For nothing is real save his grace. Here, at the close of this episode, the narrator presents us with the priest s conclusion concerning the lesson to be taken from the pensioner s life. It is an articulation of the priest s experience of the reality of God s saving grace. As such, the utterance involves its own collapse. Words are vain because they divide, classify, and separate where they seek to connect, unify, and understand.
Language serves the mystic only to the threshold of the mystic experience.
This same moment. It is this which we long for and are afraid to seek and which alone can save us. No wonder Job should be struck into dumbness at God s voice. The personal confrontation with suffering and with the divine, which stands in opposition to the practice of theodicy, is at last about a breakdown in communication that becomes a breakdown of communication which is a break through to communion. Certainly, one possibility hearkens back to the moment just prior to Billy s encounter with the heretic priest.