Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec isn’t your ordinary detective. He’s, of course, not a real person but the protagonist of Louise Penny’s murder mystery series set in the fictional town of Three Pines, just over the U.S.-Canadian border in the Eastern Townships region of Québec. Inspector Gamache is a French Canadian who graduated from Cambridge University. He has a fierce intelligence and a big heart. He’s brave, courageous, and thoughtful, with a penchant for reciting poetry in conversations with other members of the police force. Gamache tries to see the best in people and is known for giving opportunities to the most ostracized members of the Sûreté du Québec. He believes in the goodness of people; everyone deserves a second chance.
But Gamache is a particularly unusual detective in that he hates guns. He usually doesn’t carry one, and although he certainly uses guns in the line of duty, he detests them. More than one person accuses him of being a coward for not carrying a gun, but they simply fail to understand Gamache’s bravery. He dislikes guns not only because they harm and kill but because he’s acutely aware of the dangerous alliance of a weapon and human emotions. In the heat of the moment, with passions flaring, it’s easy to pull the trigger when a gun is readily available. Gamache knows that the most difficult course of action is to manage one’s own emotional volatility and see potential victims as real human beings, capable of conversation and dialogue, of conversion and redemption. Gamache is extraordinarily self-aware and psychologically mature, which is part of what makes his character so engaging. He doesn’t simply solve crimes through facts. He uses his heart, too.
Gamache is deeply in tune with the inner recesses of his own heart. When he sits across from a serial killer, he sees not only a murderer but the presence of murderous inclinations within himself. When he’s trying to figure out who committed a crime, he’s acutely aware of his own biases and unchecked suspicions. And that’s why he loathes carrying a gun. He can see what lies within his own heart. He knows that when dealing with the worst of human behavior and the presence of evil, he can’t fully trust his motivations for relying on a gun. Will he fire out of self-defense or because he despises the evil in someone? Will he use physical violence to keep the peace instead of taking on the more difficult task of risky dialogue in a hostage situation? Gamache is humbly aware of his own frailty as a human being because he’s befriended the scariest of human passions lurking within his soul.
There’s a spiritual analogy to the self-awareness seen in a character like Armand Gamache. Gamache himself is religiously inclined, although not a faithful practitioner of religion. But he nevertheless understands a spiritual insight that is quite ancient. It’s what the monastic desert fathers and mothers came to understand all too well when they fled the cities to be silent with God. They discovered that although they thought they had left the world, the world had followed them. They learned that each of them was a “little world,” to use the words of the early Christian theologian Origen.[1] Inside of them were all the evils imaginable in the wider world: murder, envy, rage, adultery, licentiousness, theft, deceit, pride.
And it was in the desert that those fathers and mothers learned to befriend the little worlds within themselves. They weren’t supposed to like the inclinations they saw inside, but they at least needed to recognize their presence. They couldn’t run from those real human emotions, and they couldn’t fight them. But they could acknowledge their existence and then ask for the grace of God to relinquish their power. Paradoxically, by embracing the darkness in their hearts, the desert fathers and mothers found that the darkness had less control over them.
It should be no surprise that the desert fathers and mothers came to see that they were “little worlds.” It should be no surprise that the demons of the world found them in the desert because those demons had made a home within their own hearts. None of this should surprise us because it’s precisely what Jesus taught.
His encounter with the scribes and Pharisees in today’s Gospel reading seems, at first, to be a simplistic overturning of legalistic ritualism. But such a shallow reading conveniently excuses us from being honest with the state of our own souls. Armed with Jesus’s words to the Pharisees and scribes, it’s tempting—indeed dangerous—to lambaste those who are rigidly obedient to the Law or to Church teaching. And in doing so, we get no further than a vague preference for the spirit rather than the letter of the law. But Jesus is not eschewing the Law or religious duty in his exchange with the scribes and Pharisees. His teaching might as well be directed at us, too, and at every Christian who enjoys pointing fingers at those they deem immoral or law-forsaking. Christ’s wisdom is for any of us who secretly judge others while ignoring the spiritual turmoil within our own souls.
Jesus’s teaching goes straight to the heart because he’s showing us that each of us is a “little world.” Our souls are so often like closets under the staircases of our homes and of our retreat house next door: they’re the convenient places to store all our junk while making the visible parts of the house look presentable. Only by doing some spring cleaning within the closets of our hearts can we grow into spiritual maturity. If we recognize the murderous impulses within, we’re less quick to judge the convicted murderer. If we own the fact that we give our loyalty and love to gods and idols of our own making instead of to God, then we’re perhaps less willing to point fingers at a sexually promiscuous person. If we face the overwhelming covetousness within our own souls, we might be reluctant to judge the person locked up for embezzlement. Each of us is a “little world,” which means that none of us is far removed from those whom society considers to be the dregs of the earth.
But this sobering knowledge of our own little worlds would be nothing more than a source of shame unless we could see that there’s a profound grace in it. In this realization of our own little worlds, we’re brought to our knees in humility and utter dependence on God. We stand, of course, before God “to whom all hearts are open and from whom no secrets are hid.” It's futile to hide our hearts from God, as much as we might try to hide them from others, and this rather terrifying reality is also a gift. There’s a profound moment of grace in recognizing that the confusing mess of our hearts is the source of our shared humanity.
Our own fallibility, our human tendency toward sin, however awful that may be, is what unites us but not in a morbid acceptance of human depravity. It’s a humble recognition that each of us, from the weekly churchgoer to the felon on death row, is made in the image of God and is therefore nakedly reliant on the grace, mercy, and forgiveness of God to be healed and saved. That is indeed the only thing that will make us whole.
Our unkind words and judgmental actions, our exclusion of others, our moral superiority, are all weapons that we wield to defend ourselves from befriending the terrifying emotions that nest within our souls. And like Inspector Gamache, that brave detective, we, too, would do well to cast away our spiritual guns and courageously honor our shared frailty with those whom we long to attack. Often the ones we try to attack are mirror images of ourselves.
Christ gently directs our spiritual eyes into the terrifying depths of our hearts. Those hearts are open to him even when we try to hide them from the rest of the world. Despite what lurks there and is disquieting, our hearts are made for goodness, not for evil. And although demons may find a home there, because Christ has the final word, those demons have no power over us. Christ is the light in our darkness. Christ is the one who forgives all that seems unforgivable. Christ is why we have no reason to be afraid of our hearts, because Christ himself dwells in our hearts. And when we befriend the turmoil of our hearts, we will find that Christ has been there all along. He’s always there, unafraid of what terrifies us, because he has unlocked the prison doors and set us free.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 1, 2024
[1] Martin Smith, A Season for the Spirit: Readings for the Days of Lent (New York: Seabury, 2004), 29-30.