“Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair is not a comforting story.” Thus begins Katy Carl’s beautifully written foreword to the Word on Fire Classics edition of Greene’s 1951 novel. Made into a movie twice over, the book features adultery and miracles, deformity and depravity, hate and love, and occasionally likable characters who do abhorrent things. A feel-good, family-friendly story it is not.
And yet, as a married Catholic trying my best, I do, actually, find the tale comforting. In fact, Graham’s incarnate, soul-searching, torrid romance offers hope and grace to all of us, at every stage of life, chiefly through the example of the married party in Greene’s Affair, Mrs. Sarah Bertram Miles.
Before we get to Sarah, I will share that I encountered Greene’s novel for the first time while wrestling with one of the most uncomfortable notions of being a lay Catholic—namely, that all of us, married and religious, single and sinner, are called to sainthood. Images of saints being what they often are—staid, pious smiles staring loftily from prayer cards and marble—I more than occasionally find this call laughably out of reach. Scan the lists of canonized Catholics, and one finds that nearly all holy members of the laity are historical royalty, visionary mystics, or violently executed martyrs of the faith. Like many of us, I imagine, my modern path to lay sainthood must be found in carpool lines, fueled by food thrown in lunchboxes. There is no lay saint (yet) twisted into stained glass wielding a color-coded calendar and an imperfectly prepared meal-train casserole. When in the trenches of modern life, this can be an uncomfortable thought.
Enter Graham Greene’s unwed jealous ex-lover, Maurice Bendrix, narrating with hate-filled certainty that the love of his life, Sarah Miles, has ended their illicit romance to pursue an adulterous relationship with someone else. Thus begins Greene’s discomforting End of the Affair. And next begins our essay’s plot spoilers (be warned!), as we find the grace this tragic tale offers to those of us pursuing our own unique calls to holiness.
Like so many of us, she finds herself navigating a sometimes confusing and uncertain call to holiness amid her own very human pain and weakness.
As we read Greene’s novel, we discover that the new love pursuing Sarah is not a would-be adulterer but a hound of heaven. We learn that in a moment of desperation—namely, when she thought her beloved Bendrix dead in a bombing raid—Sarah uncharacteristically prays to God, offering that she will end her affair if only the Lord will spare her lover’s life. When the bloodied Bendrix appears in her doorway moments later, alive and unmaimed, Sarah finds herself in the startling position of trying to keep a promise to a God she didn’t know she believed in, unmoored from the only man she loves. Like so many of us, she finds herself navigating a sometimes confusing and uncertain call to holiness amid her own very human pain and weakness.
And yet she slowly, imperfectly, allows God’s grace to work in her life, albeit in a state of earthly suffering. As Katy Carl tells us, “We find in Sarah that rarest of literary creatures: the believable saint—a character whose authentic holiness feels real to us, in part because we have also seen her at her lowest.”
This notion—the believable saint—is much more than simply a literary rarity. It is, in fact, a common reality, one that Pope Francis made sure to draw our attention to. In Gaudete et Exsultate, he reminds us that the communion of saints may include more than those we venerate as a Church. It “may include our own mothers, grandmothers or other loved ones.” It may include “our next-door neighbours,” patiently persevering in raising their children, in working for their families. It may include a “middle-class of holiness,” saints that “may not always have been perfect, yet even amid their faults and failings they kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord.” This, of course, proves to be the case with Sarah Miles, as the characters in our novel find themselves witnesses to inexplicable miracles linked to her intercession after her untimely death. Mrs. Sarah Bertram Miles, with all her faults and failings, still made it to the communion of saints.
And thus, The End of the Affair becomes a story of hope that our holiness, no matter how meager or imperfectly modern, can be used and perfected in this life and the next. It’s a story of sainthood that need not be canonized, a story of suffering turned over to the Lord, a story of the Lord giving those who loved a flawed woman the grace of seeing that he cherished her imperfect life, that he used it for his good. It’s a reminder that all of us, no matter how broken or quiet or pained or joyful, can let God’s grace in enough for the next right step. As St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross writes, “The greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night.” May Sarah Miles’s believable sainthood comfort us all with the hope that our offered good, no matter how hidden or small or uncanonized or flawed, will be used for one another by the One who created and loves us all.