Rereading Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh for me is like spending time with an old friend. Lines from the book are quoted in our home several times a week—lines that our children will one day discover in the book’s pages when they read it the first time and think to themselves, This is what Mom and Dad were referring to!
Lines such as, “Ought we to be drunk every night?” And, “Four Alexander cocktails, please,” “Yum-yum,” “One, two, three, four, down the red lane they go. How the students stare.” And so many more lines and images. The red-haired man counting the drips off the swan ice sculpture. Charles painting his first commissioned paintings of the rooms of Marchmain House. Eating strawberries with Sebastian under the tree. And of course the Vatican monkeys. Though coming back to this old friend, I had to look deeper, to let it sit with me, to see it with new eyes.
Being a cradle Catholic, I have always been struck by the “little sin” scene of Julia beside the fountain at Brideshead going over her life, her Catholic guilt, “All in one word, too, one little, flat deadly word that covers a lifetime.” And for Evelyn Waugh’s reader, it does not really matter which “little sin” is Julia’s, for when we read about her little sin, we think about our own little sins. There are the sins that we always come back to; the ones that like Julia make us feel that we “can’t go out” because we “got to take care of [our] little sin.” And some of them are clearly seen by others, as in the case of Julia. But others we hide in the depths of our being, where they fester and make us mean.
Shortly after the fountain scene, our narrator Charles Ryder, talks to the youngest of the Flyte family, Cordelia, after not seeing her for fifteen years. She has “grown up quite plain,” and while she tried being a nun for a while, she now spends her time as a single lay woman going about to the various wars of the 1930s and 40s nursing the wounded. Charles is clearly disappointed in the lost potential he sees in her—she who was once an exuberant teenager. She asks him if he thought of her as “thwarted” when he first saw her again—and after he responds truthfully—Cordelia responds that she thought the same about him and Julia who are both seeking a divorce while living together in adultery. “Thwarted passion,” is the phrase she uses.
And here is where we see the contrast between worldly fulfillment and the path to holiness. Catholic Cordelia aspires to give herself to others in whatever way she is called—after all, someone must be the field nurse. While atheist Charles and fallen away Catholic Julia also have desires for fulfillment, perhaps with a desire to give themselves, but mostly a self or couple-focused love without regard for the happiness of others. Our desire to love and be loved is good—as we learn from the film Moulin Rouge, “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return.” But the question we have to ask ourselves is, Whom are we meant to love? By Whom are we meant to be loved?
How often do we misdirect our passions which are meant to love God and God alone?
We direct them into our “little sins” that we must take care of. And we turn our faces from the revelation of God before us—which directs us to love of Him. As Saint Paul writes, “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened” (Romans 1:20-21).
We creatures have no excuse to not seek and worship our creator. But we excuse ourselves because of our fallenness, and we don’t raise our eyes to the One who made us. All the help we need to love Him is pouring out of Christ’s side from the Cross, but we hold up an umbrella and step around the puddles of grace pooling in the low places, filling every crack in the earth. And sometimes the umbrella is something as small as a second slice of cake to indulge the passion of taste while other times it is as large as harboring anger and resentment in our hearts against another human.
As I flipped through Brideshead Revisited yesterday, a passage from Charles about Julia stood out to me as very like St. Augustine’s Confessions: “I realized that she had regained what I thought she had lost for ever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, ‘Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?”
Are we not all sad in our search for fulfillment? Perhaps that second slice of cake is fulfilling as I eat it, but it is no longer fulfilling about ten minutes later when my stomach aches (true story) and I am sad again.
In The Science of the Cross, St. Edith Stein presents a quotation from St. John of the Cross’s Night of the Spirit about the relationship of the “passion of love” to love as “a free act of the will.” Our passions belong to our will, and while the will is free, we can will to let our will be taken captive by our passions and lose our freedom. This loss of freedom can be a good thing if the will is submitting to what we were made for, that is union with God (perhaps this is true freedom). When our wills submit to loving and knowing God, we can let our passions be taken captive by this union, it is an “enkindling and longing for love” which comes “from the Holy Spirit.” But this longing for love can also be, and is usually, misdirected—we can let our wills be taken captive by a passion for things that are not of God. And then we have thwarted our passions.
Surely, we were not made for our passions to be thwarted but made for fulfillment in God.
We “are called to be saints” (Romans 1:7). And “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23-24).
The call to sanctity, the way of living like a saint that Lady Marchmain models as well as the grown Cordelia in her spinster giving of herself, stands beside the wayward Julia and Sebastian (and even Charles), who cannot ignore that twitch upon the thread from God. And perhaps they all have that “magical sadness,” that touch of grace that seeps into their hearts through the cracks made in their careless hunt for happiness.
This magical sadness is present in every human’s life—for we are made for fulfillment and will look for it until we find it. Yet, perhaps part of the answer is found in Carmelite spirituality, which encourages us to detach ourselves from loving and seeking our fulfillment in created things. We are all being offered the grace of the Cross, to love God first and all things through the lens of His love. When we love Him rightly, we will love created things as we ought. Our passions are submitted to Him, our will’s freedom given over to the movements of charity, and we are no longer thwarted, but emptied of all that keeps us from Him and full of Him to the brim.