The Diary of a Country Priest: A Novel Paperback – January 9, 2002

I tried to read this book several times since I first heard of it through watching the films of Robert Bresson twenty years ago. Only now have I been able to read it, and I think it is one of those books that you have to be "ready for" before you can appreciate it. It is not easy to read and it is certainly not congenial to contemporary laissez-faire attitudes toward religion, spirituality, sin and redemption. That said, it is one of the most powerful things one can read if one can hear it. And upon reading it a second time, one marvels at how fully thought out it is. The entire book is foreshadowed in the first chapter. It really is a marvelous bit of writing. If you're the sort of person who underlines quotable passages in books, bring an extra highlighter because there's a lot to quote from in this book.

Bernanos' classic is perhaps the most touching novel I've ever read. Its the story of a country priest whose parish is not very interested in religious matters. He deals with this, his personal problems, and Bernanos' descriptions of his struggles are profoundly emotional. I read this book a long time ago, but to this day I remember the impact it had on me. Such feeling and compassion I have never felt for any other fictional character (save Lord Jim). This work is truly a masterpeice. Reading it will change you, forever....

Bernanos's "Diary" represents that rarest of glimses into the clerical world: a view that is utterly convincing and completely enthralling! As the author pursues the early life and career of a French provincial Abbe, he simultaneously reveals the sufferings, triumphs, and struggles of the people that the young priest serves. Parallel to the tribulations of their lives, Bernanos lovingly shows how deeply one man, one priest can empathize with those he serves. While Bernanos never became a priest himself, his early life prepared him to write this, his greatest novel. The poignancy of this small novel is one that builds gradually. The impatient reader may, at first, not "connect" with the story, but the faithful reader will soon find that he/she cannot put it down. The last 30 pages of this work are one of the 20th century's masterpieces of spiritual prosody that I can identify.

This book is a treasure. It is definitely not for those who yearn for a syrupy and sentimental christianity, where a doting Father provides for, and panders to, all the needs of his spoiled children. This is gritty christianity where the Father asks those whom he loves deeply to ascend Calvary with his divine Son for the salvation of the world.

The young priest, being devoured by cancer, is a luminous icon of Christ and a true Father to his flock. Darkness gathers around him - he is ascending Calvary with his Divine Master and his cross is the cancer in his body and a piercing dark night of the soul. A kind of petty wickedness surrounds him; even the children whom he catechises appeared aged ("wizened" as the writer to the preface notes) and bereft of innocence. By contrast, he is forever young and he is the innocent one.

"Look: I'll define you a Christian people by the opposite. The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown sad and old" (page 18) says his old mentor the Cure de Torcy to the young priest.

The young priest is constantly struck by his inadequacies: he is a mere drop in the ocean of time and he notes with irony the priest's call: "We pay a heavy, heavy price for the superhuman dignity of our calling. The ridiculous is always to near to the sublime". (page 74)

He notes the kind of self deceptivity that people engage in when confessing their sins (who is not painfully aware of the truth of here words?): "Petty lies can slowly form a crust around the consciousness, of evasion and subterfuge. The outer shell retains the vague shape of what it covers, but that is all. In time, by sheer force of habit, the least "gifted" end by evolving their own particular idiom, which still remain incredibly abstract. They don't hide much, but their sly candour reminds one of a dirty window-pane, so blurred that light has to struggle through it, and nothing can be clearly seen. What then remains of confession? It barely skims the surface of conscious. I don't say dry rot has set in underneath; it seems more like petrification" (page 87)

The darkness thickens and the priest notes: "I breathe, I inhale the night, the night is entering into me by some inconceivable, unimaginable gap in the soul. I. myself, am the night" "First I was no more than a spark, an atom of the glowing dust, lost in an unfathomable night. But, now the dust-spark has almost ceased to glow, it is nearly extinguished. " (page 105/106)

On the loss of faith, he notes "Faith is not a thing which one "lose", we merely cease to shape our lives by it. "No, I have not lost my faith. The cruelty of this test. Its devastation, like a thunderbolt, and so inexplicable, may have shattered my reason and my nerves, may have withered suddenly with me the joy of prayer - perhaps for ever, who can tell? - may have filled me to the very brim with a dark, more terrible resignation than the worst convulsions of despair in its cataclysmic fall; but my faith is still whole, for I can feel it..." (page 122)

