In Graham Greene’s novel, “Brighton Rock,” an aged Catholic priest reflects on the untimely death of a character whose relationship with the Church was, one might say, tenuous.
Attempting to console a grieving friend, the priest relates the story of a man he once knew: “He was a good man, a holy man,” said the priest, “and he lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn’t bear the idea that any soul could suffer damnation.” The man had decided, the priest continued, “that if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too. He never took the sacraments, he never married his wife in church. I don’t know, my child, but some people think he was — well, a saint.” After contemplating this for a brief time, the old priest asserts one of Greene’s most famous lines, “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.”
The strangeness of God’s mercy — his relentless pursuit of us fallen creatures whom he created from and for love — is a recurring theme in much of Greene’s fiction, as well as that of other Catholic writers. They often feature characters who simultaneously crave and resist the mysterious persistence of the “Hound of Heaven,” as poet Francis Thompson put it. Bendrix in Greene’s “The End of the Affair” and Querry in his “A Burnt-Out Case” are ready examples. So too are Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” Monsieur Louis in Francois Mauriac’s “Vipers’ Tangle,” Anna Karenina in Tolstoy’s eponymous novel, Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor‘s “Wise Blood,” and Marion Francis Tarwater in O’Connor’s “The Violent Bear It Away.”
These mostly unsympathetic characters are pursued by God despite their persistent resistance. And the authors who create them expose the inconstancy and contradictions of their readers’ moral and religious lives. As we peer into the souls of these characters, our own souls are laid bare, exposed to the appalling strangeness of a relentlessly merciful God.
A relentless mercy
This might also be the best way to account for the complex and conflicted characters who recite the exquisitely painful poetry of American Catholic poet, Jane Greer. Greer is less well-known than the writers with whom her poetry resonates. But her poems plumb the depths of the mysteries of sin and salvation as acutely and insightfully as the prose of these great Catholic novelists. Indeed, Greer’s poetry penetrates as deeply into the crevices of the sinful heart as any story or novel could. And she does it in a poetic style that is as spare in form as it is rich in substance. The persistent theme in what I call Greer’s “redemption” poems is precisely the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.
In “Micha-el,” for example (from the collection “Love Like a Conflagration“), the Archangel indicts the spiritual laziness of his second-person interlocutor: “you underestimate to your own peril / Whom we have come from, / Whom we are acting for, and it’s too late now: / suddenly it’s too late to ask for mercy.” But Greer then invokes a theme reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s allegorical novel, “The Great Divorce.” While it is too late to ask for mercy, God’s relentless desire to share his strange mercy abides: “Mercy is what you’ll get — His wide-armed mercy — / but you won’t like it.” Is the narrator suggesting that God will foist his mercy upon the unwilling? Or is it rather that Greer is accounting for God’s unrelenting pursuit even of those of us who are complaisant in our sin?
She answers the question in the next stanza: “He has been with you, at your elbow, lovesick, / down the millennia. He knows you deeply, / yet still encumbers your black hearts with blessings. / Willing unwillful / swain, He has wept and waited while you mocked Him.” God’s merciful love cannot be contained: “Love like a conflagration shall be yours now; / love like an April river, like a temblor; / love like an avalanche, a midnight bomb-blast, / finding you hidden.” And Greer closes the poem echoing Greene’s priest: “This is your Precious Moment, I its angel, / angry and dark and terrible. God With Us, / Emmanu-el, comes bearing yet more mercy, / but you won’t like it.”
The nearness of the Fall
Greer’s insight into the darkness of sin and the sinful impulses of our hearts and actions is sharp and penetrating, sometimes with a cheeky twist. “Sin longs to give what we’ve denied / ourselves, leads us in easy stages / — but makes some bones about its wages,” she writes in “Lines on a Plain Brown Wrapper.” In “After the Fall,” Adam (or Eve) bemoan, “Not in my ears, but roiling through my marrow / swept a sudden sorrow. / Then the epiphany: sick rushing knowledge / that I had done irreparable damage.”
