I've been working my way slowly (for a second time) through many of the novels I read in college, particularly those I don't remember very well. The latest has been Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. Yesterday, re-reading a passage out loud to Rob brought me to tears--probably some combination of the passage itself and the emotional weariness of a car not starting, then starting, then having to trek hours home through a blizzard. Anyway, I wanted to post it here:
12-year-old Del goes into her younger brother's room to see how he's dealing with the news that his dog, Major, will have to be shot after taking up a late-life hobby of chasing and killing sheep. Their family does not attend church regularly, but Del goes on her own every Sunday to the Anglican church in their town in rural Ontario. To her dismay, she has been unable to convert her brother.He was sitting on the bedroom floor fooling with some jacks. He was not crying. I had vague hopes that he might be persuaded to make trouble, not because I thought it would do any good, but because I felt the occasion demanded it.
"If you prayed for Major not to get shot would he not get shot?" said Owen in a demanding voice.
The thought of praying had never crossed my mind.
"You prayed you wouldn't have to thread the sewing machine any more and you didn't."
I saw with dismay the unavoidable collision coming, of religion and life.
He got up and stood in front of me and said tensely, "Pray. How do you do it? Start now!"
"You can't pray," I said, "about a thing like that."
"Why not?"
Why not? Because, I could have said to him, we do not pray for things to happen or not happen, but for the strength and grace to bear what does. A fine way out, that smells abominably of defeat. But I did not think of it. I simply thought, and knew, that praying was not going to stop my father going out and getting his gun and calling, "Major! Here, Major--" Praying would not alter that.
God would not alter it. If God was on the side of goodness and mercy and compassion, then why had he made these things so difficult to get at? Never mind saying, so they will be worth the trouble; never mind all that. Praying for an act of execution not to take place was useless simply because God was not interested in such objections; they were not His.
Could there be God not confined in the churches' net at all, not made manageable by any spells and crosses, God real, and really in the world, and alien and unacceptable as death? Could there be God amazing, indifferent, beyond faith?
"How do you do it?" said Owen stubbornly. "Do you have to get down on your knees?"
"It doesn't matter."
But he had already knelt down, and clenched his hands at his sides. Then not bowing his head he screwed up his face with strong effort.
"Get up, Owen!" I said roughly. "It's not going to do any good. It won't work, it doesn't work, Owen get up, be a good boy, darling."
He swiped at me with his clenched fists, not taking time out to open his eyes. With the making of his prayer his face went through several desperate, private grimaces, each of which seemed to me a reproach and an exposure, hard to look at as skinned flesh. Seeing somebody have faith, close up, is no easier than seeing someone chop a finger off.
Do missionaries ever have these times, of astonishment and shame?
