Write for God

A still from the film version of "The Road" with Viggo Mortensen as the father

Dante envisioned the lowest point of Hell as that which is furthest from God in the Inferno book of his Commedia. In Inferno, that point is called Dis and it is dominated by Satan partly encased in ice, Judas eternally being macerated in his mouth.

That’s a very grim description of Hell and so is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a celebrated novel whose film version will be released in October to compete during the Academy Awards nominations period. McCarthy’s apocalyptic work is more novella than novel–I read it in a day–but it paints a vivid picture of a barren future where the absence of people, life and God are a reality.

In McCarthy’s novel, the world has been decimated by an unnamed cataclysm. There are few human survivors, no animals, no plant life and an endless winter we might envision as a post-nuclear holocaust. A man and his son are on the road to the coast, where they imagine there’s a better chance to survive. Along the way, they encounter barbarity, depravity, cannibalism and the inevitable signs of the death of everything. They exist in a hopeless world where the few survivors literally consume each other. They hoard the few bullets in their gun for a time when they might have to use them to end their lives.

McCarthy, a reclusive author whose first TV appearance was with Oprah Winfrey when she anointed The Road as one of her book club choices,  was asked by daytime TV’s grande dame for his thoughts on God:

“It would depend on what day you ask me. I don’t think you have to have a great idea of who or what God is in order to pray … you can be quite doubtful about the whole business.”

To a Catholic reader, the world that McCarthy creates is all the more bleak because there’s no God. The man, his son and the few humans they meet are in Dis, their existence a literal Hell. The vision of a cult-like group that the father and son observe on the road is a violent alternative to a church congregation. The boy hears about God from one of the survivors, but he is too traumatized by the world to listen.

The novel’s saving grace is the love between the father and son, which is expressed simply, but poetically. The father lives to save his son from the world and the son learns how to survive in it from the father. Their bond is the core of the story and it’s the boy who retains his humanity even though he was born after the world fell apart.

The boy’s love for others and the father’s love for his son are beautifully expressed in The Road.  Considering the dreary, absent-God world created by McCarthy, they’re the only redeeming values in a story that is an allegory for how our world could end.

We exist on a planet where nuclear war is always a possibility, where global warming is wreaking havoc on polar ice caps and plant life, where the gap between the powerful and powerless grows each day. A future where God doesn’t exist and all of these man-made disasters are allowed to play out can only end in a barren world like McCarthy’s creation if we can’t redeem ourselves.

The Road is a sobering, difficult novel, but it is thought-provoking. Unless we can remain human beings with the capacity to love, says the author, we will descend to barbarism and the world will end. Hell, after all, is the furthest point from God.

Christian minister and author Frederick Buechner often quotes the late John Updike to explain what is more commonly known as the dark night of the soul by Catholics. As Buechner said, “Perhaps God saves his deepest silence for his saints.”

Mother Teresa’s decades-long dark night of the soul was revealed after her death in Come Be My Light, which I’ve been reading in spurts. Her bouts with doubt and the distance she felt from God surprised many who considered her the epitome of perfect Christian joy. Perhaps God already considered her a saint when he canonized her with his deepest silence during her life. His timeline, after all, has little do to with the Vatican’s process for making saints.

The greatest saints and the holiest monks have battled God’s deepest silence. St. John of the Cross even gave it an apt name. It should not surprise faithful Catholics when they find themselves enmeshed in God’s silence, when deep faith and deep prayer yield only deep silence.

Dante expressed the lowest point of Hell–Dis–as literally the furthest distance from God, where Satan lies encased in ice at the center of nothingness. There are Hells on Earth that we pass before we reach God’s place for us in eternity. When prayer only echoes in the silence without a response, we face our darkest nights. The only comfort we have then is that at least God is listening to the prayers of others who might keep us in their intentions as we experience the darkness. 

There’s comfort in knowing that some of His greatest saints had souls that also knew dark nights. In that, we are not alone.