How great literature can change your life

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Sunday

I’m currently on a Louise Erdrich kick, having just reread The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse after immersing myself in LaRose and The Watchman. Last Report, maybe the most spiritual of the Ojibewe author’s novels, features a woman disguising herself as a Catholic priest in order to serve the Little No Horse reservation. Agnes/Father Damien is not so much a trans man as a woman who has chosen to cross-dress for practical purposes. If the Catholic church allowed women priests, she would remain a woman.

The sensitivity she brings to her role dramatizes how much the Catholic church has lost by having only male priests. While the Indians themselves would have no difficulty with a woman priest—we are given examples of Ojibwe men acting as women and Ojibwe women acting as men—Agnes/Father Damien knows that she must keep her identity secret from the church authorities. She even finds a way to hide her death so that the secret won’t be revealed when her dead body is inspected.

The passage I have chosen today involves her “Sermon to the Snakes.” Damien has commissioned a new church, which is set upon a rock that shelters an ancient snake nest. A passionate piano player when she was a woman, Damien finds herself playing to the snakes when an old piano is donated to the church.  Then, emulating St. Francis, she delivers a “Sermon to the Snakes” (below).

Today we celebrate the Transfiguration of Christ, which “encourages us to view creation as a continuously evolving transformation of matter and energy” (John Gatta, The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation). In other words, all of nature is luminous, and this includes snakes. The ones in the novel are caught up by Chopin, Schubert, and Debussy.

At first, Damien doesn’t realize he has them as an audience:

She played in the embrace of that special sense of being heard, that expectancy, but when she finally set her hands in her lap and looked up to acknowledge the listener, no one was there. Only the still new leaves faintly twitching between the studs and the haze of gold light through the tremulous scatter of clouds. It wasn’t until she saw a twist of movement from the corner of her eye that she looked down and saw the snakes.

Damien figure that that must be at least a hundred or more:

 Another moved, quick as a lash. Yet another seeped forward and Agnes put her fingers back upon the keys. A third uncoiled in a question mark that she answered with a smooth barcarolle, which seemed the right thing to play for snakes. She watched them out of the corner of her eyes. They were motionless now, their ligulate, black bellies flat against the stone. Parallel gold stripes down the center of their backs seemed to vibrate in the fresh June light. The snakes looked polished brand-new. Perhaps they’d shed their skins at the door, she thought, and even as her fingers rippled she imagined a pile of frail husks. Their heads were slightly raised off the floor and if they weren’t actually listening to the notes, they were positively fixed on the music. They were suspended, somehow, by whatever means were available to their senses.

And finally:

Growing weary, Agnes at last hit upon the Kinderscenen from Schubert and finally, playing “Sleep” repetitively and with all the kindness of a good parent, she succeeded in driving the snakes, the ginebigoog, back to their beds.

Damien’s Ojibwe mentor, Nanapush, explains the significance of “the ginebigoog” to the community. He observes that

the snake was a sign of great positive concern among the old people, for the snake was a deeply intelligent secretive being, and knew all the cold and blessed spirits who lived under stone and deep in the earth. And it was the great snake, wrapped around the center of the earth, who kept things from flying apart.

The vision isn’t entirely negated by a statue the church commissions, a “Madonna of the Serpents,” in which Mary is depicted as crushing the serpent that tempted Eve. But as someone notes about the statue, “The snake that writhed beneath the Virgin’s feet not only was too realistic, but did not look at all crushed down by her weight.”

In her sermon to the snakes, delivered only to test out the new acoustics, Damien asks, “What is the whole of our existence but the sound of an appalling love?”

In response, the snakes “slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.” Here are the answers she explores:

What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our powers, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?

“Divine love may be so large it cannot see us.

“Or it may be so infinitely tiny that it works on a level where it directs us like an unknown substance buried in our blood.

“Or it may be transparent, an invisible screen, a filter through which we see and hear all that is created.

“Oh my friends…”

The snakes lifted their bullet-smooth heads, flickered their tongues to catch the vibrations of the sounds the being made somewhere before them.

“I am like you,” said Father Damien to the snakes, “curious and small.” He dropped his arms. “Like you, I poise alertly and open by senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.”

The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.

“If I am loved,” Father Damien went on, “it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”

He lifted his hand, blessed the snakes, and then lay down full length in a pew and slept there for the rest of the afternoon.

This comes close to capturing my own vision of God, a force woven into our very being and yet vast beyond comprehending. We “poise alertly”—to nature, to the arts, to each other—hoping to detect God’s love. And then we go on as though it is there because it is only through this belief that life makes sense.