Another book

I recently found this interesting book, a bit more difficult to read, but fulfilling nevertheless. The book, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, is by Louise Erdrich, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, Pembina Band.

It starts off with the confessions of a Father Damien Modeste to the Pope, through letters, of secrets and stories in the little town. Right from the opening chapter, the reader is told that Father Damien is actually a woman, whose circumstances in life led her to take on the cloth and become priest in the town of Little No Horse.

It is the story of Agnes deWitt of Wisconsin who became Sister Cecilia at a convent, and had to leave when she fell in love with Chopin on the piano (literally), and is led from one situation to another until a great flood leads her to the corpse of Father Damien whom she had met before and who was on his way to “save” the Ojibwe in a remote reservation. Her life takes on a turn when she takes on Damien's clothes and assumes the role of the priest in the reservation.

“Between the two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?....

“Father Damien was both a robber and a priest. For what is it to entertain a daily deception? Wasn't he robbing all who looked upon him? Stealing their trust? Shameful perhaps, but Agnes was surprised to find that the thought only gave her satisfaction. She felt no guilt, and so concluded that if God sent none she would not invent any. She decided to miss Agnes as she would a beloved sister, to make of Father Damien her creation. He would be loving, protective, remote, and immensely disciplined. He would be Agnes's twin, her masterwork, her brother.”

Did she deceive? She did. But people also saw what they wanted to see. We are filled with expectations when we meet people, that they are to us what we want them to be. Call it neurolingustic programming, or whatever, there was a role to be played, and she played it.

The past always comes back to haunt, but Agnes is able to fit in as Damien – for 80 years, she lives as the priest in Little No Horse and does wonders. At some point in her time as a priest, she is visited by another priest (Father Wekkle) who discovers her identity and they end up having a sexual affair. Years later, this priest is on the verge of death and comes to seek out Agnes. The thing that bothers her the most is the feeling that he patronizes her, even in his weak state, as though she is less of something because she is a woman.

“Had he patronized her way back then? Had she noticed? Or had he learned this? Did she patronize women too, now that she'd made herself so thoroughly into a priest?”

Would people change they way they behaved towards you if the information they had about you changed? Here is a box that is often used. Women. Less smart. Less intellectual. And there are many other boxes as well.

Through the chapters, the priest is caught in many dilemmas, which she obediently refers to the Pope, and doesn't get any responses. I guess she's relevant to the folks and that's the essence of it. What is really “service to the people” if not what is meaningful to the people? You can argue that sometimes people don't know what they need – an argument I would use to say that political education is important and needed because you need to exercise your choices wisely in politics – but I think with religion and spirituality, it takes on a different spin and I'm less tolerant to that.

The investigator from Vatican who comes to town to investigate the case of the miracle involving another member of the church concludes at the end that it is Father Damien who was the more saintly. Even where the characters knew her real identity, they kept it to themselves, and to some extent, protected it.

Maybe what was important was who she became and not who she was.

It was bit tough with the book to follow some of the characters, but I like the development of the story. You think that by revealing the identity of Damien in the first chapter that the mystery of the story is taken away, but no. The sub-plots are as interesting as the main story. Anyway, I like one of the lines in the end, where the character who has taken care of Damien (Marie Kashpaw), and ironically is the one who assists in his death, pulls out a crumpled paper where she had written one of Damien's sermons: “What is the whole of our existence but the sound of an appalling love?” Amazing.