No big answers to big questions, more a reflection on how fiction can help us – if we’re open – get past neat narratives.
And so, this group, which we first met gathered in darkness, shut off from the world by solid walls, leaves our view in an open field—a new dawn, an Easter People, as we like to say sometimes. One might assume, in hearing this, that Lodge is directing us to think of this all as unambiguous advance towards the eschaton. From darkness to light, from insularity to Aggiornemento? That is progress, right? Well, maybe yes, or maybe no. Because, as his narrator hints and his characters’ pains and continued questions make clear, there is more than one way to experience and interpret these frameworks. Is that old stone church insular and sheltered, or a rock, somewhat like Someone said it would be? Is that field open, or merely formless and directionless? Are we free now, or simply abandoned?
It is a puzzle, a mess of experiences, a contradiction that we can be witness to, if we would just set aside our narratives for just a moment. Perhaps we can even see it in our own lives. Perhaps it does not take a novel.
My mother stopped going to Mass in the early 1970’s, just about the time that Souls and Bodies ends. It is not that she lost her faith. It is, as she probably would have said, that her faith lost her. She just could not stand it anymore. It broke her heart to go to Mass, to be forced to hold hands and listen to banalities and hear the blustery aging cantor belt out Kris Kristofferson’s “Lord,Help Me Jesus,”she who was raised by an aunt and uncle, skilled amateur musicians who played classical sacred music on organ and violin in their small French-Canadian parish in Maine…