Jean de Florette is my favorite film of all time. Two films really, with its powerful sequel Manon des Sources where Jean’s daughter seeks revenge on the villagers who drove the ‘outsider’ to his early death by depriving his farm of water. The film is adapted from novels by Marcel Pagnol about country life in Provence in the 1920s
Jean is a small-town middle-class tax collector who inherits his mother’s farm near the village his mother Florette came from, and he takes his family to live there: his opera singer wife and his young daughter. He has a romantic view of life in the country, but the tragic story is one of human evil destroying his dreams. We watch him afflicted and going quietly mad like a modern representation of Job.
I learned more about the subtleties of good and evil from watching Jean de Florette than any Catholic theodicy text about “Why Does Evil Happen?” In my one year of seminary formation at the Beda College in Rome I mostly spent my time trying to escape my bishop’s future plans for me and use Rome’s unique labyrinth of intrigue to try and re-join religious life in a different congregation. but that also fell apart – largely because I was unskilled at the intrigue – but being there at on the night of the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009, we felt the shock and ran out into the stair well. As the whole college shook, we stood in the early hours of the morning looking out through the big Windows and watching the lamp posts swaying in front of the Basilica of Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls. I was in L’Aquila a few days later – a hundred miles from Rome – looking at the destruction of homes and centuries-old churches and again asking myself about the way God allows evil things to happen to good people. Half the town’s population were living in big blue emergency tents in a place high up in the mountains that was freezing at night.
How can you bring Christian comfort to people when evil happens? We tried again to do that after the football match at Hillsborough in 1989 – where 98 spectators died in a badly organized over-crowded football terrace. Most of the dead were from Liverpool. They were crushed to death under the weight of tumbling humanity. It was a policing failure. And I happened to be in Liverpool, doing my inner city social work experience as a Franciscan novice, so we were co-opted into the huge bereavement counselling team and taught new skills and the theory of the stages of grief.
In my crazy and haphazard life, where things often go wrong – in the best knock about style of the “Goes Wrong” theatre tradition it is the little things that cause the big upset, and the ensuing comedy. I found myself in the Anglican Liverpool cathedral memorial service for the Hillsborough victims, sitting with the South Yorkshire police. I was meant to be sitting with our bereaved families to give comfort and hold them tight when the choir sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, a moment we dreaded when we saw it on the service booklet: it would cause an emotional earthquake. But instead I had to sit with the South Yorkshire police because it was a high security all ticket occasion. The Prime Minister Mrs. Thatcher was there. I had been issued with the wrong color-coded security ticket, so I was seated with the police.
The evil that had killed the 98 people was the institutional incompetence of the police on duty that day. (It took many years to prove that in an enquiry, but the police sitting in the cathedral that day already knew it.) I sat there in Franciscan habit next to a young policewoman who sobbed her way through the service and I realized that I had been put there that day – with the wrong ticket – to comfort and support her through the service, and at the end of it, Mrs. Thatcher walked past the grieving families– ignoring them – and then deliberately worked her way slowly along the front row of South Yorkshire police in the west transept.
When she came to me, standing next to the woman police officer still sniffling after the singing of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, Mrs. Thatcher said, “And are you a chaplain with the South Yorkshire Police?”
“No, ma’am,” I replied. “I just got the wrong color security ticket.”
Tragedy always has its comic moments. Even in the Book of Job there are some good jokes. And when you spend so much time over the years helping with other people’s tragedies, the good humor of the social work teams, the great spirit of the volunteers, the laughter at the funny ways of us human beings, that helps build community. The AIDS crisis in London was an example. So many lovely volunteers – religious brothers, sisters, people from all walks of life – supporting mostly gay men who were dying – and there was no medical cure in the 1980s. Those of us from the Church in this work had the extra task of telling those affected, “We do not judge your lifestyle!” because there were other kinds of Christians preaching God’s judgement on the sinners. Many years later, a certain pope said, “Who am I to judge?” and even he caused scandal for such a simple example of love.
