book review: death comes for the archbiship

title: Death Comes For The Archbishop
author: Willa Cather
date: 1927

I recently read Willa Cather's 1927 novel "Death Comes For The Archbishop". This is a book I am surprised that Eugene Peterson didn't recommend (as far as I know). Willa's novel is the story of a Catholic priest lived in the starkness of the desert of southwest USA.
In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief, the story, (based on real life) traces almost forty years of Latour spreading the faith in the only way he knows - gently, while contending with an unforgiving environment, sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.

A few quotes

When they (Latour and his Navajo guide) left the rock or tree or sand dune that had sheltered them for the night, the Navajo was careful to obliterate every trace of their temporary occupation. He buried the embers of the fire and the remnants of food, unpiled any stones he had piled together, filled up the holes he had scooped in the sand. Since this was exactly Jacinto's procedure, Father Latour judged that, just as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a little (at least to leave some mark of memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air. It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it.

Then this scene that in some senses reflects our age

Down near Tucson a Pima Indian convert once asked me to go off into the desert with him, as he had something to show me. He took me into a place so wild that a man less accustomed to these thing might have mistrusted and feared for his life. We descended into a terrifying canyon of black rock, and there in the depths of a cave, he showed me a golden chalice, vestments and cruets, all the paraphernalia for celebrating Mass. His ancestors had hidden these sacred objects there when the mission was sacked by Apaches, he did not know how many generations ago. The secret had been handed down in his family, and I was the first priest who had ever come to restore to God his own. To me, that is the situation in a parable. The Faith, in that wild frontier, is like a buried treasure; they guard it, but they do not know how to use it to their soul's salvation. A word, a prayer, a service, is all that is needed to set free those souls in bondage. I confess I am covetous of that mission. I desire to be the man who restores these lost children to God. It will be the greatest happiness of my life.

Cather writes on the death of the Archbishop

During those last weeks of the Bishop's life he thought very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself. But he had an intellectual curiosity about dying; about the changes that took place in a man's beliefs and scale of values. More and more life seemed to him an experience of the Ego, in no sense the Ego itself. This conviction, he believed, was something apart from his religious life; it was an enlightenment that came to him as a man, a human creature. And he noticed that he judged conduct differently now; his own and that of others. The mistakes of his life seemed unimportant…
He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories... He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible….
He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life—some part of which they knew nothing.

After I read that I heard once again John Prine's last recorded song “I Remember Everything”.

Such wonderful perspectives on the end of life.

I’ve been down this road before
I remember every tree
Every single blade of grass
Holds a special place for me…
I remember everything
Things I can’t forget
I’ve been down this road before
Alone as I can be
Careful not to let my past
Go sneaking up on me
Got no future in my happiness
Though regrets are very few
Sometimes a little tenderness
Was the best that I could do
I remember everything
Things I can’t forget