Absolute Truths

Third Reading Summary: The final book returns to Charles Ashworth as narrator and revisits many of the themes and characters raised in the previous books.

With all of the series' weaknesses, Absolute Truths is not only my favorite of the series but one of my favorite fiction books of all time. Again, like my post about Scandalous Risks, I cannot discuss the book without a few spoilers. I will try to keep it to a minimum, so I do not spoil the plot.

The narrator from the first book, Charles Ashworth, is now in the mid-1960s. At the end of the first book, he marries Lyle, pregnant with another man's child. Ashworth, who had discovered in during the first book that the man who had raised him was not his biological father, but had married his mother to protect her when she had become pregnant, felt like God was calling him to do the same. As we return to Charles as the narrator, they had been married for almost 30 years. Quickly after getting married, they had another son. And then Charles had been a chaplain in World War II and spent most of the war as a Nazi prisoner, eventually ending up in a concentration camp. It was not until several years after the war that the couple settled into marriage reasonably happily. Lyle's fear over Charles' potential death had helped her to understand that she loved Charles for himself, not just for helping to save her from being a disgraced single mother. Charles also loved Lyle, but the distraction of his teaching and writing, his work as a bishop, and the seemingly effortless ways that Lyle solved all the problems around her allowed him to take her for granted. That changes early in the book; Lyle has a stroke and dies soon after. (Again, I disapprove of using wives' deaths as a reoccurring plot device in almost every book.)

A nearly 700-page book about a Bishop's grief may not be for everyone. But there are so many threads from the series that get raised and appropriately tied up. It is a big ask, but as much as I want to recommend Absolute Truths, it is a book where I think you do need to read the previous books to get the most out of it. And those previous five books are about 2500 pages on top of the 700 pages of Absolute Truths.

More than anything else, Absolute Truths attempts to show that we do not know what is happening inside other people's heads. We can perceive some, and we can be told parts. But no one, apart from God, can know all. This is a long quote from the book's last half, and I will quote it without context, but this gives a sense of what I mean when I say the book is about how only God can know all.

“One can never know the whole story about anyone—yet how we all rush to judgement! How we all love to ignore the truth that we know so little about what motivates other people, what shadows from the past distort their psyches, what demons haunt and enslave them. How readily we say with perfect confidence: ‘He's despicable!' or: ‘He's behaved unforgivably!' or worst of all: ‘I'd never behave like that!' Yet how dare we pass judgement when so much of the evidence is beyond our reach? No wonder Our Lord said so sternly: ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged!' No wonder he said: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone!' Jesus wasn't interested in rushing to judgement. He wasn't interested in ‘keeping up a front' or scoring points off those who found him intolerable. ‘Love ye your enemies,' he said, ‘Do good to them that hate you.' And time after time he said: ‘Forgive,' and talked of the truth which sets us free ... And so we come back again to our own current quest for truth, the truth about one another. As Charles pointed out just now, we can never see the whole truth; only God can see everything. But we can see so much more of the truth when our eyes are open, viewing people as Christ viewed them, than when they remain resolutely closed.”

You and I, of course, would see this as an example of the redeeming work of the Holy Spirit. So perhaps one might argue that our task as priests is not primarily to condemn sinners but to facilitate the work of the Spirit so that all suffering, merited and unmerited, may be redeemed. Then indeed we would be able to say with St. Paul: ‘All things work together for good to them that love God.' What a hard saying that is, and how easy it is to pay it lip-service in the name of piety while side-stepping the task of expending blood, sweat and tears to make it a living truth.

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