The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

celebrating a birthday, alone.

Ora pro nobis.’

We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

‘The window,’ the stranger said, ‘is very beautiful.’ One pane of stained glass had been let in: a Madonna

indulgence.

‘I will pray for you.’

Latin.

Heat stood in the room like an enemy.

‘They would have caught him if we hadn’t, and then he would have been one of your martyrs. They would write a book about him and you would read it to the children.’

foreshadowing

abandoned

Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round.

Her answers might carry him anywhere.

She was independent of both of them:

an unhappy man is always prepared.

the unforgivable sin, despair.

‘Reading Without Tears’

she looked more fragile than ever and more indomitable.

she came closer: a lot of little crosses leant in the circle of light. He must have lain down among the bananas and tried to relieve his fear by writing something, and this was all he could think of. The child stood in her woman’s pain and looked at them: a horrible novelty enclosed her whole morning: it was as if today everything were memorable.

Stabat Mater

while his heart beat with its secret love.

the smile somehow left behind like the survivor of a wreck.

Pain is part of joy.

‘Pray that you will suffer more and more and more.

5th Station, a share in Christ's Cross

they built new plans at once out of the ruins of the old.

unfrightened.

or rather one must love every soul as if it were one’s own child. The passion to protect must extend itself over a world—

Christ would not have found Judas sleeping in the garden: Judas could watch more than one hour.

‘Every time … I have such fear.’

You are a father, aren’t you?’ ‘I have a child,’ the priest said, ‘if that’s what you mean.’

a black fountain spouting out of the marshy useless soil and flowing away to waste—fifty thousand gallons an hour. It was like the religious sense in man, cracking suddenly upwards, a black pillar of fumes and impurity, running to waste.

It was for this world that Christ had died;

it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God’s image.

If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures—you had to kill yourself among the graves.

‘I am a priest.’

pious women.

fed on illusion.

full of unc...

Hate was just a failure of imagination.

the price of a Mass.

Then he heard a sound; it was like hope coming tentatively back: a scratching and a whining.

‘Virtus Laudata Crescit,’

'Greatness increases with praise"

abandonment—

the enormous breathing of the rain

church.’ ‘A church?’

cleanliness, not purity.

He couldn’t help wondering how it had got here—with its ugly type and its over-simple explanations—

‘Love is not wrong, but love should be happy and open—it is only wrong when it is secret, unhappy

Even when he drank he felt bound to his sin by love. It was easier to get rid of hate.

wide empty early world.

Christ danced