the holy task of pardon

I just finished reading Alan Paton's novel, Too Late the Phalarope. It was one of the saddest and truest books I have ever read and I feel like sending a copy to everyone I know. It is a tragedy in the classical sense - a story of a good man, " master of all things save one," whose fatal flaw destroys him and his family in the end.

His temptation and fall is a sexual relationship which is both illegal and immoral, so the consequences are civil and societal as well as personal and private. Although the particular act he committed would not be illegal for the same reasons today,(he was a white South African male who had an adulterous relationship with a black woman in the 1940's), we do have laws that circumscribe similar encounters. A powerful man who takes advantage of a woman who occupies a subservient role might still run afoul of the law in 2008 in the US. A boss, a teacher, a superior officer, a doctor, a judge or a law enforcement official could all be prosecuted for abusing their positions of influence or authority with a vulnerable female. Our society has little tolerance or understanding for men who offend in that way.


Paton, however, creates such sympathy for his flawed hero that we are drawn to see him through a very different lens. We watch him wrestle with his demons and find ourselves praying he will not give in. We observe how many times he resolves to tell someone of his terrible temptation, hoping to defuse some of its power over him. We almost cry when he goes home without ever voicing the darkness in his soul. We read his thoughts, written months later in a prison cell, and wonder with him why his prayers seemed to go unanswered, why an angel never came to him and showed him the consequences his children would face if he did not turn from his destructive ways. In short, we sympathize with Lt. Vlaanderen. We see him through the eyes of a narrator who loves him, and we come to love him as well.


We fear for him, we want to save him, and, failing that, we want him to be restored. We feel the second tragedy of his father's inability to forgive when he closes the door of his house to his own son forever, when he decrees his eldest son's name must never be spoken again. We grieve when Lt. V is treated with loathing and disgust by the same young men who once idolized him, who seeming ly know nothing of the anguished struggles he knew as he wrestled within himself before he plunged into darkness and committed the one act that would forever mark his future. We do not understand what drives him to destruction - he does not understand it himself - but we recognize his fall as a tragedy, and we feel no impluse to gloat or to hate.

Of course Lt. Vlaanderen is a fictional character, not an actual person, although he has many counterparts in the real world. But the truth that Paton speaks in the form of a story is a Truth in the real world - "for God is both Lover and Judge of men, and it is His commandment that we join Him in loving, but to judge we are forbidden." And in a later chapter, ". . . an offender must be punished, I don't argue about that. But to punish and not to restore, that is the greatest of all offenses."

That is a truth all but forgotten in our culture - perhaps in most cultures. We clamor for punishment, but we have little interest in restoration. Our society has developed institutions to punish, but none to restore. Restoration seldom happens, and most likely will not happen unless it is accomplished by the church to whom God has entrusted the ministry of reconciliation. As someone whose family has been badly shaken by the fall of a great but flawed man, I desperately wish the church would remember that mercy triumphs over justice, that grace trumps law, and that restoration is a nobler work than punishment.

Paton's narrator concludes speaking wistfully of "the holy task of pardon," which the church must undertake "that the body of the Lord might not be wounded twice, and virtue come of our offences." I could not have said it so well myself.