Here we have the concluding segment of our three-part series on The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene’s novel on a Mexican priest bound in life to love and death.
[The lieutenant] wanted to destroy everything: to be alone without any memories at all…That, of course, was the best solution of all, to leave the living witness to the weakness of their faith…The lieutenant, lying on his hard bed, in the damp hot dark, felt no sympathy at all with the weakness of the flesh.
It is paradoxical that the power and the glory comes by means of sickness unto death. This…