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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2017
In the manuscript draft of an essay written for The Tablet in the last year of his life, Brown muses over ‘the universal hunger for narrative and truth’, and reflects on the life of the medieval peasant, who would have known ‘that Christ was one of the greatest story-tellers’. This essay, which was drafted less than a month before Brown's death, shows the continuities of his faith over time. It has much in common with his earliest (fictional) conversion account, ‘The Tarn and the Rosary’, where the young convert writer, Colm, states:
I'm telling you this as a writer of stories: there's no story I know of so perfectly shaped and phrased as The Prodigal Son or The Good Samaritan. There is nothing in literature so terrible and moving as the Passion of Christ – the imagination of man doesn't reach so far – it must have been so. (H, 189)
Having marvelled at the power of biblical narrative in his essay, Brown's focus shifts to Orkney's elemental landscape – one not so different to the surroundings gazed upon by his Orkney ancestor, centuries ago. If stories could tell this forebear something about the Christian life, then the rhythms of agriculture and the seasons of the year could tell him something about God Himself:
He who had watched the fields under snow in winter, and set plough to them in spring, and seeded them and watched anxiously for the ripening under rain and sun and wind, and reaped and threshed and winnowed, and seen the loaves brought out of the oven by his wife – he knew well what Mass was on Sunday morning in the village church. He needed nobody to interpret to him what was the meaning of ‘I am the bread of Life.’ He had no need of the theologians to expound transubstantiation to him. He knew that he was made out of dust, like Adam, and to dust he would return. In between were the seventy marvellous and anxious years, in which he hungered, in the body and in the mind and in the soul.
These two sources of divine revelation – the story and the earth – nicely illustrate Catholicism's dual acceptance and veneration of sacred scripture and sacred tradition.
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