Always, when people were visited by evil and surprised by its sudden arrival, there would be that burning question “Why me?”
Now it is my turn to ask that question. It is truly terrible the way that it gnaws at you. You beat yourself up trying to find the bit of you that caused the evil to come down upon you. Guilt is a very damaging internal poison.
Nine years ago I was looking for a place suitable for my four donkeys. Plenty of space and terraces so they could circulate up and down getting exercise, and for me a silent place to make my hermitage. As much as I like to say that I live a solitary life, I have to admit it is more of a “hobby Hermitage…” with a hobby donkey farm attached. Hermits come in all shapes and sizes: from those who are never out of their enclosure, to those who are never in it (jet-setting across the world to yet another international hermit symposium). But hey!, when it comes to the religious life, who am I to judge?
I made this place into a place where silence includes the beautiful sound of equus asinus braying in the moonlight. I bought this place for my donkeys and when I look at them now, knowing they have no idea of what evil we are facing, I just can’t bear their innocence. “Everything Will be fine because our Peasant always looks after us.” But he didn’t. He brought them to the wrong place! Now we have been struck by evil. Everything is now under threat. Nothing is as it was a month ago. Now my donkeys have a hashtag too: #BurritosDeLaCantera – the donkeys of the quarry.
One Sunday in May – one month ago – I arrived home from just a short distance away, helping some friends prepare to receive some rescue donkeys. I was given the devastating news that the Pavasal company that owns the old disused quarry, the Penya Negra – right next to me – had been given permission to reopen for a further 15 years of mining. That means dynamite blasting 150 meters from my donkeys, heavy machinery grinding rock into gravel all day long, heavy trucks being noisily loaded and driving up steep inclines with gears grinding. And suspended fine dust in the air, risking my donkeys’ acquiring respiratory problems. When I bought this place ten years ago, they promised they would never reopen the quarry.
At the age of 73, I am now in full campaign mode. I’m taking on the company. Others in the village are campaigning politically. I’ve decided to explore it from a Laudato Si’ angle and I am signed up as an animator. I handed Pope Francis prayers cards to two men of the Pavasal company after an intense meeting in the Town Hall yesterday! Never underestimate the power of the little gestures in life.
This will be a long fight.
My blog equusasinus.net is now remodeled as a campaign site and I am learning to use Instagram and other social media. The chilling thought has just occurred to me. In that favorite film of mine, Jean de Florette, the protagonist is driven out of his mind by the evil occurring to him and he desperately tries to find water by dynamiting a hole in the ground. He is killed by a falling rock thrown high in the air by the explosion. When I called in the Guardia Civil animal welfare unit SEPRONA to assess the situation here, they told me, “Until one of your donkeys is killed by a flying rock from the quarry, we cannot do anything, because no crime has been committed.” I thought of Jean de Florette.
And that’s when I began having the recurring nightmare of finding my “Big Mummy Donk” Matilde – the big grey Andaluz pure-bred and mother of my Aitana donkey – lying dead in my kitchen under a pile of black-green rocks of the type to be mined in the quarry. I see the village doctor each week now. She is called Maria and she is brilliant. She respects my wishes to not be given any strong medication to help me sleep, because I want to remain alert, campaign, and generally challenge the evil that has been visited upon this valley and upon me and the donks.
I’m still left with the question that my first-year seminary mind couldn’t cope with: why does evil happen? The person in pain is a theologian of unique authority. I am as vulnerable as all those people who I once helped in my rewarding and fulfilling Christian life, and now someone is helping me: a wise person who was such a comfort to Pope Francis in his last years. Keep him, and me, in your prayers.
Images: Provided by the author. All rights reserved.
Gareth Thomas Weaver lives a solitary life with his donkeys in a pine wooded valley in Alicante, Spain. A former aircraft engineer, Franciscan friar, and geography teacher, he has written about the pilgrim routes to Compostela and his walks with donkeys. He was never intending to become an activist in his 70s, but now he goes head-to-head with environmental vandalism, guided by Laudato Si'. Keep up with the story on equusasinus.net.
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