While unsparing in her contemplation of the effects of original sin, Greer does not let us cast blame for our sins on our Edenic parents. She teaches us that the Fall is not some remote primeval event that introduced sin into the world. Rather, she reminds us that we are responsible for our own moral errors, and that we tend to delight in them. The Fall is proximate; it is not remote. It occurs each time we choose to sin and then try, however subtly, to justify that choice.
Greer’s poetry shows us not only that we sin, but also how we love to cultivate our failings. We feed and nurture iniquity; polish and shine it. For Greer, the Fall is as much about the particularities of our discrete sins as it is about the joy we take in committing them. We resist God’s grace not by express decision, but rather by the inertia that comes with the pleasure of our vices. She challenges the reader not merely to contemplate our capacity for sin, but to consider the ways in which we revel in it.
Greer never lets us evade the responsibility for our own faults and foibles, even while acknowledging those things that (unjustly) might contribute to them. For example, in “Because God Wanted It,” the narrator carefully nurtures his resentment at some wrong committed against him. ” … My pique was blackest yes: / yes to the Devil’s thoughtful, hot caress, / yes to some fracture that might not be mended / I stoked my little hurt to hate most splendid.” Even if we do not yearn to be wronged, how often do we take some offense as an opportunity to wallow in our resentment?
In “I Live in Paradise” (from the volume, “The World as We Know It Is Falling Away”), the first-person narrator is Adam or Eve but only as a proxy for us. “The falling took no time: an idle thought, / a heedless act — and then the instant swell / of brass and tympani and angels grieving — / then just as swiftly only my own breath, / distant, hesitant, and so deceiving … .” But no one is to blame but me, the poem concludes. “I know that all this harm and sorrow happened / through my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.”
In Greer’s poem “Disorder,” the speaker begins, “Decades of bad decisions gather to a greatness, forming a shameful monolith of vast proportions.” The same narrator could be speaking in her poem, “More”: “Keep your cloudy eternity. / We are not gluttons. All we want, / right here, right now, is a long encore.” And in “Surviving Consolation,” Greer digs deeper into this penchant for nurturing our own sinful pride and illusions of self-deception. “I sow the seeds of my falling-down, / fingering like a silver charm / the thought that I deserve renown. / Thus do I pinch grace into harm.”
Room for redemption
Greer’s preoccupation with the sinful impulses of fallen man are not the end of her poetry, however. On the contrary, the purpose of lamenting the seeming intractability of sin is to celebrate the actual lavishness of God’s merciful grace. God’s strange mercy is unrelenting. He will not be defeated by our sin, even though we might defeat ourselves. “He leans on your doorbell, arms full of Bibles. Christ! / Sometimes it seems like you just can’t catch a break,” Greer writes in “Last Things.” In “Saved,” God’s mercy leaves “a sense of loss with no remembered having, / of cooling where I hadn’t noticed heat.” Greer recognizes that the world is redeemed in Christ even despite our resistance and complaisance.
But his mercy is severe. It must kill the reluctant sinner to create the triumphant saint. “My God will rescue me,” Greer writes in “Surviving Consolation.” “Before the fact / of what is coming, my overwhelming thought / is to talk myself down gently: Brace for impact. / This is going to hurt. / This is going to hurt a lot.” God’s mercy is appallingly strange because heaven is not fit for the sinner. The sinner must first be changed by the very mercy that saves him. The narrator in “Admit Impediments” describes the second garden Adam built — a garden of exile and guilt. But then the poem concludes, “There will we also lie like strangers after passion? / Or will the word be flesh, the flesh forgiven / its driven, unholy hunger? Will I learn who you are in Heaven?”
“Between the stirrup and the ground, he something sought and something found,” says Pinkie to Rose in Graham Greene’s novel, “Brighton Rock.” Jane Greer’s redemption poetry could be described as a sustained meditation on that metaphor. She writes about the timeless time between the stirrup and the ground, where the fallen can be redeemed; where the damned can be saved. What is sought and found between the stirrup and the ground, you ask? “Mercy,” replies Pinkie, but an appallingly strange mercy.
“Death is going to Hell to stay. / The world is falling away,” says Greer in “Eschaton Song.” But, she warns, “Brace for impact. / This is going to hurt. / This is going to hurt a lot.”
