The Operation of Grace. Gregory Wolfe

times,” Betts writes, “when Jesus inveighed strongly against a ‘generation of vipers’ and other times when he might stoop and silently scratch words in the ground.” She continues:

      Like the descendants of Job’s second cousins once removed, [my characters] struggle through a long weekday process that includes losses and boils until in the end God does not so much answer their questions as silence them, simply by being there, so that my characters end by saying—or maybe whispering—“Mine eye seeth Thee.” Some of them might add: “That is You, isn’t it?”

      In the face of wisdom like this, those critics who champion earlier cultural manifestations of muscular Christianity start to sound a bit like schoolyard bullies rather than enlightened intellectuals.

      They are also reactionaries rather than conservatives. What they want is to preserve in amber a certain aesthetic form and spiritual stance, even after huge cultural changes have rendered those things obsolete. It is one thing to bemoan the postmodern world, with its relentless consumerism and its secular public square, but it is quite another thing to blame artists for reflecting the times.

      There is no way back. You can only move forward, which means that writers and artists have to begin with the way we live now and to somehow find in that unheroic, weekday world the whispers of grace. If people are alienated from authority, ignorant of the richness of their faith tradition, betrayed by religious leaders—if they are lost, wounded, resentful, and doubtful—then those stories have to be told, from the inside out. Genuine doubt is not weakness but strength, a willingness to wrestle with the angel.

      Are there some writers and artists who use doubt and ambiguity as a way of dodging what T. S. Eliot called the “Overwhelming Question”? Sure. But the decline-and-fall critics are so sure of themselves that they don’t bother to carefully sift what’s out there. If they did, they’d find more kinship between the whisperers and the shouters than they have imagined.

      Artists of faith may work on smaller canvases today, but if they can create exquisite miniatures, then they have done their bit to redeem the time.

      Fully Human

      Last night i watched—mesmerized, despite its near three-hour length—Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, a minimalist science fiction epic set in a dreary, bombed-out industrial wasteland. The title does not derive from the contemporary connotation of the sexual predator, but goes back to the sort of guide who leads hunters to where game can be found. In fact, the script deliberately associates its stalker with the James Fenimore Cooper character Natty Bumppo, who is known as “Deerstalker.”

      In the film the stalker leads people into the Zone, a heavily fortified area guarded by machine-gun nests and roving patrols. Some years back, it seems, something—meteorite or spaceship—crashed there, leaving a device known as the Room, which apparently grants the wishes of those who enter it. There are those willing to try to get past the perimeter, but for this they need a stalker. The stalker’s services are required not only because the authorities have sealed off the Zone but because the site has strange distortions of space and time, making any direct approach to the mysterious room impossible. Since Tarkovsky provides almost no exposition, some of these details have to be pieced together. But it helps to explain strange little gestures, such as the stalker’s habit of tying bits of metal to pieces of cloth and tossing them ahead, as if to test for anomalies in the space-time continuum.

      On this particular journey the stalker leads two men into the Zone; he calls them Professor and Writer, and they come to represent two distinct ways of looking at the world, that of science and art. The professor ostensibly wants to win the Nobel Prize (or at least gain the recognition of his colleagues) while the writer seeks inspiration. But the stalker reminds them that the Room grants only one’s innermost wishes, and soon deeper, more complex motives begin to emerge. So do fears and defenses: one of the men is carrying a gun while the other has a suicide pill.

      One might be tempted to idealize the stalker, but throughout the film he is an abject character, anxious and divided. Like Natty Bumppo, he is more at home in the Zone—a lush, wet, green place, despite the litter and waste that mar it—than in the gray world of the city. His daughter has been maimed by something he has picked up while in the Zone, and his wife suffers through his absences. Not everyone who ventures into the Zone survives, and that includes stalkers.

      But for all his anxiety and suffering, the stalker possesses a kind of reverence for his task. He is a beggar, a suppliant, before a mystery. The professor calls him, somewhat scornfully, “God’s fool,” a term that had great resonance in the Russian culture Tarkovsky inherited and contains echoes of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, with its own holy fool, Alyosha. At one point in the journey, as the stalker approaches a deep pool, he utters something like a prayer:

      May everything come true. May they believe. May they laugh at their passions. For that which they call passion is not really the energy of the soul, but merely friction between the soul and the outer world. But mostly may they have hope and may they become as helpless as children. For weakness is great and strength is worthless.

      Of course, Andrei Tarkovsky was shaped by the experience of living under Soviet totalitarianism, which attempted to outlaw religious faith, so the professor and writer represent to him the failure of the two noblest human enterprises left to him—reason and imagination—while the stalker takes on religious connotations. If Tarkovsky had lived long enough to contemplate a remake of his own film, he might have added a fourth figure—the religious fanatic—to his band of pilgrims. Honesty compels the admission that ideological religion itself has emerged in a particularly fearsome way as one of the new forms of alienation from, and disdain for, mystery—and not merely in the Islamic world.

      As I reflect this morning on the past two decades of publishing Image, I’d like to believe that this journal has been a place hospitable to contemporary stalkers, to those who throw probes out toward the mystery, those who know that to approach mystery is a long, arduous pilgrimage, best undertaken by those who know themselves to be beggars and fools.

      Image was founded because the professor, the writer, and the fanatic are too much with us. Reason, imagination, and faith have gone their own ways, and the fragmentations and distortions that follow in the wake of that dreadful separation continue to haunt us. Without all three of these capacities we are less than fully human.

      The path toward reintegration will require its own lengthy journey, because the interests surrounding these warring fiefdoms are powerful and entrenched. Nonetheless, many people do not feel represented by any of them and are in search of their own Zone. Many carry scars from past experiences, often inflicted by religion, making the road that much longer.

      Paul Elie, author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a group biography about Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy, took up this subject in a recent essay in Commonweal. Though Elie wrote about the state of Catholic literature, his essay resonates beyond denominational boundaries. He praises O’Connor’s insight into the postmodern world—its sense of displacement and uncertainty—but points out that her confidence in Church teaching as a countervailing force is precisely what contemporary writers lack, even writers who consider themselves to be believers.

      To shed light on the present Elie employs a distinction made by the Victorian Matthew Arnold between a creative age and a critical one. Elie sees the era of O’Connor and the other three figures as a creative age, energized by modern secularism but confident in its faith. With the tremendous cultural shifts that took place in the 1960s and ’70s, he believes we entered a critical age, characterized not by O’Connor’s self-described mission “to make belief believable” but by skepticism—by the need to step back and, in Arnold’s words, “to see the object as in itself it really is.” The religious writer in a critical age starts from her own problems with the church, and her scrutiny can be anguished and harsh.

      Elie is deeply sympathetic with the predicament of such writers, yet he is uncomfortable with the critical sensibility. His conclusion is bleak. Arguing that intransigent Church authorities are making the problem worse, he blames them for causing these writers to doubt the existence of God. He says that the current critical