Thursday. My haggard mind is doing its best this morning, but keeps losing focus. The dense fog cosying around my psyche is unsettling. I cannot count the number of times I've found myself standing slackly in the middle of a room, or regarding a paper towel dispenser with almost utter blankness. "Almost utter blankness" is so much worse than "utter blankness." It's that niggling tooth, that word on the tip of the tongue, that vague deja-vu sensation all rolled into a feeling that is distinctly less than the sum of its parts.

I finished reading Greene's "The Power and the Glory" yesterday, and have been gnawing on it in my mind ever since. The priest even made it into my dreams last night, begging me for a place to stay the night. I was in character as Sara, the protagonist of Harriet Doerr's "Consider This, Signora," and was very afraid that my ex would appear and get the wrong impression, especially if he saw the wine I was thoughtfully procuring for my fugitive. For some reason it never entered my mind to fear the wrath of the lieutenant dogging my winebibbing refugee.

All dreaming aside, it was a book brutally faithful to portraying the dark side of the glamor of the Christian faith (the side nearer to apostasy than hypocrisy), and to revealing how the dark side is often, in the that paradoxical cliche, closer to the light than the glamorous side (which is nearer to hypocrisy than apostasy). The priest experiences a terrible fall from grace, finds himself both metaphorically and literally in the same camp as the publicans and sinners, and is forced to recognize the crippling extent of his depravity. It contrasts the petty compromises and complacencies of his prior comfortable existence to the state of mortal sin--drankenness and fornication--that shadows his current existence. In his journey down the slippery slope, the father learns how to love by learning more and more personally about the nature of sin. While he never overcomes his terror of death, he at length does choose it over the safety and hypocrisy of life in a new country.

The novel reminded me that the most important thing in life is to strive after holiness, even though that path is never the easy one. Even though the choices that face me will often seem small and innocuous enough in themselves, whenever I choose the lesser good I am choosing wrongly.

And when I fail (as inevitably I will), the novel reminded me that the plan and providence of God are much vaster than I can dream, and will make everything right in the end.

It was the most discouraging bit of encouragement I have read in a very long time.