by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Alice McDermott: Back, You Jesuit Snapping at My Heels!
The sacramental imagination: what is it, exactly, or even approximately? I have to say that I’m not sure – I’ve never been sure.
Oh, I understand the ways the sacramental imagination has been set out by writers like David Tracy and his associate Andrew Greeley. But I am not convinced that it exists – not convinced that there is a “sacramental imagination” that is distinctly Catholic in the way the term suggests, or that it isn’t simply a way of describing experience rooted in the pre-Vatican II rites of the church, or that it isn’t just a lofty way of putting the ordinary orthodox idea that the “supernatural is the real” (as Charles Ryder put it) and that divine designs are best discerned the things of the world.
I have to say that I’m surprised to find that Alice McDermott is of like mind in this. Her essay in the current Boston College Magazine carries the subtitle “Storytelling and the Sacramental Imagination,” and I have to say that I expected a robust defense of same.
But it turns out that Alice, too, is instinctively suspicious of the “sacramental imagination”:
Personally, I am in no way certain that the Divine Light shines through the things of this world—not with the kind of certainty that would sustain a 30-year career dedicated to demonstrating this through fiction. In my own experience, meaninglessness is often as good an explanation for the things of this world as is meaning. In matters of faith, I am as aware of wordplay and disingenuousness and outdated dogma as was my agnostic young friend—not to mention the role that fear and confusion, sentimentality, and shallow thinking can play when we confront our mortality. The Jesuit notion of God in all things is marvelous, but it takes a faith I don’t have to keep another notion—one we call wishful thinking—from snapping at its heels.
And it turns out that Alice has a better idea, one that finds the roots of our experience of literature in an ancient doctrine in ways surprising, powerful, and – so old-school Catholic, this – self-evident-seeming once you have read her account of it. It’s her idea that “the confluence that occurs when we read: confluence of the writer’s mind, the narrator’s mind, and the mind of the reader” is akin to the Trinity – is a trinity in its own right:
It’s a simple enough formula (miraculous in its simplicity, when you stop to think about it): The writer—in the silence of her composing room—puts her mind, her language, her experience, her aspirations and observations, even her own will, at the service of her narrator. The narrator speaks and creates a world. The reader, in turn, lends his inner voice, the voice with which he speaks to himself, to the narrator, and thus that created world comes into vivid existence. Eliminate one part of this particular trinity and the novel—the story, the poem, literature itself—disappears.
Is this idea akin to somebody else’s – say, Dorothy Sayers’? I have to say that I don’t know. But I am investigating. Alice is on to something.