In Christianity’s most well-known conversion story, a persecutor of the new religion falls off his horse on the road to Damascus and becomes the apostle to the Gentiles. Like Saint Paul, many Christians repent of their sins and also earnestly try to convert others.
But to believe is one thing and to convince others is something else.
“Why can’t you people just accept it that some people don’t even want to believe in God,” a non-believer says to the man who tries to convert him in “The Sunset Limited.”
The short play consists entirely of a conversation between those two characters: a suicidal university professor and an ex-con with his own conversion story. Written by Cormac McCarthy, whose harrowing novels “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” were turned into acclaimed films, “The Sunset Limited” is likewise the basis of a film. It stars Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed.
More wounded than arrogant, the atheistic professor is utterly pessimistic about the future of civilization. He has tried both anti-depressants and group therapy, to no avail. After a raw, intense and often profane conversation with the Christian who desperately wants to convert him, he leaves, presumably with the intention of killing himself.
At the end of the play, the would-be evangelizer is alone, feeling defeated from his debate with the articulate and erudite professor. He complains to God: “If you wanted me to help him how come you didn’t give me the words?”
Like “The Sunset Limited,” the short story “The Last Word” describes an encounter between a believer and an atheist.
The author, Graham Greene, like Cormac McCarthy, has had several of his novels turned into films, including “The Power and the Glory,” a story set in Mexico during the 1930s when the government was attempting to suppress the Catholic Church.
“The Last Word” envisions a future world in which the suppression of religion is complete. It is specifically the story about the execution of Pope John XXIX, who is the world’s last living Christian.
As the story begins, the pope has survived an assassination attempt (shot while saying Mass) 20 years earlier. Since that time, he has been living in a government-sponsored single room apartment. His injury has left him a frail man – with no memory of who he is.
One day, a stranger arrives and escorts him to a meeting with “the General.”
The General apologizes to the pope for the attempt on his life carried out by his predecessor so many years ago. The killing would have been a mistake, the General says, because it would have made the pope a martyr. But now, he continues, the pope is no longer a threat. “All this nonsense is finished, forgotten,” he says of Christianity.
Understanding he is about to be killed, the pope makes no outward effort to preserve his own life or the future of Christianity.
The General invites Pope John to have a last meal with him. The pope politely declines but agrees to a glass of wine.
With the glass in his hands, Pope John raises it and says words that the General does not understand: “Corpus domino nostri. …”
As he drinks, the General shoots him.
The story has only one last sentence, but – told from the General’s point of view – it suggests that this persecutor of Christianity may well become a new Saint Paul in this future world: “Between the pressure on the trigger and the bullet exploding, a strange and frightening doubt crossed his mind: Is it possible that what this man believed may be true?”
One interpretation of the story is that God “gives the words” – to use the language of the ex-con of “The Sunset Limited” – to the Church, and thus the Church will ultimately prevail. More broadly, the story suggests that the Word (Jn 1:1) and the mysteries of faith transcend politics, history, culture or any purely human concepts.
Saint Paul’s own words are believed to be the oldest writings of the New Testament. Nonetheless, the saint – a martyr, like the fictional Pope John XXIX – taught that faith cannot be fully understood or communicated solely through language, either in philosophical debate or emotional appeals.
Using his own rhetorical skills, Saint Paul told early Christians (and he tells us) to concern themselves first with their own inner lives. “If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love,” he wrote, “I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal” (I Cor 13:1).
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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