Chapter 4
Oh God. Michael Dashwood sees right through me and knows me for a hypocrite and a fool.
He has practically called me such and I could not deny it.
I do not understand how a piece of kindness, enacted in good faith, could have become twisted into something .
. . else. What have I done? Is my heart so corrupt?
I am lost and I cannot even begin to fathom how I came to be lost. Less than a week ago my path was as straight and clear as a bridge across calm waters.
But nothing is as it was before, and I cannot trust my footing or what my eyes perceive.
It is as though I have worn blinkers my whole life, but now they are gone and all I understand is how close I am to a sin from which I believed myself remote.
Perhaps I have always been astray, walking in the Devil’s footsteps, not the Lord’s, in thinking myself better than other men.
I am not. I am worse and I simply did not know it.
My iniquity is of such magnitude I do not even have a name to call it, nor knowledge of how it may be practised.
I think it must be a form of idolatry. For when I look on Michael Dashwood, I think not on God.
I think nothing of God. Only of him. I think him beautiful.
Illness has left him pale and weak and his eyes are as black as hell and reflect nothing but bitterness and pain. Yet, still, I am—
I am what? Entranced. I pursue his rare smiles like the promise of paradise itself.
He speaks harshly, his words are cruel, I find no kindness or compassion in his gaze, no sense of a higher self.
But he is like some magnificent, ruined thing, a piece of stained glass, still vivid and no less beautiful for its cracks and rough edges.
I ask myself, how is he brought so low? Who in the world beheld such splendour and chose to break it?
I do not think he will tell me. He will never trust me.
And it is right that he does not, for I do not trust myself.
How am I to untangle this—whatever this is—and find my way back to righteousness?
I try to imagine that my patient might be a woman and I might feel such things.
I think this must be a common struggle for priests, for are we not men, as well as servants of God?
But, of course, he is not a woman and I have never felt anything for women beyond what was appropriate for my role, so I am clearly not like other men, and I have nothing to compare against. Besides, were he a woman I could woo and wed him in all honour and goodness.
Have I looked thus upon other men before? Not to my recollection but perhaps I deceive myself?
Then let me imagine, for the safety of a moment, that I am a priest, a priest like any other, with a problem, like any other.
There are many who would hold the thinking, in itself, a sin—ill thought, the brother to ill deed, whether it is carnality or doubt that preoccupies the wayward, imperfect heart.
But I cannot believe that. I believe it is freedom of thought and deed that lends validity to moral choice and action.
Though, writing this, I must not think too much upon my own life for, like my brothers, I never chose, and I have no certainty that God chose me.
But if we felt no struggle, if we resisted no temptation, of what worth would be our capitulation to moral law?
To God’s love? For what benefit free will, if we have not the mind to exercise it?
Or perhaps I write these things, which stand upon the brink of heresy, because I do not know how to feel God’s love.
I have no worldly analogue that would teach me how.
This need not necessarily be a lack of faith.
Nor even necessarily a lack of God. One should not need to feel a thing, to understand that it may be there.
That higher consciousness, the ability to reason, gifts from God, surely?
Distinctions between man and beast. Nonsense, then, to conclude that the universe is a cold and unloving place, chaotic and empty.
It is surely right, it is surely logical, to believe that there is order and goodness here.
Even if it is unseen, sometimes, unfelt.
I can trust. I will trust. On thought alone.