village and parish

The beginning of The Diary of a Country Priest:

Mine is a parish like all the rest. They’re all alike. Those of today, I mean. I was saying so only yesterday to M. le Curé de Norenfontes–that good and evil are probably evenly distributed, but on such a low plain, very low indeed! Or if you like they lie one over the other; like oil and water they never mix. M. le Curé only laughed at me. He is a good priest, deeply kind and human, who at diocesan headquarters is even considered a bit of a freethinker, on the dangerous side. His outbursts fill his colleagues with glee, and he stresses them with a look meant to be fiery, but which gives me such a deep sensation of stale discouragement that it almost brings tears to my eyes.

My parish is bored stiff; no other word for it. Like so many others! We can see them being eaten up by boredom, and we can’t do anything about it. Some day perhaps we shall catch it ourselves–become aware of the cancerous growth within us. You can keep going a long time with that in you. (1)

It is the parish that is bored stiff. Man qua parishioner in those French parishes “of today” is bored stiff. The priest discovers him in this condition. M. le Curé de Norenfontes laughs at such thoughts. His laughter is not mocking. Possibly it is meant to suggest that the “low plane” is a temporary matter and easily dealt with: a “dangerous” reform or two here, a fiery harangue before the right audience there, and the high drama of good and evil is back. Where his colleagues are gleeful — he is too naive or too earnest — the Curé d’Ambricourt is discouraged almost to the point of tears. For the diarist, the priest whose parishioner is bored a priori with respect to the supernatural is like the philosopher who attempts to discover the phenomenon of time consciousness by looking at a painting. It is not the path to the meaning of the painting that marks the time; it is, instead, the heartbeat, the breath, the “pressure of the foot on the ground,” the voices of passersby — and it is almost inevitable that these latter sensations will overtake both meaning and time (see Voegelin, “On the Theory of Consciousness”). In order to discover the meaning of his own vocation, the priest looks at his parishioners. When the faces that look back are veiled from the beginning with a thin film of the dust of boredom, the priest who has “admitted once and for all into each moment of [his] puny [life] the terrifying presence of God” must discover deep and stale sensations in his own soul. These sensations are symptoms of that “cancerous growth” within the priest himself. It is a lonely recognition.

This thought [about boredom as a cancerous growth that threatens even priests] struck me yesterday on my rounds. It was drizzling. The kind of thin, steady rain which gets sucked in with every breath, which seeps down through the lungs into your belly. Suddenly I looked out over the village, from the road to Saint Vaast along the hillside–miserable little houses huddled together under the desolate, ugly November sky. On all sides damp came steaming up and it seemed to sprawl there in the soaking grass like a wretched worn-out horse or cow. what an insignificant thing a village is. And this particular village was my parish! My parish, yes, but what could I do? I stood there glumly watching it sink into the dusk, disappear. . . . In a few minutes I should lose sight of it. I had never been so horribly aware both of my people’s loneliness and mine. I thought of the cattle which I could hear coughing somewhere back in the mist, and of the little lad on his way back from school clutching his satchel, who would soon be leading them over sodden fields to a warm sweet-smelling byre. . . . And my parish, my village seemed to be waiting too–without much hope after so many nights in the mud–for a master to follow towards some undreamed-of, improbable shelter.

The reader begins to catch a glimpse — as the curé does in his own writing — of a shelter from the everywhere of this even distribution, this boredom. It is difficult and it is “improbable,” but it is there. On his deathbed, the curé’s last words will be: “Grace is everywhere.” That these two everywheres contend throughout the novel is evident from its first two pages. There is the overwhelming boredom of the low plane. Even when its sensations are only symptomatic, they promise — nearly guarantee — a cancerous reach; they borrow the inevitability of death. The insignificance of the village looms large. But even the ugly sound of cattle coughing in the sprawling dusky mist promises that a “little lad” will find even the most “wretched worn-out horse or cow” and lead it “over sodden fields to a warm sweet-smelling byre.”

Oh, of course I know all this is fantastic. Such notions can scarcely be taken seriously. A day-dream! Villages do not scramble to their feet like cattle at the call of a little boy. And yet, last night, I believe a saint might have roused it. . . . (2)

Is it only imagination, however? Villages may not “scramble to their feet like cattle” but does that mean that they do nothing? Later, again on his rounds, the curé will look again on his village:

What does it want of me? . . . Whatever I were to do, were I to pour out my last drop of blood (and indeed sometimes I fancy the village has nailed me up here on a cross and is at least watching me die) I could never possess it. Although it looks fresh and white enough just now (they’ve been washing down their walls for All Saints with milk-of-lime and household starch), I can never forget it has been there for centuries, and its age frightens me. Long, long before this little fifteenth-century church, through which I am merely a passer-by, it was there, patiently enduring heat and cold, rain, wind and sun, now thriving, now starving, fastened like a limpet to this strip of land, sucking in life and yielding up its dead.

How profound, how secret such experience of life must be! I shall be swallowed up with all the rest, and quicker than most, surely. (40-41)

You can almost hear the curé whispering, “I am dumb to tell the enduring village . . .” Can his recognition of the enduring village offer it nothing more than a silent echo its own forceful staying? Can no strain of de Lubac’s Catholicisme (published a year after The Diary of a Country Priest) be heard in the praise for the village’s secret experience of life? Is there no glimpse of an everywhere that has been in force from the beginning?

The supernatural dignity of one who has been baptized rests, we know, on the natural dignity of man, though it surpasses it in an infinite manner . . . Thus the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, a supernatural unity, supposes a previous natural unity, the unity of the human race. (Catholicism, 25)

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