Cormac McCarthy has another theme that plays out in The Road more practically, one I hinted at at the end of the Inferno piece: is the Pater Noster truly something we all share or is it simply a phrase we all use for pater meus? 

Set aside for a minute that he’s going straight up against the words of Jesus and, no matter your worldview, is a rather bold move to spit in the face of a man who took care of so many poor and sick and infirm and had the courage to die for his convictions in the teeth of the Rome, single handedly dismantling said empire with said death. And set aside for a moment the apologetics that bolster several crucial facts about that man’s life. 

Let’s just take the raw idea from the book:

Through most of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, you have these Pater Noster moments where the Papa of the book (and calling him Papa and the boy the boy plays into all of this: an archetype of the names plays out longer and stronger a la Everyman or Pilgrim) seems to be praying. Raging. Talking to the form, the divine, in Cormac McCarthy’s words. 

And yet, by the end, we discover that Papa was talking to his Papa. Raging at his Papa. Papa’s pater meus more than his Pater Noster. It reinterprets every scene of desperation, gratitude, petition, imprecation, frustration, glorification, intercession: Papa saw it all through the lens of his own unnamed, offstage father. 

And he argues at the end:

If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see. 

Will I hear you?

Yes. You will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you’ll hear me. You have to practice. Just dont give up. Okay?

This he gives to the boy he told prayer wouldn’t work.

And later:

Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

So the argument seems to be that there’s not really God, just this genetic disposition to talk to one’s late father. To debrief with the one you once used as a steady sounding board. 

There’s something of filial piety of that. Ancestor worship certainly has a strong staying force within humanity. So does the “great cloud of witnesses” to whom we appeal as intercessors as surely as we do when they’re living. McCarthy, in this way, understands something that Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans understand that many Protestants miss: we ask living elders to pray for us because the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective, why don’t we ask those who are more real than us having passed through the veil of death?

Speaking autobiographically now, I can say that phrases like “I miss you dad, every day” and “I wish you could meet him” and “I really wish you were here right now: this is so hard” and “why did you have to leave so soon” and even “this sucks and you would agree” or “you would have loved this” come unbidden. They come pre-logic. They come at moments of great strength and great weakness alike. They come acknowledging the presence of a man that I more than carry with me. Tara more than carries with her. It’s beyond that idea of gone but not forgotten. It’s that he’s actually not quite gone: we can feel his mind, still. Since mind is obviously irreducible to matter, there’s likely a reason for that. And grandpa’s mind. Deno’s. Della’s. Lexi’s. Uncle Bryan’s. Opa’s. Granny’s. Aunt Danee’s. Friends that have gone one before me.

And yet my father — my ancestors — did not make their own minds and do not hold up the world. 

There’s a real sense that the moral guidance, the presence, the cheerleading, the tools and materials, the agency I received from my father — all of this pales in comparison to the raw is-ness, the raw being of mind and existence. Take anything: the ring on your finger, the chair under your butt, the phone in your hand, the wall or tree or seat before you, the other passengers on your commute. Okay, now: what within that thing or person give it or them an excuse to exist, right now? 

Because I’ll tell you right now, it’s not the wood in the table.

And it’s not the woodworker who made it all those years ago.

And it’s not the idea of tableness — the blueprint of its design nor its participation in the hierarchy of all tables. 

It’s certainly not its purpose in holding up my laptop right now. 

It exists. 

Inexplicably. 

And you and I reflecting on it also has absolutely nothing to do with it. We can imagine it without it existing. Here — I’ve lifted my keyboard and closed my eyes. It is still there and will be there when I set it back down. Yup. Still there. 

My dad didn’t do that. Neither did the table, the tree it came from, or any of those other things. 

There’s a word for that kind of moment-to-moment permission for a given thing to be and be reflected upon, reflecting mind to mind. A wonder at it all.

It’s a givenness. 

A sort of begetting. 

Pater Noster.

Father of all. Our Father. 

It’s why, in the final estimation of the total of the boy’s mind, it’s just as likely that he prays to God as it is that he agrees that Plato’s cave was wrong and there’s only the memory of his father. Papa can do what he wants, but appealing to him is only the beginning and not the end of the metaphor. 

For I prayed long before my father, grandfather, or anyone I knew had died. 

And appealing to them is little more than asking them to appeal to the Father of All. 

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Photo by Ben White on Unsplash