The Diary of a Country Priest: Chapters 7-8 (Finis)
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Apr 10 • 1HR 6M
The Diary of a Country Priest: Chapters 7-8 (Finis)
Close Reads is a book-club podcast for the incurable reader. Featuring David Kern, Tim McIntosh and Heidi White, alongside a couple of other occasional guests, we read Great Books and talk about them. This is a show for amateurs in the best sense. We’re book lovers, book enthusiasts. This is not an experts show and it’s barely literary analysis in the way that literary analysis is commonly understood. Instead it’s a show about experiences with literary urge. Join us!
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This week Sean & Heidi discuss the priest’s last days, his four final encounters, the purpose of the diary, and the mingling of grace and suffering that pervades the novel.
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The Diary of a Country Priest: Chapters 7-8 (Finis)
I loved the insight that Heidi had about how the Priests encounter with Olivier shows us a taste of him as a young man, as what he would have been had he not been called to the priesthood, and how non-religious people might look at that and think what a waste. As Heidi pointed out, no matter the vocation you are called to, it requires a sacrifice, a loss, because you must say no to one way of life in order to say yes to another. As a Catholic who struggled with vocational discernment, precisely because I became so anxious about saying “no” to something (the religious life) and lost sight of what God was asking me to say yes to, I feel like I can read this section with a renewed appreciation. It’s so easy to judge lives (including our own) and think-oh they/we could have been so different if only...-that we forget to live fully in the garden has entrusted to us. And that’s what the Priest does so well. He gets down and deep and buried in the muck of the garden God has given to him with total abandon
A line that had stuck with me, particularly after reading Achilles in Vietnam and starting The Ethics of Beauty: “There is no
greater loneliness than a certain type of ugliness, the devastation of ugliness.”