Soul Searching for Forgiveness

Author's Note - This is a response to The Power and the Glory.

Judas--one of the twelve apostles of Jesus in the New Testament and best known for his role in betraying Jesus into the hands of Jewish religious authorities--is much like the mestizo in the novel, The Power and the Glory. The irony is that although he means the priest nothing but harm, he actually provides prospects for the priest to commend heroic and gallant acts.

An illness falls upon the mestizo the first time the priest and him meet. The priest makes a small sacrifice for mestizo and refuses to leave him. Put on a mule and sent toward a town, mestizo knows that death surrounds him, but has faith in the priest to comfort him with health and hospitality along the way. When the mestizo reaches the other side of the border, the trap he has set becomes an opportunity for the priest to turn away from the life of leisure, and recommit himself to his ideals and his duties. During his night in the hut with the mestizo, the priest has trouble keeping himself awake, recalling the night Jesus spends in the garden with the disciples who cannot seem to keep themselves awake. The mestizo, with a never ending desire of selfish devotion, asks the captured priest to pray for him. The priest then begins to tell him that forgiveness just isn't handed to you, but instead it must be earned.

In order to find forgiveness of your sins true soul-searching will lead your way. You need to find yourself first and understand that the sins you have committed were wrong and have some reason to why they should be forgiven. The mestizo is, in many ways, a mirror image of the priest. The priest--who has done this soul-searching-- despairs over having no listeners to hear his confession. But, while the priest attempts to root out all self-interested motivations from his mind, the mestizo is concerned only with his own advantage. Nevertheless, the priest's actions towards the mestizo make the mestizo a seem like a sympathetic character. Since the characters are carefully emphasized to have the free will to decide their own paths in life, their decisions on what paths they take will lead them to the amount of power and glory they get in life.

The Power of Love

Authors Note: This is a response to a quote from the novel, The Bean Trees, about a girl named Taylor who is given the gift of a beautiful child, Turtle, but Taylor doesn't know how to undergo the customs and actions of a mother. Will she learn to love Turtle and not let her fears hold her back?

"The whole Tucson Valley lay in front of us, resting in its cradle of mountains. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds." (chapter 12)This is during the time of the first rain, when Mattie takes her young friends into the desert so they can see the natural world come to life. This quotation, typical of Kingsolver’s descriptions of the natural landscape, shows her consciousness of the environment. It also shows Kingsolver’s use of unusual metaphors. The land embodies a life lived from birth to death. Taylor falls in love with the Arizona land and sky, and her appreciation for nature in all its forms, with all its surprises.

While Taylor falls in love with the long lost land of Arizona, she is falling in love with Turtle as well. Realizing the beauty of mother nature makes her understand that a child is a gift, understanding that Turtle is a gift. The land describes Turtle and Taylor's relationship from the start. When Kingsolver says, "The whole Tucson Valley lay in front of us, resting in its cradle of mountains. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city…" it is showing there are so many more experiences and adventures and so much time to grow and love, but there is this barrier holding Taylor back from wanting do venture and explore a new world, a life style of a mother. It seems as though she is scared and her fears are holding her back.. You cant let your fears defeat you, you have to defeat your fears. When Taylor saw how wide and beautiful the world was she also realized that there are so many opportunities. When this opportunity to have Turtle in her life forever she didn’t want to miss out. She took advantage of the opportunity and made it the best experience because she looked passed her fears and realized there was more to life than hiding behind yourself.