Empire Falls

still that he apparently hadn’t been able to revise his thesis later in life. Was this what it meant to be a Catholic?
    But it was only last night, as he lay awake in bed, that the meaning of Grace Roby’s story, or one of its meanings, became clear to him. By this time Father Mark’s own crisis had passed, leaving him weak and relieved, as if a fever had broken.
    They had gone to an opening held at a tiny gallery on a back street in Camden, and afterward the two men had had dinner at a nearby restaurant overlooking the harbor. For the first week of October, the weather on the coast was unseasonably warm, and in the evening it was still mild enough to eat outside under the suspended heat lamps. At the next table a man and a woman were sharing a bowl of steamer clams, which had reminded Father Mark of Miles’s story. The man and woman might’ve been husband and wife, or husband and someone else’s wife, but it was obvious they loved each other. When the artist noticed his smile and asked what was so amusing, Father Mark told him Grace’s story pretty much as Miles had told it, and in the telling he realized something he hadn’t entirely grasped in the hearing. Wondrous! he thought, how the heart leaps when one is chosen, especially later in life, after one would suppose the time for choosing and being chosen has passed. To be recognized as lovely, as desirable—to feel lovely and desirable—surely that was precisely what Grace Roby had needed. It was a God-given moment, during which God had mercifully averted His eyes and absented Himself. Hence the title of his sermon.
    Some of the paintings in the artist’s Camden exhibition had been ones Father Mark had already seen in the downtown studio, but others either were new or had been concealed from him before. The majority of these were specifically homoerotic, and when Father Mark examined them, he could feel the young artist’s eyes on him. Later, over dinner, Father Mark explained that his own counsel to homosexual men and women had always been similar to the activist priest’s, before, that is, his lamentable conversion to strict orthodoxy. Father Mark also said he wasn’t entirely surprised by such a midlife reevaluation. After all, Chaucer had renounced his own Canterbury Tales , and surely, as an artist, the young man must be aware of painters and sculptors who in later life disavowed their best work as vain or immoral. Father Mark intended all of this to offer comfort on the off-chance that the young man genuinely needed it, though in truth he was no longer confident that there was either an activist priest or a betrayal. He couldn’t say why, but he was suspicious. At the gallery it had also occurred to him that while there might be no single priest, there could’ve been many.
    What was un deniable was that Father Mark understood that he was being chosen, and his heart had leapt with recognition, just as he imagined Grace Roby’s must have. Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart? Could anything so true be a sin? Even though he now knew, as he had not before, that he wouldn’t surrender to this particular temptation, still, how wonderful to be desired! Surely this was God’s gift to fallen Man. Both the reason and sweet recompense for the loss of Paradise. How deftly God steps back out of view, as He had done with Grace, as He’d done with Father Mark himself, to let them muddle through on their own. Father Mark understood that he was not to feel virtuous, merely fortunate. Or maybe blessed.
    The general thrust of his sermon, which he tried in vain to remember as he stood awkwardly in the pulpit, searching his notes, had been to suggest that while God never abandoned us, neither was He on every occasion equally present, perhaps because His continual presence is what we desire most—that is, to be led away from temptation, away from ourselves . We want Him to be there, ready to receive our call in the moment of our need: lead us not into … Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know that your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two …
    “When God Retreats” had seemed one of his finer sermons as he’d delivered it to his sleepy early congregation. Exhausted and happy, he could find little fault with it as a personal