Sculpting the Saintly
Helen C. White’s Bird of Fire
Brought to us in this new edition by Cluny Media,
Bird of Fire is the sixth and final work of American novelist Helen C. White
– it was first published in 1958.
Writing sanctity is a difficult thing. In fact, it has often been said that it is simpler to sell the evil than it is the good. A case in point? Satan is arguably the most interesting character in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and his putrid rebellion against God takes on an almost heroic nobility despite the poet’s having had quite the opposite intentions. Even Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset - the woman who made 14th-Century Norway feel like last week - shied towards the biographical rather than the novelistic in her treatment of Saint Catherine of Siena. There is a reason that stories end with ‘and they lived happily ever after’ and don’t begin there, and similarly, begin at the bottom of a character arc, rather than the top.
More than that, saints are not just ‘characters’, they are also models held up to the faithful for imitation. How we paint them matters, which is why the Church has had a long history of iconoclastic tendencies trying to preserve Truth from the imagination of the sometimes presumptuous artist. Writing sanctity badly isn’t just bad art, it is a potential deterrent to the Faith, and if that state which should bring us the highest joy rings false, our pursuit of it is undermined.
But why is it so hard to get it right? Why is evil so much simpler to portray? Catholic theology tells us that evil is a nothing, the mere absence of the good – so why is it so narratively compelling? Well, there are of course the two standard arguments. The first is that evil is, of its very nature (if it can be said to have one), deceptively alluring, and thereby pre-endowed with all the tricks (cheap and otherwise) to snare the senses and captivate the imagination. The second is that narrative thrives on conflict, and goodness, if it is to be true and vital, must be free of such conflict.
Both are valid and contributing points, but I would like to posit a third: evil is easier to sell, because it is most believable to us.
In an experience marked by original sin, we have never known a world of goodness unalloyed. Within ourselves, there is the taint of evil everywhere, even in our very best. As an audience, then, looking to suspend our disbelief to really engage in any story, we need a grounding that presents to us some form of ‘reality’ – something we now unfortunately connect with the presence of evil. By contrast, Goodness without Stain appears a flimsier fiction, distinct from human experience and, thereby, trite in its expression.
Similarly – to step into the writer’s shoes for a moment – we are all familiar with the adage ‘write what you know’. This is grounded in the fact that to write is to take the raw material of sensible realities and rearrange them into a new and compelling picture. Good writing is always rich in very real, very particular things – actual objects, peculiarly evocative smells, distinct personalities. The further the writer strays from the concrete, the less the story is capable of pulling us into it and becomes instead a series of vague and intangible ideas.
So, if the writer has never experienced the unalloyed good, does not ‘know’ it, how can she be expected to ground it in sensible realities?
The answer is by stretching her craft to its limits.
In Bird of Fire, Helen C. White does exactly that, and makes of it an impressive showing.
In taking on Saint Francis of Assisi, she certainly has her work cut out for her. Few saints have been subject to as much legendizing, few messages as distorted from their center as that of Umbria’s poverello. The result has often been a haze of dreamlike sequences involving an almost Disney-esque love of animals, or a spineless kindness detached from any sort of sacrifice or guiding principle. White avoids both possibilities simply by taking on the fullness of Saint Francis’s life; she treats of his singing to the moon and his kissing of a leper with equal gravity and talks both about his efforts at peace-making and the profound joy with which he welcomed the suffering of Christ’s Passion in his body, longing for the pain in a way that many a contemporary mind would call ‘morbid’. White understood that sanctity requires both temporal concern and eternal longing, and that at the center of both must be a singular obsession: love for Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the coming of His Kingdom.
It is this singular obsession that drives Bird of Fire, starting quietly and gradually consuming Francis Bernardone like the seabird that makes up the central image of the novel, radiant in reflecting and ultimately engulfed by the light of the sun. With Christ as this backbone, the rest of the story stands on solid ground despite what can only be called ‘antics’ of every sort, covering large portions of the adult life of the saint, including his winning of Saint Clare and two delightful meetings with Our Holy Father Dominic. As for some of the more fantastic legends, White grounds them in the nexus of her story but never guts them of their miraculous quality.
Similarly, the writing subtly shifts between a well-rendered portrayal of Friar Francis’ vulnerable interior life and the external bewildered experiences of his compatriots as they encounter Saint Francis of Assisi in all his paradoxical grandeur. We get both points of view, sometimes understanding the very depths of Francis’ motivations, and sometimes having nothing more than his physical actions described. He is both struggler and wonder-worker and the narrative moves with care between his own desires and the many details of his life that have been retold through the ages. The effect can be a little piecemeal, with a few instances feeling more like his Greatest Hits than an organic expansion of the story, but the effort is welcome and deftly handled – especially for an audience that has grown used to more psychological portrayals of the saints, rather than the hagiographic accounts that were more common before the twentieth century. These elements are neatly sculpted together to give us a portrayal of a real man in a real place, working out his salvation with fear, trembling, as well as the fire-cracker wildness of this particular soul fixed on Jesus and nothing else.
All in all, Bird of Fire is a faithful and uplifting retelling of the life of Saint Francis and gives a treatment of him worthy of a more complex look at his life, the politics of his Order, and the struggles and joys of following the Lord Jesus. It is certainly worth the read for any who are interested in the life and spirituality of the saint, and makes for a good introduction to him for older teens and young adults approaching him for the first time. Several aspects of holiness are presented, which make for excellent discussion material around the nature of the spiritual life and what the Church looks for in her canonized saints - flaws and all.
Not many know that, as Dominicans, we celebrate October 4th as the Feast of Our Holy Father Francis - a title otherwise awarded only to our founder, Saint Dominic, and the author of our rule, Saint Augustine. As a fellow-founder of the mendicant orders in the early 13th Century, Saint Francis is esteemed in the Dominican Order as one of the two pillars working to uphold the Church in a turbulent time. The meetings between Saint Francis and Saint Dominic alluded to in Bird of Fire have come under historical scrutiny, but the story itself tells a poignant story of two radically different men coming together in a perfect harmony to advance the Kingdom of God. May they both continue to intercede for us, and may the dual fire of Francis’ concern for the poor in this life, and the riches of the next likewise catch light in us.
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