A Man I Cannot Understand

After following this man across all manner of terrain and through all sorts of wild adventures that have taken me well beyond the normally boring confines of my mundane journalism career, I have decided a few things about him. At first I was positive he was a complete farce without a scrap of morality to his name. However, as I observed him, my ideas were gradually changed. The way he acted toward the Mestizo when he was first within his clutches was far from virtuous or generous. He tried to escape and leave him many times. If he had I would have not thought the less of him, as he was clearly about to be betrayed. Yet his willingness to stay showed a part of him that I had not seen. I had glimpsed it with his daughter, but I was too far away from him and incapable of discerning more of his dialogue with her. I had dismissed this simply as a sly and underhanded act with some other subversive goal in mind especially in light of my discovery of his lustful tendencies. That small act of love was overshadowed at the time, but looking back it was worth more than I credited it. I saw still more of this in the true humility he showed in the prison with all of the wounded creatures there. This humility showed itself once more in this man's return to the land that had caused him so much pain from relative comfort and security. He returned not for his benefit, but for that of a dying criminal. I had not expected true humility from such a prideful coward, but his choices seem to have shaped his nature from the man I imagine he must have once been. He is not so much of a coward as the man they call Padre Jose.

But this man, this whiskey priest, is far from good, as his pseudonym aptly implies. In spite of the good I have seen him achieve, he seems to have an incurable apathy and a un-shifting lack of repentance toward his sins. I do not understand this. He stated to all those round him in the prison that he was a bad priest, and he meant it. This gave me cause to believe him capable of humility. However, this one fraction of a virtue seems incapable of spreading and changing the rest of him to bring him into repentance and a desire to change. He seems to be caught up in a misguided belief that if the products of one's sins are something beautiful then the sins themselves must also be beautiful. This is the nature of our world. Ugly, base, disgusting things perpetually turn into things of incredible beauty. But who can divine the infinitely greater beauty of an act of pure charity, humility, love, or generosity?

I spoke to the Lieutenant the night before this walking contradiction, this Whiskey Priest, was to be killed. Even this man of the most profound atheism and vanity seemed moved by the humanity, if not the religion, of this man. Yet he seemed similarly unable to understand this man. It seems that this man's final request: to confess his sins to Padre Jose, that most despicable of cowards, was ignored by the turncoat himself. If the Lieutenant is to be believed, the Whiskey Priest stepped up to the block the next day without having felt a drop of repentance.

When it comes down to it, in the end, I must confess I understand this man less than I did a month ago. At the end of his journey I feel as if, by his example, I have been granted no consolation, no reprieve from the doubts about how best to live my life that have plagued me. I do not wish to say I have learned nothing, for I have learned a great deal about this man and about the nature of all men, but I cannot say that his example makes sense to me ultimately. I thought, for a time, that I might have had a trove of treasure from which to dig ideas and concepts that could be formulated into a book. Now I am left bewildered. I have no choice but to return to my life prior to these events almost empty-handed, and with no more material than what is sufficient to spew forth an article filled with what would appear to the casual observer to be no more than one month's worth of material.