A Mirror of Shalott and a Bit More

The other day, I was looking for some book or other on my Kindle, and I came across A Mirror of Shalott by Robert Hugh Benson, the author of Lord of the World. It only cost 99 cents, so I figured I would give it a try, and I'm really glad I did. In a way, this book is very similar to Grandmother and the Priests. You may I remember the book with the cover that no one wants to be seen with which I wrote about in May. I wonder if Taylor Caldwell, whose book was published in 1986, had read Msgr. Benson's book, which was published in 1907. I think it's likely.

In Mirror, a group of priests are gathered and each of them agrees to tell a story of the supernatural--or perhaps the preternatural. They are agreed that one has to be agnostic about these unexplained events, but that they are of interest all the same. There is also a journalist with them, the narrator, who plans to write about the stories that they tell.

After the priests have made the decision to tell their stories, one of the younger priests complains that, "Half at least of the stories one hears have no point--no reason." The monsignor explains that one shouldn't assume that the point has anything to do with the person who experiences them. He says that if you drop an orange peel on an ant hill, the ant may assume that it's a sign from Heaven, but in reality it's nothing of the sort. But then, someone might supply the ants with something in the nature of an ant farm in which case it would be a gift to the ants. In the same way, some of things we see or hear have nothing to do with us and some are sent.

I found all of the stories to be quite good and engaging. Several of the stories involve evil presences that affect the characters; some are about those unexplainable events that don't have anything to do with us; one was very beautiful and moving. They don't, however, always reach the sort of satisfying end that one might like. Sometimes there's no resolution. You just have to wonder.

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One serendipitous occurrence that presented itself while I was reading Mirror of Shalott was that something that was said in one of the stories corresponded almost exactly with something that I read in my daily reading from the Catechism. The German priest says:

I knew a man in Germany, thirty years ago, who had lived away from God. He had been a Catholic, and was well-educated in religion till he grew to be a lad. Then he fell into sin, and dared not confess it; and he lied, and made bad confessions and approached the altar so. He once went to a strange priest to tell his sin, and dared not when the time came; and so added sin to sin, and lost his faith. It is ever so. We know it well. The soul dare not go on in that state, believing in God; and so by an inner act of the will renounces Him. It is not true, it is not true, she cries; and at last the voice of faith is silent, and her eyes blind.

The passage in the Catechism reads:

The human mind, in its turn, is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also by disordered appetites which are the consequences of original sin. so it happens that men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful.

Both of these quotes remind me of a talk I attended at a conference a long time ago. The title of the talk was Keeping Your Kids Catholic, and it was given by a man who had written a book by that name, and who began the talk by saying that two of his college-age children weren't going to Mass. This wasn't a very promising beginning. In the question and answer session a couple of people asked, "Why do children leave the Church?" People gave all sorts of answers, but it seemed clear to me that in most cases the obvious answer was that they wanted to sin, and not being able to live with the guilt, they had to quit going to Mass. I still think that is the primary reason, although today, there is so little influence toward church attendance that it's easier to just slip away through inertia.

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I can't, by the way, figure out which story the picture on the cover of the book is supposed to go with. I think it may not go with any of them. It looks like a pre-Raphaelite painting, but I can't find it online anywhere.

AMDG