Oh God, I Have Deserted You

Earlier in the trimester reading The Power and the Glory, I wrote on the incompatibility of the whiskey priest’s duties to God and to his daughter with his fugitive life. While reading tonight’s segment of The Heart of the Matter, I see in Scobie a similar inability to reconcile the sense of responsibility he feels towards humanity with the obligation he holds to Christ. When Helen grows irate over the caution that constantly protects their affair and Scobie’s preoccupation with work, she commands Scobie to “go to hell” to “go and don’t come back” (229).  In the moments following Helen’s command, Scobie feels liberated at last and the “ability to sleep as he hadn’t slept for weeks” (229). For Scobie, his obligations to Helen run counter with his spiritual obligations, which call for fidelity in marriage and forthrightness with spouse and community. Yet with “recklessness”, Scobie attempts to make amends with Helen and attach himself again to his ponderous task by writing the letter. In forsaking caution and writing the letter, Scobie wails, “Oh God, I have deserted you” (230). His letter obliges him to Helen, calling forth that pity he momentarily was ridden of. His letter is a forsaking of Christ’s hopes for him as he professes his love for a woman other than his wife.



Scobie needs to take some advice from this guy

After delivering himself back into a pity-driven position of responsibility for Helen, Scobie considers suicide. Scobie despairs, “They wouldn’t need me if I were dead. No one needs the dead. O God, give me death before they give me unhappiness” (237). To liberate himself from all responsibility to the living, Scobie seeks a detachment from life. Yet it is an “unforgiveable sin” (237) in the eyes of God and the Christian community, a pathetic renunciation of one’s obligation to humanity. I believe the major issue for Scobie lies in his inability to leave the women in his life to the protection of Christ. He continually affirms his Christian identity, yet he appears to have no trust in the providence of God. For him, God can scorn suicide and infidelity, but is unable to look after Helen and Louise. Scobie’s pride, manifested in his constant feelings of obligation and debilitating pity for humanity, blind him to the possibility that as a human he lacks the ability of Christ to accept “the bidding of a hundred centurions” (235). Scobie needs to relinquish his sense of self-importance in the lives of others, to not “bound himself [to Helen] with promises” (244) and recognize that his pity needs limitations. His sense of responsibility to Louise and her need for departure has already plummeted him into the corrupt world of Yusef, “the territory of lies without a passport for return” (245), making him “one of those whom people pity” (248). Scobie’s unbridled pity and feelings of obligation to humanity are ushering in his demise rapidly, entangling him in a web of corruption and a life of deceit from which there seems to be no escape other than from life itself. Scobie needs to redirect his ability to be responsible and allow it to govern over his debilitating pity, keeping it in check so that he doesn’t die from the exhaustion ushered in by his conflicting, mentally-taxing sense of responsibility for all humanity,  the worst disease, what most…die of in the end” (178).

On a side note, I found the characterization of Harris through his reflection on his youth at Downham noteworthy. He begins to feel nostalgia for his youth despite the fact that his days were miserable, noting “the loyalty [he feels] to unhappiness- the sense that this is where we really belong” (218). Harris’s proclivity to seek misery parallels the calling to misery Scobie feels from his ever constant sense of responsibility and the pity driving this sense of duty.

Question: Is there any way Scobie can reconcile his duties to Christ and humanity without being crushed by the tremendous weight of his pity for humanity? How might he come to understand Christ's role in his life to lessen his sense of incessant responsibility?