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.