Personas of the imagination 5 — learning to love in darkness — Father Peregrine

I wanted to write something about the imaginative territory explored in the character of Father Peregrine in The Hawk and the Dove stories.

I've been taken aback by the number of readers who've responded to Peregrine as a Christ figure — seeing him as representing Jesus, a man full of wisdom and love; which intrigued and surprised me.

By contrast, the first editor for The Hawk and the Dove described him as "a bad-tempered old man", and she couldn't see why anyone liked him at all. But they did.

So I was turning over in my mind what it was exactly that drew people to Peregrine  . . . when I got an email. 

I recently subscribed to a site I came across and liked, run by an Australian woman called Leonie Dawson, here. She's cheerful and inspiring and encouraging and makes me smile, and she has some wonderful freebies on her site. So I subscribed for her updates and I've been enjoying reading her mailings. And then, today, what a jolt. Where she lives there's been a forest fire, out of control, people being evacuated from their homes. Thank goodness, the emergency services responded quickly and thoroughly; the helicopters circling over her neighbourhood dropping water bombs have succeeded in putting out the fire. 

She wrote about the importance of acknowledging when something in life — yourself, even — is broken, and being honest about your distress. Since I got her email, she keeps coming back to my mind.

And when I got to thinking about Father Peregrine again, sort of fused together with thinking about Leonie, I thought — yes — that's the imaginative territory he personifies; how to live in and through the things that are just unbearable; how to keep going (because you have no choice) when you don't know what to do; how to transform circumstances that terrify and defeat you by immersing them and yourself in the presence of Christ.

Father Peregrine is only in the first three novels of the series. While he's there, he spends almost all his time out of his depth, trying to cope, not knowing what to say, and clinging tight to Jesus whom he loves with every fibre of his being. And Jesus clings tight to him, too.

He dies at the end of Book 3, The Long Fall.

After his death, Brother Tom (unwillingly) has a conversation about him with Father Chad:

Tom passed his hand across his face and sighed. He decided that he might as well give Father Chad what he wanted simply in order to secure his escape.

‘How I felt about him? I loved him. Sometimes I was angry with him, at my wits’ end with him. Sometimes he made me feel very small, very ashamed. Sometimes he tore my heart open with pity. He taught me to love in darkness, showed me that it is possible to find a little spring of hope in the most arid place of despair, just by loving; by consenting to be defenceless … permitting the pain and the wonder of loving and being loved. All that … but mostly I just loved him without knowing why. 

I loved his crazy smile and the way his eyes could dance with laughter. I loved the way he looked like a bad-tempered bird when things were going wrong. I loved his faith.

‘And what hurts most is facing up to the fact that I will never hear that slow, careful voice struggling its way back to speech—“T-om. Th-ank y-ou, T-om.” Never. As long as I live, never again. Never see those eyes smiling, “T-ell m-e about it.”

‘What else did you want to know? Memories? I remember the night we went out to look at the stars … the hunger and ecstasy in his eyes, the sigh in his voice, “Oh, mon Dieu; oh le bien.” And the scent of rosemary. I remember lying with him in the grass below the burial ground, talking about his death, about God…I remember him lying on his bed naked in the firelight, the oil shining on his body, the sound of him weeping, and Brother Michael talking to him, quietly. I remember another time he wept, holding him in my arms, and I felt as though his pain would divide my soul in two. Those wretched blackberries. I remember holding his hand, before he learned to speak again, and the extraordinary cost of caressing it with real tenderness, such a simple thing, but it took courage to do …

‘I remember how Martin used to drive him to distraction … I remember how jealous I was that it was Theodore, not me, who taught him to speak again … silly…’

Tom looked up at Father Chad, all the extravagant torment of unbearable grief in his eyes. He felt the pain of it swell relentlessly inside him; the by now familiar agony of hurting so intense he felt it would split him apart, dislocate his reason.

And then at the very end of that book, Brother Tom sits with Father Theo, who says this to him:

‘He… he was worried about you. He spoke to me about it one day. He said that he never knew when he might be taken ill again, and he was worried once Brother Francis went away to the seminary, that if he died while Francis was away you might have no one you could turn to. He told me to look after you. He said I was to remind you, if you needed some comfort, that you’d helped him to start living again. He couldn’t have faced it without you. He said that the breath of God in you is a gift of life, a holy kiss to be passed on. He said you’d know what he meant. And he said to tell you that the sorrow of grief is a bitter crucifixion, but that the loving had been joyous, and one day would be again.

‘He told me to behold your grief without embarrassment, to help you not to run away from your pain. He told me… he said that it would be the comfort of my love that led your anguish out into compassion, instead of it festering to destruction. He said to tell you that a man in grief is like a man with bedsores. It costs him to reveal it, but he needs help with it. He said you’d know what he meant. And he said to remind you of the thing you said last night. That love has no defences, and you only know it’s love when it hurts.’

I think Peregrine personifies that capacity — to behold grief without embarrassment and not to run away from pain; he personifies the cost of allowing the intimacy of authentic encounter. Much of what I wrote in Peregrine's stories I learned in palliative care contexts with people who were dying or bereaved or living with life-limiting illness and profound disability. He personified the way the soul shines through, no matter what.

And today as I thought of Leonie and her family facing the terror of out-of-control fire, that fused together in my mind with reflecting on Father Peregrine, a vulnerable human being like all of us, who also, in his way, walked through fire. It's that thing Tom said: He taught me to love in darkness, showed me that it is possible to find a little spring of hope in the most arid place of despair, just by loving; by consenting to be defenceless.  That territory.