Deceptions and Enormities

I just finished reading a short story by the poet (and prolific writer in many genres) Donald Hall, "From Willow Temple," which you can read in its entirety here.  The story, about a young farm girl whose inadvertent witnessing of her mother's adultery resets the trajectory of her own life, is restrained and affecting, notable as much for what Hall leaves unsaid as for his stance of quiet, distant compassion for his characters.  He has his protagonist muse:  "Surely I was changed forever . . . . I knew that by universal conspiracy we agreed to deny the wickedness of every human being.  We needed, every hour, to understand:  The fabric of routine covered unseen deceptions and enormities.  We also needed to remember that the cloth must show no rips or tears, and this covering was as real as anything." 

Then I read the Facebook status update of a man from my old parish who runs a crisis pregnancy center in the South Bronx, helping desperate young women seeking abortions to choose life instead, and supporting them in every way possible in that choice.  On his Facebook, he often posts anecdotes from the day-to-day work of the interns who tend to the young mothers.  One young woman, he wrote, came to the office seeking an abortion because of her dire economic situtation and her desire to finish school.  A friend of his -- incidentally, a self-described conservative Catholic homeschooling mother -- commented, "If you want to finish school, don't have sex!"

Then I picked up the copy of Marian Helper that had come in the mail, the little journal published by the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, the order in Stockbridge, Massachusetts whose apostolate is the spread of the Divine Mercy devotion.  I read an excerpt from a memoir written by Fr. Donald Calloway, a priest in the order, who had been a runaway, a drug addict, and a criminal before his conversion.  The story included a photograph of Fr. Calloway addresing a crowd, and quoted from his address:  "Don't think I'm holy, because I'm not.  The honeymoon is over.  I go through trying times, tough times, and I am tempted like you don't know.  Big time.  So pray for me . . . I need it.  I'm a hunted man.  Satan hates my guts.  And I am still a man in the conversion process [in need of] more mercy, more mercy, more mercy.  That's what I need, what we all need."

At first, I misread "hunted" as "haunted," and I began to wonder if all of us are divided into two groups, the haunted and the scared -- those who have committed "deceptions and enormities," and those whose fear of the consequences has prevented them from doing so.  Of course, this is wretchedly simplistic.  Still, reading the barely-disguised contempt of the homeschooling mother on Facebook for the poor young girls in my old borough reminded me once again that those who were lucky enough to receive sound moral instruction in their early lives should not attribute their good fortune to their own merits, and that from those to whom much has been given, much is expected.

Whether haunted or scared, however, we are all hunted; surely we can unite in our recognition of this, our human condition.  Some of us, like Fr. Calloway, are "tempted . . . big time"; others are probably tempted to far less spectacular sins, like the common house-and-garden pride and scorn that is so very hard to weed out of our hearts, and which seem to me emblematic of the state of being scared -- for surely it's fear that leads us, more sinful than the publican and less virtuous than the Pharisee, to commend ourselves for having avoided spectacular sin and for having achieved much.  This brittle self-commendation surely masks the quite justified fear that our nice lives, our accomplishments, our sense of ourselves as good people doing good things, could be swept away from one moment to the next by the simplest, most unwitting mistakes made in a moment of carelessness.  Which is why, in addition to being hunted men, we all need more mercy, more mercy, more mercy; and the more we're given, the more we are required to show to those poor souls we're inclined to scorn.