The "Appalling" Love of Christ in Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at
In his “Sermon to the Snakes,” Father Damien Modeste asks, “What is the whole of our existence but the sound of an appalling love?” (226). Throughout her novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Louise Erdrich considers the transforming power of appalling love in the life of Father Damien Modeste and his community. Out of her love for God, Agnes DeWitt commits the appalling act of transforming herself into a Catholic priest named Father Damien Modeste. The narrator reflects, “There would be times that she missed the ease of moving in her old skin, times that Father Damien was pierced by womanness and suffered. Still, Agnes was certain now that she had done the right thing. Father Damien Modeste had arrived here” (65). It is significant that in this passage Erdrich refers to Isaiah 53:5, a passage that discusses a suffering servant that will be pierced so that “by his wounds we are healed.” The connection between Father Damien and the suffering servant, Jesus, is explored and strengthened throughout the work. Throughout his ministry, Father Damien exudes the unexpected, unfathomable, appalling love of Jesus who “being in the very nature of God” transformed into “human likeness” (Philippians 2:6-8). As Father Damien asks in his “Sermon to the Snakes,” “[I]s God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?” (227).
The importance of Christ’s willingness to “humble himself” “by taking the very nature of a servant” in the “appearance [of] a man” cannot be overstated (Philippians 2:6-8). John 12 discusses the many Jews who “would not believe in him” despite the fact that he “had performed so many signs in their presence” (John 12:37). Many of the Jews, especially those among the religious elite, were unwilling to “believe in the light while [they had] the light” because they could not understand how their traditional conception of the Messiah as a warrior king fit with the person of Jesus (John 12:35). After all, who would have ever expected that the Messiah would be born in a stable? Or that he would be raised by a rather insignificant set of parents? And who would have dreamed that the King of Kings would have spent his life ministering to people to try to make their lives better because he actually thought that that kind of thing was important? Who would have ever guessed that our savior would be willing to spend his life investing in the lives of the sick, the criminal, the poor, the widowed, the forgotten, the lonely? Who would have thought the Son of God would have made up his followers with a group of nobodies like the disciples? And who would have imagined that Jesus, God incarnate, would have died on the cross as a sacrifice for our sin? The kind of love Jesus’ extended to humanity through his sacrificial life and death as a suffering servant was so unexpected that it was a “stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Because that kind of love is simply appalling.
Agnes’ love for God convicts her to transform into Father Damien so that the Ojibwe people might also be transformed by the appalling love of Christ. After all, is not the Christian mission to transform the world from darkness to light, from death to life because we ourselves have been transformed? As 1 John 3:14 says, “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death.” It is by the grace of God that his “love [is] something very different from what we think we know” and could have ever imagined (227). Like the snakes Father Damien preaches to, we too must shed the skin of our old selves so that we might experience “a new life in Christ” (Colossians 3).
Works Cited
Erdrich, Louise. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. 1-361. Print.
Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994. Print.