, since Tolkien’s explanation of exactly how moral evil caused physical evil is entirely fictional, and also makes it Melkor’s (Satan’s) rebellion not Adam and Eve’s.
However this viewpoint still does not ring true to me. There seems too much of an implicit assigning of moral evil to physical things. The catechism (don’t have access to mine to quote from) makes clear a distinction between moral evil and physical evil, the latter somehow connected to the former but distinct. Whatever we say, we can not say that there is something morally wrong for a predator to hunt or for a parasite to do its thing or for a fire to burn a tree or a turtle.
Hello, J.R.!
I can’t see animal suffering as part of God’s original plan, independent of Adam & Eve’s sin. That is, I can’t imagine that if our firstr parents had not sinned they would have gone outside and found lions tearing antelope apart. If that _had_ happened, then I’d imagine it was because of some previous fundamental contamination by Satan. (If the blood & pain were what God had ideally intended for the poor beasts, then I’m reminded of God as Sebastian Venable saw Him, in Tennessee Williams’s _Suddenly Last Summer_!)
Hence my Schrodinger’s Cat explanation!
Yes, there’s certainly something splendid in hurricanes and charging lions; but of course God can tweak even the most disastrous consequences of bad choices into splendor. We never got to see the way it would have been without the consequences, so we just see absences when we try to imagine it.
Hello, J.R. —
Your third post snuck in while I was writing my last!
My own idea is the following. God created all natural creatures (again a fuzzy concept I know but let’s avoid tangents) and created them good. There is an order to nature (probably not a balance in the oldschool ecological sense but an order in the Christan sense). Human beings were meant to live in this world but not take part in the danger, disease, death, and decay because unlike animals we can really suffer, not just experience the triggering of pain receptors.
With original sin we lost this privilage, as well as having our relationships disordered. Loosing our right relationship with God, we lost or subordinate right relationships with other people, with ourselves (relationships between intellect, will, passions/flesh), and with nature. Forced to fend for ourselves in the same way as other animals as a result of sin, the raw forces of nature and many specific creatures (viruses, wasps, wind, mud, thorns and thistle, etc.) became our enimies. Since God loves us, these things that hurt us become evils. Not because there is anything wrong with them (hence they are not morally evil) but because there is something wrong with us.
When naturally good things created by God like grubs or wolf kills bother us again it is because there is something wrong with us, not with what we are looking at.
An interesting additional consideration would regard our own altering of nature. No one could call traditional agriculture evil in light of the Bible (and common sense I’d venture), or many other things. But what about the various kinds of pollution, extinctions, etc. This seems to be another aspect of the struggle between man and nature and deserves much attention, but I should stop writing.
In my previous comment, I wrote the following.
= So, I usually assign as a penance the “Our Father” (just one) AND the “Hail, Mary” (just two). =
I intended to write instead:
= AND the “Hail, Mary” (just one). =
.
In the light of the Bible, agriculture was part of original sin’s consequences, same as painful childbirth. Traditional agriculture is making “bread in the sweat of one’s brow”. It’s darned hard work; and though it’s nice to be able to store food, it also opens the door to state planning of agriculture, war for croplands, and “excess” people being used as slaves or treated like crud.
Also, it’s kinda hard on the plants. 🙂
God’s not terrible, though. Just as painful childbirth has its compensations, so does agriculture as hard work. But that doesn’t mean they’re both not a big pain, or that things couldn’t have been better. Adam and Eve didn’t pick that trouser leg of time. 🙂
Fr. Stephanos,
Those are great points about Confession, thanks! Especially about prayer being an obligation, hence an appropriate penance; and that it’s the sacrament itself, rather than any peripheral comment from the priest, that offers comfort to the penitent.
Another point — even if something I confess somehow _isn’t_ actually a sin, I thought it was when I did it. And therefore, it seems to me, it was a sin. Like, “I deliberately ate meat on what I thought was a Friday in Lent, but it turned out to be a Thursday.” The intention to sin was there, at least.
Maureen, good point about agriculture! And I love the phrase “that trouser leg of time.”
Maureen:
Pratchett fan?
I love the Catholic Faith and I also love the short story genre.
So a series of short stories with a Catholic theme: as Jimmy would say YEEEHAW.
It would be great if they could be bound in a single anthology.
Just a quick comment here on that story: even by his own shrunken, withered, ossified code, the priest has sinned: “isn’t the only real sin cruelty?”
He has been cruel to the woman who came seeking the sacrament and so he has sinned. And perhaps that is the first time something has managed to cut through his rationalisations and allowed his guilty conscience to finally make itself heard to him.
Great story, Tim!
Yep, I am a Pratchett fan. And he’s a nice guy, too.
There have been a couple of Catholic sf anthologies before, but I haven’t really been satisfied with the recent ones I’ve run across. There may have been older ones which I didn’t run across.
*kicking self for missing out on this over weekend*
First Tim Powers story that I have ever read. I don’t like ghost stories and I did not like this one. Are all his stories spooky? And are all his stories so overtly Catholic?
Ben,
I would say that all of Powers’ stories deal with some sort of spine-tingling element or another. He is a Science Fiction/Fantasy author, after all and that is one of his strongest appeals! And I would say that none of his stories are overtly Catholic. He certainly is never preachy. But I find his strong sense of moral order which weaves through all of his work, very refreshing, especially in this day of moral relativism and wishy washy boring subjective nothingness too many writers end up writing.
I can’t say too much more than what everyone has said here, though I will say that when Tim told me he was meeting with you, Jimmy, I had no idea it was about starting a literary club! What a completely (pardon the term) novel idea!!! 🙂 This is terrific!
On the story: Tim’s work is always brilliant, and I feel he really doesn’t get enough recognition (Fantasy Awards aside…). When I first read this, I couldn’t help but think that every priest on this planet should read it. In fact, I may just buy an extra copy of Strange Itineraries for my own priest for educational purposes. (Give him my own? You kidding? I may not get it back!)
Jane is a victim, of course. And I have been in the same condition as she has–confessing to taking the Eucharist while not in a state of grace. And I’ve received the same reaction from a priest. How ironic that this touchy-feely priest doesn’t want to touch the dead.
Jane’s words really struck me here:
“But it’s God, literally coming into us, right?” she interrupted. “If there’s oily rags and newspapers around, you’ll catch fire from the heat of Him, your soul gets scorched, right?”
Wow. How utterly poignant and powerful. I couldn’t have said better it myself, Jane.
I can’t say anything much more about the story because everyone else here has said it so well. I love Tim’s work, and I highly recommend that you all get out to the book store and buy Tim’s books – most especially Declare, which totally rocks the house.
–Ann Margaret Lewis
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It is a nice story. I really enjoyed reading it.