Orphans of the Storm
Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
-Evelyn Waugh
Oxford dons, smoking suits, fox hunts, nightly cocktails in tuxedo tails, medieval titles, and marble manses—there is hardly a person alive today who would recognize these items as integral parts of their lives. They are as ordinary to the average modern as Genghis Khan. Perhaps escapism or nostalgia for a lost era of aristocratic elegance is part of the charm of Evelyn Waugh’s classic Brideshead Revisited. Yet, behind this alluringly unfamiliar surface is a thoroughly recognizable and contemporary story that demonstrates how the challenges of living the Gospel in modernity are not as new as we like to believe.
The first member of the Flyte family who we encounter in Brideshead is the young Lord Sebastian. Sebastian is beautiful and damned by pursuit of pleasure. While some characters describe him as a sort of airheaded blond, his dialogue is often piercingly perceptive, especially on matters of his family and Catholic faith. During one memorable exchange with our protagonist, Oxford classmate Charles Ryder, he describes his family as “mixed” religiously—some siblings are “fervent Catholics,” others are “half-heathen.” “Mummy,” he says, “is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated.”
Sebastian is the victim of his family’s fragmentation. A young child when his father runs off with a mistress, Sebastian is sent to public school, unlike his pious elder brother, and thrown into secular culture at a tender age. Sebastian grows into a profoundly conflicted character. He has a deep inclination towards the faith in which his devout mother raised him, so much so that his sister believes he has a vocation to the priesthood. Yet, he lives firmly in the City of Man and indulges freely in its sins. Throughout the novel, Sebastian, like so many young Catholics today, tries yet largely fails in his attempt to reconcile these competing impulses.
The tumults of the fictional Flyte family have only grown more germane in a world where we constantly hear about the crisis of the family. As St. John Paul II wrote in Familiaris Consortio, “Every attack on the family and its integrity is an attack on the good of humanity.” The pews of the parish church are increasingly filled with lonely penitents—last scions, converted Truth-seekers, Monicas bearing their children’s sins. The culture’s allure has grown stronger, increasing in magnetism and ubiquity. The family, once a fortress and source of strength for the Church Militant, has become, for most, yet another battleground.
Brideshead mourns the breakdown of the modern family. In a quiet, but critical scene which concludes the novel’s first of two “books,” Charles Ryder, after the death of the Flyte matriarch, is contracted to paint the family’s London home before it is to be sold and turned into an apartment block. One evening, Charles and Cordelia, the devout and precocious youngest Flyte with whom Charles shares a close bond, share a parting meal. After the death of her mother, the fragmentation of her remaining family, and the closing of the family chapel, Cordelia describes her feelings with a short phrase from Tenebrae: Quomodo sedet sola civitas. “How lonely the city stands,” wept Jeremiah in the Book of Lamentations over the loss of his beloved Jerusalem. Just so, Cordelia mourns the family and faith of her childhood and her home. This phrase is invoked again on the novel’s final page by the converted protagonist. Both invocations express a quiet sorrow over the temporal failings of Goodness, yet sorrow not without acceptance, sorrow not without hope.
So too do I weep—like so many young converts and reverts—as our joy of coming home to Christ’s Church is mixed with laments over her brokenness. We see the apparent abandonment of our witness to authoritarian regimes, the sacrifice of innocents in East and West, and clouds of schism gathering over Germany and Belgium. Even the distinctive beauty of our faith has become a rarity, with an increase in architecturally vapid churches, insipid liturgies, and a languishing culture of arts. On the bad days, it feels as if we have found our long-sought home just as it appears to be crumbling from beneath us.
On the good days, we recognize our foolishness—our Lord tells us that we are wrong, the battle is already won, God prevails. Our view of church history in light of the present moment waxes myopic. Waugh’s fellow Englishman, St. John Henry Newman, understood this when he said, “[t]he whole course of Christianity… is but one series of troubles and disorders. Every century is like every other… the Church is ever ailing… the cause of Christ is ever in its last agony.”
Waugh leaves the reader with a similar message of hope in ultimate victory, grounded in the humble reality of our fallen world. In the novel’s final act, Charles conducts a long extramarital affair with Julia Flyte, Sebastian’s eldest sister. Charles and Julia, living together at Brideshead Castle, initially bond over the sadness of their broken marriages. However, our protagonist describes an increasingly disquieted Julia as the years wear on—given to sudden flashes of guilt, discourses on her sins, and complex, often contradictory desires which he loosely grasps as the movement of conversion within her. Finally, after the deathbed reversion of her father, Julia confesses her acceptance to Charles, thereby ending their affair. She tells him, “I can’t shut myself out from His mercy… I saw today there was one thing unforgivable… the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I’m not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God’s.”
What is so striking about Waugh’s portrayal of the faith and conversion is its realism. The movement of God’s grace is quiet, slow, and relentless. We try to set up rival “truths” to God, and ultimately fail to outrun what our consciences know to be reality. The prayers of family and friends appear fruitless. Our conversions are not without pain, for ourselves and those around us. These are the tales many of us have lived and seen—souls rescued from the maelstrom of our own sins not through grand or dramatic moments, but, more miraculously, by the unceasing love of our Father.
When Brideshead concludes, we find an older, converted Charles in the reopened Flyte family chapel. Modern Catholics can feel ourselves with him as he silently beholds the sanctuary flame relit beside the tabernacle. The sparsely attended chapel is occupied by a subtle fullness—a thickness of earthy spirit found “anew among the old stones”—whereas previously was found only a cold beauty. The movement of God’s grace has overcome, first slowly and then all at once. In this immediate reality, we gaze upon Christ face-to-face in the Blessed Sacrament as the City of Man swirls in agony around us. The death, decay, and melancholy found in the ruins of our fallen world wither against the evergreen flower of our suffering God. He is here, eternally beside us in this moment. This is our ultimate solace, knowing that our Lord will never leave us, and will always call us back to Him when we wander, one-by-one, we orphans of the storm.
Michael Eamonn McCarthy is a native of Delaware County, Pennsylvania and a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He currently studies medicine at Sidney Kimmel Medical College in Philadelphia.