The Papal Laundry (Part One)

Or the Confluences of Faith and Fiction

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Preamble

Never say never in fiction, but I have not penned (and am unlikely ever to pen) a short story about the Pope’s laundry in order to establish incontestably my credentials as a Catholic fiction writer. Even in that highly improbable event, my sole consideration would be aesthetic. The imagination would fall upon a somewhat overlooked and workaday nun who has found fulfilment precisely in the ‘pots and pans’ and for whom ‘being seen’ would be nothing short of ghastly. Very little would happen in the tale outside the ebb and flow of observational humanity. Its power would reside in the subversion of expected satire (given the story’s title: Peter’s Pants) and its exploration of the tensions surrounding self-worth and duty, the nature of willing sacrifice and the modern all-consuming recognition malaise. All powers would be bent on ensuring the singular beauty of this woman’s life shone through, rather than demonstrating by proxy what an incredibly orthodox Catholic I am.

The story would garner three Substack love hearts of standardised semi-articulated approval and three reader comments. The first would bemoan the story’s fatal lack of plot. The second would bemoan its deeply problematic disempowering antifeminist and gender-colonising male lens. The third, balking at the title’s irreverence, would pugnaciously call out the authenticity of said Catholic credentials. This is still all in my imagination. I’m telling a story here. It would never happen like this IRL.

Being a titan of literary largesse, I would take all criticism in good faith. Art of enduring dignity must, after all, suffer the scorch of misperception and misconception. Phoenix-like, I would rise far above the lick of such unjust flames, reborn once more upon fiery wings of magnanimity. There I would soar into skies of liberty blue, beyond the reach of all earthly slings and arrows. For roughly five minutes. Before rage-writing some suitably sardonic passive-aggressive replies. And the pièce de résistance, of course, which now freighted with italicised French naturellement takes on the necessary air of je ne sais quoi, would be my riposte to the sheer effrontery of questioning my faith by questioning my fiction.

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Introduction

Your patience with my opening prolixity is very much appreciated. You will see now it has all been but a barely diverting construct to reach this simple consideration: what might it look like when faith finds an authentic way into fiction? If this is a matter of marginal concern to you, then, vaya con Dios. If, however, you’ve found yourself similarly hypothetically traduced and left slack-jawed by the sound of newborn kittens emanating from your mouth instead of an unstoppable juggernaut of rejoinders, then, God bless us all onward.

For starters, I’m not going to serve up the smoked hareng rouge that is the Catholic literature debate. For the uninitiated: does it ever make sense to describe a fictional work as Catholic or Christian? What is meant by this, precisely? How does it help? Who draws the lines? For what purpose? Etc. So: Conclave by Robert Harris, A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair or The Power and the Glory, William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, William P Young’s The Shack, Walter M Miller Jnr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, Colleen MacCullough’s The Thorn Birds. Ad infinitum. I’ll leave you to decide. The ever perceptive

William Collen

explores something similar in cinema.

Pursuing a more modest course, I’ll simply reflect on what I’ve noticed about the interplay of my own faith and fiction. Suffice to say, faith is the aesthetic lens for my writing. In other words, the stories I write don’t need to be about people of faith but will always be suffused with the faith that shapes my whole outlook. My personal meta-narrative, if you will. And beauty of form will always be paramount. As it should with faith. So, Pootchee isn’t a Catholic but Mother Matilde definitely is. Yet neither story turns on ‘Catholic content’. It’s as clear to me as the pen in my hand that fiction utterly fails when employed as a Trojan Horse for evangelisation. Those are God’s rules, not mine.

You may have noticed, then, this reflection focuses on markers of faith in fiction rather than Catholicism. The reason should be obvious by now but it’s still worth unpacking. Most of this reflection will be relevant to any Christian fiction writer, not just Catholic. But it should also resonate with anyone, (how to put it?), God-adjacent or mindful of what it means to be a moral person. All a far cry from: can I trust this story for good, clean Christian content? If that’s the desire, get a theological tract. Of course, I’m not questioning the importance of appropriate age-related content. That’s a different conversation. And I also appreciate that different readers have different tolerances to explicit content. That’s a conversation as much about taste as appropriate aesthetics. Reading about moral corruption isn’t inherently morally corrupting. Quite the opposite if well written. Granted, if explicitness is the focus, that’s a fail. However, if it uniquely reveals, as it were, that’s another matter.

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Elucidation

Without further ado, here’s a dainty smorgasbord of musings on how faith so throughly shapes my storytelling that to remove it would result in something similar to a bumblebee’s longevity post-sting.

1. Death

Speaking of stings, we may as well start with the biggie. Cue the White Shores of Maestro Tolkien…

Pippin: I didn’t think it would end this way.

