It is late when I put the novel aside, but tiredness is not the reason that I close the book. I stop reading because the kid in the story is getting to me.
            Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, opens with an addicted teenager giving birth in a single-wide trailer home in the hills of Appalachia. The boy born that day becomes the story’s raw-boned, tough-as-nails narrator. A brash and often hilarious kid, he leads the reader through taut episodes with violent live-in boyfriends, meth-dealers and snake-handling preachers. He ushers you into in foster homes with bare shelves in the kitchen and bare mattresses on the floors.
            His story mirrors that of the addicts and inmates with whom I regularly interact.  I don’t recall hearing the kid’s name in real life, but I swear I’ve met his kin. So expertly drawn are the scenes in the novel, I cannot read the words without seeing the scars on the arms and faces of individuals whom I long to console and convert to Christ and his Church.
            Sadly, the cumulative effect of Demon Copperhead on this come-to-the-rescue priest is two-pronged: 1) the lack of tangible results in my ministry and 2) the exposure of an inner pride that comes from fashioning myself as a priest-of-the-people and friend of the poor.
            So, on this winter night, reading a novel about homeless people while sitting in the warmth of a cozy fire, I become convinced that my life’s work is, basically, straw.
            Nothing but straw.            
            The desolation hits hard. Staring into the flames, I eventually surmise that my sense of futility springs from a lack of inner communion with the Real Presence. In other words, without Christ’s compassion in my glance, his truth in my voice and, most keenly, his own agony surging my blood, I am and always will be nothing but a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal.
            I close Kingsolver’s book and open a different one, the one that contains the words: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains but a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it produces a good yield.”
            Closing the second book, I close the day with a prayer along these lines: