Leviathan with a Hook
by Richard Hague

Know then that God has dealt unfairly with me, and compassed me round with his net. If I cry out "Injustice!" I am not heard. I cry for help but there is no redress. -- Job 19:6-7

Though I was shocked as we Catholics all were when the revelations of child abuse in the Catholic Church began to surface in the media, I have to say now that my lingering emotion is surprise. Not over what a very few priests have done, nor over the insistent media coverage that has resulted, nor over the nearly inconsolable pain and betrayal suffered by the victims. It is not surprise over the good-old-boy closing of ranks that some clergy indulged in, rationalizing their cover-ups in the face of evil. All of these are to be expected. My surprise is over the apparent depth of disillusionment of many Catholics, a disillusionment I think we have to get over. It's as if we had forgotten that sin happens just about everywhere, to just about everyone. As it was with the dangerous life supposedly securely enclosed in Jurassic Park, so it is with sin: it will find a way.

I know of what I speak, as a sinner myself. And though I too have been sinned against, and have worked myself up into an outrage over it, like Job, I have to keep in mind the fact that to err, however grievously and unthinkingly, is human. And priests, God knows, are human. Despite our careless investing of them with divine qualities, secret knowledge, and supernal powers, as we do with brain surgeons or particle physicists, we must not forget that priests, too, are children of The Fall.

The first Mass I served, in the pre-dawn candle-lit chapel of St. Peter's parish convent back in Steubenville, was before the gathered nuns who had taught me from the first grade on. The celebrant was a man named, I swear it, Father Priest. He was an achingly old and disheveled fellow, deaf as a post, as flatulent as he was pious. The first time he farted, I sagged with dread (not that I would laugh serving Mass, for that was simply unthinkable, but that the good sisters might have heard).

His name underscored the dilemma we face now: both fatherly and priestly, he represented the ultimate of authority, honor, trust, and revered power. But from the moment I was faced with his actuality, his being-in-flesh, his deafness and decrepitude, I suffered an acute holy terror. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, I nearly shouted. For Father Priest was holy, sanctified, capable of mediating between us and God, yet as I spewed my unheard Latin, he tugged at his chasuble and bowed, guts rumbling.

My father, who had attended Mass with the sisters, and who sat with me in the car afterwards as I ate my biscuit and salty hard-boiled egg while waiting for the school to open, offered neither excuses nor explanations. I was left to struggle alone with what I later learned is called "the scandal of particularity": God had become a man, as Father Priest was a man; Jesus had become a specific, historical being with fingerprints and lungs and bowels and a susceptibility to tooth aches and rashes. The Incarnation loomed, the greatest of problems, before me.

Keeping all that in mind, then, I say again: I am not surprised by the behavior of what is, realistically speaking, a tiny portion of our priests. Even the shallowest knowledge of Church history reminds us that its human servants are liable to weakness and error. Among Chaucer's medieval clerics journeying to Canterbury are the most brazen and vulgar of cheats and con artists, lechers and libertines. Where's the news?

It's the Book of Job I default to in times of pain; an odd response, I suppose, from a Christian whose Jesus is the Lamb of comfort and compassion. But there is a hard, intellectually satisfying edge to Job for me: life is not fully fathomable; the human being (myself included) shares with the Incarnate God an important and troublesome quality -- mystery. As humans, we are capable of glorious deeds and heinous deeds; we cannot know whether life will make sense or whether it will plague us nearly to despair with its irrational and chaotic turns. We cannot say with any certainty that we will never be the perpetrators or the victims of sin.

Job understandably but mistakenly tries to call God to an accounting: Why do you make me, your faithful disciple, suffer? In response to this obedient and pious man's reasonable request, God roars more than seventy unanswerable questions from the whirlwind:

Have you entered the storehouse of the snow,
and seen the treasury of hail
Which I have reserved for times of stress...?
Can you lead Leviathan with a hook, or curb his
tongue with a bit?
Can you put a rope in his nose, or pierce through
his cheek with a gaff?

The answer, of course, is No.

Job's Leviathan is the mystery and pain of these times, the sense of betrayal and disgust we feel over the sins of a few priests and the less than responsible handling of those sins by other churchmen. Leviathan is our helplessness and our pain, the hail in our times of stress. It is a manifestation of that which cannot be answered or led away.

Make no mistake: Job's problem is not posed by a vindictive storm God, but by a God of utter realism. The heart of Christianity is this: Good Friday -- only then Easter. If this tremendous mystery has been true for us all along, then it still must be true.

Richard Hague is the author of MILLTOWN NATURAL: ESSAYS AND STORIES FROM A LIFE (Bottom Dog Press), nominated for the National Book Award in 1997, and GARDEN (Word Press), his eighth collection of poems. He teaches at Purcell Marian High School, a Catholic school in Cincinnati.