Marc Veldhuyzen, Contributor
Do you hate yourself? Hopefully, no, and statistically the majority of the people reading this don’t. However, there always exists in every community the lowest experiences of human existence. You’re not alone, if your dice happened to land there. It’s not your fault either. One of the hard lessons of the school of life is that control is limited and often illusionary, despite how desperately we are to resist fervently against that fact.
It is in this place that we find the priest in The Power and The Glory, by Graham Greene. A destitute and broken man. A man of shattered ambition. A man at his lowest point. He is disgusted with himself. How could he not be? He is a criminal. The government, fed up with the catholic churches abuses over Mexico, has outlawed it and in the Southern provinces in which he lives, the punishment is death. From the outset this priest seems to be a hero, he is standing up for his beliefs, resisting a tyrannical government, a paragon of christian martyrdom.
But he also has a child. He is a whiskey priest, an alcoholic. His thoughts, before the repression, were more on ambition to rise to being a Bishop, not on his local community. All of those ambitions are gone now, of course, but they still haunt him. Like a little nudge, a little reminder of how evil and terrible of a human being he truly is. He is absolutely certain of his fate after death. He could feel the fires of hell brushing against his skin. Every negative trait of the priest is emphasized and laid out in its raw fullness. He has grown obsessed with it. He spends nearly every second of every day with that weight of self-judgement dragging itself around. If you looked only at his own thoughts then you’d be sure that he is right, he is evil.
The problem, as it always is when it comes to how you perceive yourself, is the other. Being the only priest in that province of heavily religious southern Mexico, the believers he encounters on his aimless journey are infatuated by him. They see him as the last vestige of resistance, proof that hope still lives. He continues to keep going out of a very real and genuine desire to save souls and help people, something he devalues as much as he can, and yet still exists. In his suffering, he experiences his fellow Christians in a way he never could as a wealthy priest. He wears their same clothes, he eats their same food, he looks poor and ragged. Despite how much he hates himself, the people around him see value in him. He dismisses their claims, but really, he is a figure of respect. It’s very silly, in hindsight, how much he hates himself.
This is especially true when he is contrasted by the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant doesn’t hate himself. He is a happy and very mentally secure man. He is not very self-critical at all. He is also a complete and utter monster. The man tasked with killing the priest, he exists as a reflection of what the priest was before his suffering. An ambitious and secure man who rides around on a horse, utterly different then the people he serves, yet still claims to be the people’s highest servant. While the priest feels the immense mental guilt at having fallen into the sin of sex a single time, the Lieutenant without batting an eye orders a man from every village to be shot, until they turn in where the priest is hiding.
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In the end, the priest is found and the priest is shot. He makes it across the border into a safer place, but returns back for the mere chance to save one soul, an American, who was murdered and robbed and then fled to Mexico. His last moments were not pleasant. There was no sudden revelation. Instead he was numb to it, his greatest fear being the pain of the bullets striking his body and then hell to come after. He never realized he was a good man.
It is, in a sense, a very classic Christian story. He may not have realized it, but, through his suffering he ended up embodying the tenets of Christ which he thought he strayed so far from. All of this happens while the Lieutenant, the one which his world gave success and power, is on the opposite end. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re perfect or if you think you’re disgusting, both points of views probably stem from delusion. This story shows that you have traits some consider good and some consider bad, and you can move yourself through that. You are not an absolute object of hatred or love. You are you.