** spoiler alert ** The Sacramental Kiss of a Bloody Finger

Binx Bolling marries Kate Cutrer, even though a bystander, much less the Cutrer family, would not have suspected these two were in love. The Moviegoer is the strange story of one week of Binx’s life, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, which happens to fall on Ash Wednesday. Binx is searching for something in life, but for what he is not too sure. He is just a normal guy living in Gentilly, a New Orleans suburb, with a normal stockbroker job in a fine office that earns him a fine living. Externally, Binx is normal and fine, and the plot of The Moviergoer reflects this as there is almost no external action or adventure. Internally, however, Binx is anything but fine, and Kate is downright sick. We often see Kate’s sickness when she plucks at her thumb, leaving her skin as fragmented as her soul in this modern world full of “malaise.”

If you have not read The Moviegoer, I hope you will. I can think of few novels that better grasp the need for a sacramental life—especially in these modern times. Percy never explicitly preaches the Gospel in his novels, leaving that instead for the Church. Rather, he hints and points at Truth artistically, leaving the reader puzzled with this modern world, longing for hope. In the end, Binx shows us hope as he finds peace and a vita nuova in work, worship and marriage, and this is his sacramental redemption.

I should be clear: The Moviegoer is not a novel about the Sacraments (capital “S”, if you will); rather, it is about sacramental life (small “S”). The Moviegoer is literature, not theology, and nowhere are the Sacraments defined, and especially not numbered. Rather, The Moviegoer shows us the need of living sacramentally in this life because any other way of life is incomplete. Binx has spent his life searching for meaning and unity in a fragmented modern world. He cannot find any real sense of time and place, and so he chases skirts and lives in perfect American conformity seeking some American ideal. But then he finds Kate. Kate is hardly ideal. She is fleshly, broken, but real. Near the end of the novel as they discuss their matrimony, Kate worries all the more and “started plucking at her thumb in earnest, tearing away little shreds of flesh.” Binx takes her hand and kisses away the blood.

Binx and Kate find life and hope through the little things such as work, worship and marriage. Until Kate, Binx was a committed moviegoer, seeking to live as the stars on the screen recommended. They preach sex and success, perfection and follow-your-heart drama. Kate brings the opposite: brutal honesty, little sex-appeal, and no perfection, just simple, weak flesh. She is the chief sacramental image in the novel because caring for her flesh, weak though it is, is exactly what Binx needs. They need each other, plain and simple, yet powerful in grace.

Theologically, the Sacraments are holy signs and seals of God’s grace. They set apart the Church as God’s people, and they feed God’s people. But when it comes to living sacramentally, literature is an essential counterpoint to theology. Literature points and shows, providing a vision of truth, whereas theology and philosophy seek to define truth. Binx and Kate’s redemptive matrimony does not define marriage, much less baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but their matrimony shows us how the simple, tangible things are vehicles of grace. And that is the sacramental life—experiencing grace in the common things.

Now, as normal modern Americans it is natural to balk at this point. What does Percy mean to say the modern world is full of “malaise” where men are “dead, dead, dead” and to think that matrimony, among other things, is a cure? What sort of an idea is that? In the 21st century, matrimony itself is up for redefinition, or even elimination. What is the value in such an “institution”? What we most likely want are some numbers and statistics, something scientific to show us the way. We probably want an idea, something we can understand. After all, it is in our blood to think ideas and rationality are the main things.

I think Percy expects us to balk. Perhaps that’s why his fiction is so bizarre (see Love in the Ruins). Then again, we need something strong to penetrate a thick modern shell. Like O’Connor’s grotesque images, Percy awakens us by shock value if nothing else to remember that we do have bodies, that our bodies need other bodies, that our bodies need food, and that all this is very, very spiritual. This is perhaps the crux of the matter, especially for evangelical Protestants: we live in a dualistic world where the spiritual does not really interact with the physical. We think of eating as an enjoyable activity and as an essential physical activity, but we fail to see what is really involved in eating. As Alexander Schmemann reminds us, what is really behind eating is sacrifice because something is dead (plant or animal) so that we can now live. Is this a mere coincidence with our Lord who was crucified for us so that we may live? Or consider Christ who comes to claim the Church as his bride. Coincidence? Impossible. Nor is the Church as bride a mere metaphor, but rather a real metaphor, a metaphor that shows the real essential connection between the two things. Matrimony is a means of grace for many reasons, but primarily because it depicts the marriage between Christ and the Church. Matrimony is not biological. We are not destined by our DNA to crave one (or more) person of the opposite (or not) sex to fulfill our biological needs. The proper term is not biology, but flesh, and yes, the flesh needs marriage, but even the flesh is not the primary reason for matrimony. Christ and His bride define matrimony.

This is why the story of Binx and Kate is comedic. Kate needs Binx, and Binx needs Kate. Matrimony alone does not heal them, nor is matrimony the end, but artistically, this sacramental couple points to a transcendent Goodness. Their simple common love in holy matrimony is grace in a fragmented soul-less world.

Lastly, we should remember that while matrimony, work and worship may be the main themes Percy brings to light, these three are hardly an exhaustive list of things for a sacramental life because a sacramental life includes everything under the sun. Everything is an opportunity for grace if we remove the false dichotomy between spirit and flesh. Moreover, we know for certain that Percy’s literature is not sacramentally exhaustive because he deals very little with one of the most important sacramentalities—food! Food seems more dominant in film than literature, perhaps because food is more sensual than imaginative. Nevertheless, no discussion of sacramental life is complete without food. Peter Leithart reminds us that God’s gift of food, not man, is the climax of the six days of creation. “Genesis I ends with a menu.” Leithart continues,
Adam’s menu discloses the secret of human beings in another sense as well. Influenced by Greek and Enlightenment perspectives, modern Christians assume that ideas and thoughts and other functions of reason are superior to the body and its desires. For nearly two millennia, theologians have claimed that the image of God is located primarily if not exclusively in rationality or mental capacities. In no way do I wish to minimize the wonder of the human mind, whose measureless corridors reflect the incomprehensible God. But there is nothing at all said about the brain or thinking in Genesis I, nothing that suggests that silent contemplation is more fully human than eating a good meal. Quite the contrary: when God spoke to Adam, He did no reveal the Pythagorean theorem or teach the intricacies of superstring theory; He offered food. Adam did not come from the hand of God calculating and measuring; he came hungry.

There is no end to exploring sacramental life. Really, it simply needs to be lived. We are all-too-serious with ourselves, thinking all-too-much of ourselves as though we really know ourselves and the world when we can calculate and measure it. At the end of The Moviegoer, true moderns will scoff that Binx kisses Kate’s bloody finger and they live happily-ever-after—meaning that they will continue to be wounded, but will have each other to kiss the wounds. There is no rosy optimism in Percy, and we know Binx and Kate are far from out of the woes of life. But they are well equipped for these woes, sharing a simple and, dare we say, boring (and that is a good thing!) life together as man and wife.