Eight Whopping Lies and Other Stories of Bruised Grace

by Brian Doyle

Me, I suggest that the sooner you wake up and get it that there actually is a wild grace and defiant courage in people, and there actually are stories that save and change lives, and that there is a lot more going on here than we can ever find words for, and that love and attentiveness and creativity are real and wild and immanent, the cooler and wilder a life you will enjoy while you have such a priceless and inexplicable thing as a life, which goes by awfully fast, my friend.

The crucifix had a tiny lean gaunt sagging Christ with his head fallen onto his chest in utter weariness and despair. You always felt bad for him when you saw him like this but it was hard to discuss this with adults because if you said something like the poor guy they would launch into apologetics or hermeneutics or muddled theology or a speech about how his death was actually Glorious, and he was Resurrected, and Our Holy Mother the Church Says, and etcetera and etcetera in the endless murky religious blather of adults who are not listening to what you mean, and all you meant was that you felt bad for the poor guy, all battered and bereft and alone.

Even when she was very ill she prayed the rosary every day and even when she could no longer remember her son’s face or name she would still run her fingers over her rosary.

I believe you can pray the rosary even if you no longer know what the word rosary means. Perhaps that is when the rosary is prayed most piercingly of all.

There was Willa Cather’s fine Song of the Lark, and Harper Lee’s perfect To Kill a Mockingbird, and David James Duncan’s great headlong Pacific Northwest coming-of-age novel The River Why, and best of all, greatest of all, the glorious hilarious epic sprawling wondrous novel The Horse’s Mouth, by the Irishman Joyce Cary, and that was all, just those four, the three lean and the one thick with Cary’s word-wizardry; and now I look back through the years at that shelf and wonder if those four books did not nearly encapsulate and characterize and explain and draw a collective map to the woman who married me.

Surely we are made of more things than we know. We could be part goshawk, or languages no one knows anymore, or dreams a turtle had one winter under the ice.

indeed how to catch fish is perhaps the least interesting thing about fishing, and there must be many people who go fishing not for fish but for something else altogether, so that when you ask them if they had a successful day fishing, and they say yes, but they have no fish, you know exactly what they mean, because you feel that way also.

So let us review: an American soldier, age twenty-two, is nearly pierced by a bullet made in America, sold for a profit in America, by an American company which makes half a billion dollars a year selling bullets and other weaponry to armies all over the world.

Yet even now that I am long past the habit of dressing in my best for Mass, I sometimes feel that I should, and not just for nostalgic reasons, or to hint to the boy with surfer shorts that he ought to get a grip. No; it has something mysteriously to do with respect, and humility, and ritual, and reverence. When I was young I thought dressing for Mass was silly and empty performance art; now I wonder if it was more a gesture of something like awe. For great moments in life you prepare slowly and carefully, and present yourself buffed and polished and shining, as a way to say something for which we do not yet have particularly good words.

I like the fact that Mount Carmel, in Israel, is called ‘God’s Vineyard’ in Hebrew, and is a holy place for the Baha’i, Jewish, and Muslim faiths as well as for the Christian faith; indeed it is thought to have been a sacred place long before any of those religions existed, which cheers me up, for it reminds me that holiness is bigger than any religion, and that what is sacred cannot be owned or controlled or claimed by any one religion or people or sect or species.

I think theology is an attempt to make sense of that to which sense does not apply.

If you were really a visionary leader, if you were really a devout follower of the Prophet and of the word of the One, you would kneel in the bloody sand and atone for what you have done, and apologize to those who weep, and then arise and turn all your mind and heart and soul to peace; in so doing you may yet save your soul, and turn the eyes and ears of the world finally to what is great and good in Islam, which is reverence, and purity, and peace.

I don’t think I ever fully understood the deep almost inexplicable love of the Christ for us, why he would accept his own early tortured death as a sacrifice, until I had been a father for a while.