WHY DID YOU WRITE
EDDIE’S DREAM?
The question was put to me by an editor of the VOTF web magazine. It puzzled me. I wrote the book over a lot
of years, amazed at the mob of characters taking shape around me. Some I liked, some I found boring, others intriguing.
I spent one entire summer creating a fictional religious order, inventing a history for it, supplying it with a
mission, giving it its own spiritual jargon, and actually picking sites for a college and university it ran. It got kind of
scary, to the point that I called up a seasoned Irish novelist friend and said, “Bob, this is weird: the ‘Christian Fathers’
somehow seem more real to me than my own Jesuit order!” “Relax,” Bob said, “it happens all the time.”
Why I wrote it rarely crossed my mind. First, I was enjoying the sheer pleasure of writing in such a way that you, the reader, could walk in and suddenly you’re in the middle of a scene where everyone looks, feels and sounds real — like they were there before you even arrived. Second, given the time span I was dealing with, my mind recoiled at the prospect of trying to make sense of it all — or indeed of anything. We’re talking the Great Depression, WWII, Korea, the burbs, the civil rights movement, Sputnik, Elvis, JFK, Vietnam, the Beetles, the Golan Heights, Humanae Vitae, MLK, Vatican II, Reaganomics, perestroika, 9/11, dissent within Catholicism, gays, the women’s movement, the changing of religious life and the departures from it, the embattled image of priesthood, and the Age of (and aging of) the Laity.
I did my thinking about these things through Eddie — without, I hope, making him me, or me him. We share,
however, one common characteristic: we’re both priests and neither of us is stupid. Not ‘stupid/as in brains’, but ‘stupid/as in a stupor’, that is, impervious to the dynamics of human projections, whereby people unconsciously draw others into scripts running in their own heads — scripts that are traceable to their own anxieties, their own yearnings or feelings of resourcelessness — and then assign to others roles that don’t belong to them, putting pressure on them — even on God! — to behave or react according to the scripts we have provided them. Psych 101.
Eddie is not calling them ‘bad’ for doing this. That would be condecending and way off the mark. It is precisely
the greatness of their humanity that gets them in trouble in the first place. There is something about being human that makes us want to taste existence to the full, to want to know all about everything, to measure up to the highest ideals, to gorge ourselves on beauty, to be endlessly active and productive, and to be free to choose it all. It’s just that our feelings get a little protective and maybe even testy when this doesn’t happen all at once!
In any case, my long experience of consulting to groups around issues of power, authority and leadership taught me a lot about projections, but perhaps not much more than the average parent, teacher, shop boss or authority figure learns over time. But with priests it’s hairier — because God is always smack in the mix.
But no sweat. Neither Eddie nor I have time to worry about handling the projections. They go with the territory.
In fact, Eddie gets a mind-blowing creative realization one day: “Hell, he thought, if people can load up their lousy projections on me as a priest, why can’t they do the same to God?” That moment sets Eddie off on a marvelously quixotic campaign to change the world — a campaign that’s simultaneously funny, wily, frustrating, smart, sad, yet full of warmth. He takes on not only the predictable arbiters and poobahs of acceptable religious language, but also the people crouched there in the pews who find certain perks to that posture. Nobody, but nobody, is perfect.
So, Eddie tries to peel away for audiences of various sorts every insulting, crazy, sloppy, misleading, demeaning image of God, Jesus and Co. that people unknowingly embrace when they hear and speak religious language — and sell themselves short in the process. (The same fate is met by whatever deity is handy — Buddha, Allah, the Prime Mover, the Queen of England, Zeus, you name it.) If there was a benchmark for success, Eddie would probably tell you: it’s when you can finally bring yourself to believe that God is actually nicer than you are!
Inevitably, Eddie’s campaign crashes and he walks away from it with dignity. So why did I write this book? I’d have to say that I got to like Eddie and felt I should stick it out with him to the
end. That’s what creators do, don’t they?
George McCauley, S.J.