Diary of a Country Priest

Having listed Bernanos on that infamous list over at Korrektiv a couple of weeks ago, I decided to reread this most Roman Catholic of novels. Interestingly enough, I'm finding that the point-of-view, with its necessarily interiorized monologue, makes it more difficult to follow daily events than I remember. In fact it hardly resembles a diary at all - there are no dates, for example - and references to life in the world of Abrimcourt are swept into a narrative that is hard to imagine anywhere outside a novel. For example, the novel begins with the sentence, "Mine is a parish like all the rest," and then in the next paragraph gets Right Down To It:

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 will catch it ourselves - become aware of the cancerous growth within us. You can keep going a long time with that in you.

That paragraph is essentially novelistic for a number of reasons, but aside from its augury of things to come and the time required to simply take it all in, it occurs within the sweep of a narrative that combines material descriptions of character, place and weather with abstracted judgements about good and evil, the nature of boredom, and the transparancy of hidden emotions in the eyes of a very minor character. That's on the first page. It's certainly well composed, but it's also hard to imagine an actual priest taking the kind of time required to put something like this together. Of course he's a bit of a saint, our priest, so perhaps anything is possible. But it doesn't look like any diary I 've ever seen. It certainly doesn't look like my diary. And looking at it as the work of a saint (as someone says on the back cover) puts it somewhat at odds with the ordinary province of the novel. But maybe this is the fault of novelists. The good novel enlarges our understanding of what it means to be human, and shouldn't the lives of saints do much the same?

Stranger still is the fact that it isn't "saintliness" that attracts us - by which I mean me - to this character. What I find so compelling are observations such as this:

I have been looking over these first few pages of my diary without any satisfaction, and yet I considered very carefully before making up my mind to write it. But that is not much comfort to me now. For those who have the habit of prayer, thought is too often a mere alibi, a sly way of deciding what one wants to do. Reason will always obscure what we wish to keep in the shadows. A wordling can think out the pros and cons and sum up his chances. No doubt. But what are our chances worth? We who have admitted once and for all into each moment of our puny lives the terrifying presence of God. Unless a priest happens to lose his faith - and then what has he left, for he cannot lose his faith without denying himself? He will never learn to 'look out for number one' with the alert common sense - nay, with the candour and innocence of children of this world. What is the use of working out chances? There are no chances against God.

Very plainly laid out here is the most comon way we keep ourselves from God - i.e., from becoming holy. There is a lot of confession here as well, without it seeming the least bit 'confessional'. He's certainly someone we'd expect to have the habit of prayer; what does this tell us about his motives for keeping the diary? He's also a 'wordling', so how good is he at weighing out the pros and cons? And who exactly does he point to with that "our"? How has he come to understand that 'there are no chances against God'? That inevitability of returning to God becomes even more clear as the story develops and we learn how difficult it is for this diary keeper to keep praying. He doesn't write in order to make himself out as a 'saint'. It is true, though; he does lead an extraordinary life, and however improbable the form of this story, it's an extraordinary novel.