THE SEA REMAINS
Jean Sulivan
New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989
118 pp., $ 13.95
“My friend…it is time to be serious and prepare for death," These seemingly desperate words of Ramon Rivaz, the main character of The Sea Remains, said half in jest, constitute in effect the starting point of his dramatic spiritual recovery. Rivaz' concern over death is not a morbid one: It is grounded in his Christian belief that physical death is in reality a passage into eternal life. Paradoxically, the fact of aging and death drives Ramon to a higher awareness of the purpose of life. This is in essence the subject matter of Jean Sulivan's typically Catholic novel.
Chaff and Grain
Through sheer hard work, Roman Rivaz has risen like a star in the Catholic Church to first become an archbishop and then a cardinal. He is now at the evening of his life, officially retired from active service, with enough time to evaluate his career and assess his life. It is time for him to come to terms with himself, with his real identity. And when Ramon does take a hard, long look at himself, he is profoundly unhappy with what self-examination reveals to him. He discovers he has been living a lie. Determined to strip himself of false accretions, he begins by questioning the validity of his church, the central institution he has been serving throughout his adult life and that has decisively shaped his personality.
This criticism of the church is tempered by the realization that despite its shortcomings, the Roman Church is destined to remain the spiritual mother of the Catholic. It becomes apparent that Ramon, like the other Catholics who have sharply, sometimes mercilessly, castigated the mother church, has no intention of abandoning the fold. This appears to be equally the position of Jean Sulivan who, by becoming an author, adds, however, a new dimension to his priestly office. He identifies with his main character and takes on the prophetic mandate of exposing what he perceives to be the shortcomings of a fallible church operating in a fallen world.
The narrator suggests that instead of being a providential instrument, the church has become an established institution almost as an end in itself. Its functionaries have subordinated the spiritual to the temporal and confused the means with the end. The church has thus degenerated into a dehumanized, unwieldy bureaucracy that is smothering the original spirit of Christianity. Such an indictment naturally brings to mind the far more serious corruption of the medieval church that provoked the Reformation initiated by Martin Luther. And this is the sentence "I have never crossed this square without … thinking of Martin Luther," repeated like a leitmotiv by Ramon. However, the narrator soon moves from criticism of the established church to engage his main character in self-criticism.
Spiritual Death
Indeed, Ramon's dissatisfaction with his church is indicative of a deeper dissatisfaction with himself. When he takes stock of his career, the cardinal concludes with bitterness and despair that he has been buried alive. Far from being food for
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