Gandalf: End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take.

Tolkien’s not preaching here, of course, but, by associating this perspective with Gandalf, he’s signifying to the reader that, at the very least, the human instinct that death is not the end is worthy of contemplation. As we know, the context is the twentieth century rise of totalitarian mythos, rationalism and atheistic materialism.

Arguably, the idea of life after death in ‘modern literature’ is now precisely consigned to fantasy, fable, history or metafiction, and even where it approaches realism eg Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, it’s employed rather as a literary device or classed as ‘magical’. Because, granted, there is a certain measurable nobility in Meursault’s general meh to life and curious ambivalence about death. At face value, death doesn’t appear to yield any inherent meaning and possibly therefore life too. So what do you do? As a Christian writer, slowly working out my own story through Pollockesque spatters of super-condensed storytelling, there’s no compromising over the reality that death is not the end. As a writer of realist fiction, however, there’s equally no compromise with the reality that death itself is very obviously a physical end.  

As per my polestar, Flannery O’Connor, I don’t think it necessary to hop the fence into the Elysian Fields to carry considerations of eternity. I’ve no issues with the story integrity of The Shack, for example, but the realism is somewhat drowned by the fabulous. I enjoyed the read but, arguably, intimations of heaven might be better soaked into the story frame or sharpened at endings eg Flannery’s Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, The River. The haunting close of James Joyce’s The Dead also reverberates with this power as does Bernanos’s The Diary of A Country Priest. That’s terrain still worth exploring even if (especially if) what’s left of modern reading appears to lie somewhere between mindless fanfic titillation and perma-hyped voguish TikTokery.

2. Suffering

Go big or go home, as they say. And another, if not the doozy, is suffering. And as with death, no compromise here. As a Christian, I am presented with suffering both as a personal mystery and a grand narrative: all suffering is the result of a broken world and that brokenness also exists within me. Yet faith reveals it never defines us. Our dignity, in fact, defies it. The One Who Is Healing got inside all suffering and definitively broke its dominance over us. However, as a realist fiction writer, I can also see with my own eyes and feel in my bones that suffering can feel meaningless, gratuitous, relentless and utterly degrading. And lives are sometimes snuffed out without warning, cruelly and seemingly arbitrarily.

I’ve started to explore the biblical foundations of this in my Scriptourer journey through Genesis so if you want a more theological approach head there. Suffice to say, personal suffering can just as much destroy or affirm a person’s faith and equally can lead someone undecided into faith or confirm their rejection of it. In By A Thread, I reflect on Dostoevsky’s masterly handling of this in his The Brothers Karamazov. Obviously, a work of fiction can touch on the matter of why there’s suffering in the world but there isn’t exactly a satisfying narrative answer to the question so unless a writer is simply axe grinding in either direction, mystery presents as the only credible option.

The paradox of that central mystery spreads out in either direction. Towards absurdism in the gnarly and inimitable Samuel Beckett:

It is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it.

Or horror in Joseph Conrad and more towards gallows humour in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s. Or into the very grit of faith in Dostoevsky, in Silence by Shūsaku Endō and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. And, of course, Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night is a shattering non-fiction portrait.

Not comparing with such literary heights, but, this is the most daunting challenge I feel in my own writing. The black hole of suffering is real and that consuming darkness ought have no power over the light. And yet it seems to. And seems at times to overcome it. And it feels dreadfully inadequate at those times to say it’ll all be ok in the end. Like all we ought do is ride the rollercoaster to the end. Because they never derail do they? The modern world has seen suffering on such a horrifying scale, it’s hard to bear this up against any single edifying faith journey. And what of animals? Have a reflect on

J. M. Elliott

’s recent insightful piece. They just appear to be the fragile, dumb or feral casualties of a great not-so-great cosmic experiment. This story sure does have a lot of frayed ends.

Of course, I know through faith, that grand narratives are best left in the hands of far grander beings, but equally, inexpressibly, that Christ literally lives within me in the simply complex ways love also does. Write what you know, they say. Good luck for that in this case. My fiction is racked across these antinomies and necessarily so. It’s built upon a vocation of the impossible: to write what I don’t know. Still, I’ve felt enough of heaven’s healing breezes to grasp that suffering truly isn’t the whole story, despite its many chapters skirting the limits of the bearable and its sentences seemingly interminable. Alas, you only discover appropriate words for this once you’ve suffered their punishing weight and paid your dues. If you have it in you, though, that’s always a story worth the struggle to pen. But take my advice: don’t go looking for it. It’ll find you soon enough.

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Photo by Quaritsch Photography on Unsplash