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DOCENCIA: Gracia Prats Arolas

ALUMNO: Santiago Carbonell Matarredona

Final task:
In this work the author deals with some specific arguments along
the different chapters. Identify them and see how the topic
progresses along the work. Copy the main excerpts where you
find a description of each stage.

a)

Gods absence

The author feels, from the beginning, a total abandonment of God, just
when he desires most a deep and real consolation. Thats why he doubts
between admitting Gods total inexistence or confessing His unfair attitude
towards him. God seems to be silent and gone, just like a door slammed
in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside, or
like an empty house, with no lights in the windows.
He debates himself in such terms, for he feels God to be so present a
Commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of
trouble?.
Anyway, though he describes the grievous feeling of the absence of
God, he shows most his reluctance to submit the idea of a God Who hides
Himself voluntarily, especially when his creature is most in need of his
protection: the conclusion I dread is not So theres no God after all, but
So this is what Gods really like. Deceive yourself no longer.
He knows that God is always transcendent and unapproachable, and when
he compares Him with his dead wife he says: She is with God. In one
sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and
unimaginable. But, on the other hand, he dares to describe God in some
way, concluding He is not a good God, because His goodness should be
inconsistent with hurting us; but, all the dangers and pains in our daily
life move him to conclude that God is responsible for all these pains, so
either God is not good or there is no God.
Moreover, he calls God The Cosmic Sadist, seeking a chance to inflict
the next torture to his creatures, or a Vivisector, wickedly playing with
living beings.
But, in these desperate thoughts appears a glimpse of light when he
thinks that this attitude of God could be compared to that of a Vet rather
than a vivisector, thus, trying to heal His creatures although they have to
suffer.
Going on in these new thoughts, making up his mind regarding to God, he
discovers that something has changed in his relationship with God, for he
feels that the door [Gods door] is no longer shut and bolted. And then,

all that pain and suffering are more likely to be for the purpose of knocking
down the house of cards of the authors faith and love.
Little by little his image of God is being purified, up from the garden [his
wife] to the Gardener [God], from the sword to the Smith. To the life-giving
Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful. And then, he can declare
confidently: Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door.
At this point, we can declare that the author is on the way of conversion,
sincerely seeking the True and Living God: I know perfectly well that He
cant be used as a road. If youre approaching Him not as the goal but as a
road, not as the end but as a means, youre not really approaching Him at
all. Furthermore, he is talking directly and openheartedly to God: Lord,
are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you
so much that I dont care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it
looks to us.
And in this dialogue, he listens to the meek and fatherly voice of God:
Peace, child; you dont understand.

b)

Hs image

In this reading we have attended to a process, in which the author has

been guided from a complete obsession about his dead wifes memories to
a gradual liberation of these recurrent thoughts.
In the beginning, he remembers freshly and vividly her wife, her traits, her
firm personality, although he declares that one never gets the total
impact of what we call the thing itself; because theres a threshold in
our perception ability.
Most of all, he experiences Hs absence, which is not local at all, because
it is like the sky, spread over everything.
He is especially worried about losing Hs image, or disfiguring it with
personal additions: slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes [] little flakes of me,
my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. He
is reluctant to lose Hs memory, though he realizes the impossibility of
keeping alive and fresh these memories.
He also wonders: where is she now? [] she is in no place at all [] the
dead are not in time [] She is with God. In one sense that is most
certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable.
Anyway, he is obsessed thinking about her nearly always, and thats
why he perceives the insidious beginning of a process that will make the
H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Then, H is gradually
becoming a phantom, changing the memory of her into a disguise of the
impressions of the author, because the rough, sharp, cleansing tang of
her otherness is gone.

In this desperate reluctance, he will say if H. is not, then she never was,
or will think about Hs soul post-mortem life as if Lazarus, whom Christ
took back into earthly life,
But, in a determinate stage of the process, he has stopped bothering
about Hs memory, and how false it might become, and that obsession
has been replaced by the certainty of, since that, she seems to meet him
everywhere, as an obstinately real experience. Then, turned to H., it no
longer meets that vacuum nor all that fuss about my mental image of
her.
He continues describing his wife like a garden. Like a nest of gardens,
wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and
fertile life, the further you entered. But in some way, his concern for his
Hs image has changed, for he knows now that mental images are not
important for themselves, they are nothing but merely links.

c)

Quality of his faith

In the beginning, he neither declares him to be an unbeliever nor an

atheist. He doesnt think he is in much danger of ceasing to believe in
God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about
Him. The conclusion I dread is not So theres no God after all, but So this
is what Gods really like. He is really aware of the idea of a God Who
deliberately sends such painful sufferings to His creatures.
But, although he sometimes believes that there is a God, he is not sure
about Hs post-mortem existence: can I honestly say that I believe she
now is anything?. He even has always been able to pray for the other
dead, and I still do, with some confidence. But when I try to pray for H., I
halt. Bewilderment and amazement come over me. I have a ghastly sense
of unreality, of speaking into a vacuum about a nonentity.
Then, he must admit that his beliefs were so fragile and inconsistent: you
never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or
falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you [] Only a real risk
tests the reality of a belief.
Moreover, he begins a skeptical process, doubting all that he believed, like
a house [that] has collapsed at one blow, [] because it was a house of
cards. This loss has been inevitably crucial for him, because he was
playing [the game of life] not for counters or for sixpences but for every
penny you have in the world. Thats why he has to admit that, like his
love for H, his faith in God was also a card-castle, imagination above all.
In other stage of the process, he attributes his pains not simply to a
Cosmic Sadist, but to a Vet, a good God would decisively operate his
patient, a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good, a conscious
dentist, who doesnt stop the operation no matter the pain he inflicts. Such

a good God, that is Christ, has done vicariously whatever can be so

done, for he could and dared.
And then, in these thoughts, a new way of relationship with God catches
him by surprise, when he feels that the door [Gods door] is no longer
shut and bolted. And he begins to reinterpret his former life from a new
horizon, perceiving that Hs loss was not a trial came from God, for God
does not try experiments on us in order to find out the quality of our faith
or virtue (he knows it before hand). He only wants us to be aware of our
faiths inconsistence.
He feels still far, far away in the valley of my unlikeness, from the fruition
which, if His mercies are infinite, I may some time have of God. But by
praising I can still, in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some
degree, enjoy Him.
He even declares openly that I need Christ, not something that resembles
Him. I see here that the conversion to God has been largely
accomplished.