There is a scene in Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel All the Light We Cannot See in which the matronly French housekeeper Madame Manec reflects on the “Old Ladies’ Resistance Club” she has started in Nazi-occupied Saint-Malo. Fresh off of laughing with the women of her coastal town on the most recent week’s pranks against their invaders, she whispers, “Seventy-six years old . . . and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes?”
This feeling, this exciting thrill of purpose, appears in each of the novel’s characters in turn, as they use their unique gifts to fight the evil forces at work during World War II. And while we, of course, do not live in Nazi-occupied Europe, all of us have our own purposes to discover during an exceptional time of spiritual warfare. In his last encyclical, Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis warns that we live “in an age of superficiality, rushing frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives.” Fortunately, as we look to the characters of Doerr’s Light in turn, we find instructions on how we too can use our ordinary gifts to subvert the forces of evil prowling about us every day.
We’ll return first to Madame Manec, the seventy-six-year-old with stars in her eyes, who has spent decades of her life caring for the home and family of Etienne, an eccentric, elderly man who returned from World War I without his brother. Her care readily extends to Etienne’s nephew and his blind grandniece, Marie-Laure, who appear on her doorstep in the dead of night after a grueling journey from besieged Paris. We watch as Madame Manec draws out the scarce tools her friends and loved ones possess to resist evil in increasingly dramatic ways. We see her buoying spirits with cans of peaches, laughing about pranks played on Nazi forces, tracking German license plates and vessels, and ultimately provoking her employer to operate one of the most critical resistance telecommunication operations on the coast of France.
It is knowing the gifts and joys and pains and treasures of our hearts, and turning them outward, according to God’s will, that we find our purpose.
Etienne’s role against the forces of evil begins as a young boy making educational science recordings with his brother. When that brother is lost, Etienne’s grief prompts him to broadcast the same recordings, using a proclivity for engineering to construct a radio station into the exceptionally tall seaside turret on top of his home. It is this antenna, made in grief, that Madame Manec sees as a potential tool for Allied forces. Though Etienne initially refuses to get involved, it is the echo of Madame Manec’s question to him, “Don’t you want to be alive before you die?” that finally pushes him to take the plunge into the resistance communication ring.
As Marie-Laure watches her great-uncle’s transformation from bystander to rebel, “something bright kindles in her abdomen.” For she too now has a purpose. Her unassuming countenance as a disabled young woman garners no suspicion as she blindly counts storm drains to walk to the bakery and back, transporting coded messages baked into loaves of bread. As Madame Manec’s purpose has led Etienne to his, Etienne’s purpose leads Marie-Laure to hers, all of them working against the Nazis with the hope that they are “the good guys.” Much as Marie-Laure feels enkindled, Etienne’s new purpose invigorates him, “his heart untroubled . . . he feels unshakable; he feels alive.”
And yet the most surprising contribution of all comes through Werner, a teenage Nazi soldier. In the novel’s stunning ending, as all the storylines combine, it is Werner’s nurtured childhood gift for engineering that leads him to Etienne’s broadcasting turret. And it is the terrifying Nazi training he has received that empowers him to get there in time to save Marie-Laure’s life. The German forces did all they could to brainwash Werner and his young peers into soldiers primed to act, to fight, to kill, to die for the Nazi cause. As he finds himself with a rifle and a fleeting opportunity to fight for good, he uses this education, reflecting that “they said what he needed was certainty. Purpose. Clarity. [They said] that they would strip the hesitation out of him.” And it is this very barbaric instinct for soldiering that Werner uses, not as a tool of the Nazis who indoctrinated him but as a spear against them.
As each character finds extraordinary purpose in the ordinary things that make them the people that they are, we return to Dilexit Nos to make sense of this for our own time of spiritual warfare. Pope Francis writes, “In the heart of each person, there is a mysterious connection between self-knowledge and openness to others, between the encounter with one’s personal uniqueness and the willingness to give oneself to others.” For Madame Manec, Etienne, Marie-Laure, and Werner, we see how they use the good and the bad, the pains and the pleasures, the big and the small gifts of their heart. A greater purpose comes from cans of peaches and the grief of a mourning veteran; from a blind girl counting storm drains and a young man’s radio engineering. Like the peaches, the recordings, the storm drains, the radio, Pope Francis reminds us that “these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms.” Thus, it is knowing the gifts and joys and pains and treasures of our hearts, and turning them outward, according to God’s will, that we find our purpose. As we unite the ordinary works of our hearts and lives to the Sacred Heart of Christ, we walk in the hope that we will become the light he wants us to be to fight the spiritual battles we cannot see.