On the community of sinners, be notes: "There is not only a communion of saints; there is also a communion of sinners. In their hatred of one another, their contempt, sinners unite, embrace, intermingle, become as one; in the eyes of Eternal God they will be more than a mass of perpetual slime over which the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly" (Page 139)

He has this supernatural ability to summon forth a kind of darkness from the member of his congregation: "For some time now I have had the impression that my mere presence will draw sin out, summon it up to the surface, into the eyes, the lips, the voice...As though the enemy scorned to hide himself from such a puny adversary, as though he came to defy me openly, laugh in my face" (page 153)

His mysterious fatherhood, extraordinary for one so young, comes to the fore when he confronts the old countess over her bitterness and her refusal to let go of the deep spiritual psychological wounds that the death of her son has inflicted on her, wounds that are devouring her; her state is one of spiritual rebellion but yet masterfully keeps her self together through the force of her pride. Deep down, her cry is; "non-serviam". And yet this young priest of peasant stock brings her (an aristocrat) to a peace beyond all understanding - she is reconciled and resigned; she accepts peace from the young priest; he mediates the father to her. The dialogue is masterfully done and I was reminded on a number of occasion s of CS Lewis.

On the devouring darkness of evil, he writes:

"Our very hate is resplendent, and the least tormented of the fiends would warm themselves in what we call our despair, as in the morning of glittering sunshine. Hell is not to love any more, madame. Not to love any more... To stop loving, to stop understanding - and yet to love...The sorrow, the unutterable loss of those charred stones which once were men, is that they have nothing more to be shared". (page 164)

His pains increases and night grows around him: "Fear of death passed over me. The though of death often enters my mind and sometimes I feel afraid. I don't know to what I can compare this flash of terror. Like the lash of a whip through my heart, perhaps - Passion before Death". (page 232)

"My death is here. A death like any other and I shall enter into it with the feelings of a very commonplace, very ordinary man. It is even certain that I shall be no better at dying that I am at controlling my life. I shall be just as clumsy and awkward." (page 279)

And, yet he dies beautifully- where one darkness abounded every where; grace is everywhere with a luminous entity.

Bernanos has depicted a saint without sentimentality with the eye of a master-painter: who would have thought that 2000 years ago, the man dying on the cross was the saviour of the world. Saints too, like their Master, come into their own when they ascend their Calvary, making up what is lacking in their Master's sufferings.

By way of postscript, I should add that a few months after reading this, I too was diagnosed with terminal cancer - a curious coincidence!

Last year marked the 70th anniversary of Bernanos's powerful tale of a young and earnest parish priest in rural France who feels that he is a total failure. From a merely human perspective he is not mistaken. As is fitting, we never learn his name. The entire novel is a diary in which he confides his doubts and loneliness, his sense of futility, struggles with a sense of vocation ("Keep marching to the end, and try to end up quietly at the roadside without shedding your equipment."), powerlessness in the face of suffering, clashes with clergy colleagues, the history of his own family dysfunction, and even disgust with his own body due to chronic stomach pains and an impoverished diet. He knows he is physically clumsy and socially awkward. He describes his parishioners as bored, boring, and petty. They gossip about him as a "secret drinker" and a womanizer, both of which are laughable. The priest loves his flock; he visits every home every year, and he prays for them. He has a keen sense of history and his own obscure role to play. He is an astute observer of the weakness, frailty and fallenness of human nature, especially his own. By the time he dies of stomach cancer at a young age, Bernanos has painted a portrait of what we realize is a genuine saint. On his deathbed at the end of the book the priest confesses, "Does it matter? Grace is everywhere." Every person in ministry ought to read this book, but perhaps not until you turn fifty or so.

I am not religious, yet this book is a permanent source of inspiration for me. I believe this comes from the beauty of the life it describes, rather than of doctrines. This is perhaps the most relevant book I ever read, and also one of the best in whatever sense.