I have three items for my write-up today on Stephen King’s The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition:
1. On pages 501-502, Mother Abagail looks at the stars and remembers when she was a little girl (which was a long time ago, since Mother Abigail is 108 years old). Pages 501-502 state: “A warm night like this, the stars, the summer moon just peeking his red lover’s face over the horizon, it made her remember her girlhood again with all its strange fits and starts, its heats, its gorgeous vulnerability as it stood on the edge of the Mystery. Oh, she had been a girl. There were those who would not believe it, just as they were unable to believe that the giant sequoia had ever been a green sprout. But she had been a girl, and in those times the childhood fears of the night had faded and the adult fears that came in the night when everything is silent and you can hear the voice of your eternal soul, those fears were yet down the road. In that brief time between, the night had been a fragrant puzzle, a time when, looking up at the star-strewn sky and listening to the breeze that brought such intoxicating smells, you felt close to the heartbeat of the universe, to love and life. It seemed you would be forever young…”
There is a certain coziness that comes from looking up at the stars and feeling small in the face of nature. Several people say that they believe in God especially when they look up at the starry sky. Mother Abagail reflects that she did so even when she was a girl, before she had to wrestle with the fears of adulthood. It’s good when one can keep in touch with a simpler time, as long as one does not take a permanent vacation from adulthood.
2. On page 510, we read: “Nick had been sitting at the table through all of this, on the far side of the room from her rocking chair. You would think, [Mother Abagail] mused, that if a man couldn’t talk he would get lost in a roomful of people, that he would just sink from view. But something about Nick kept that from happening. He sat perfectly still, following the conversation as it traveled around the room, his face reacting to whatever was being said. That face was open and intelligent, but careworn for one so young. Several times as the talk went on she saw people look at him, as if Nick could confirm what he or she was saying. They were very much aware of him, too.”
I’m the sort of person who fades in the background because I am quiet. Plus, I may have a vacant sort of face, which gives people the impression that I don’t know what’s going on, when in fact I do. Nick could not speak, but he still carried weight in a group, perhaps because he listened carefully to what people were saying, or he conveyed a certain seriousness and intelligence through his facial expressions. As a result, at least at this stage of the book, Nick is a leader, although he does not particularly desire the role and feels that it’s odd that he, as a deaf-mute, should have it. Perhaps his life-experiences have prepared him for this point: his struggles with his disabilities made him deeper and wiser, he learned how to handle situations in which he’d have to run things (i.e., a jail, guiding Tom Cullen), etc. He had gained a practical insight, and that served him well as a leader, even though, on some level, he may also be guided by God (in whom Nick doesn’t even believe).
3. On page 514, Nick, Ralph, and Mother Abagail are talking about their dreams about Randall Flagg, the villain of the book. Nick speculates that Flagg may not be a literal person, but rather that they’re dreaming about what they fear that they themselves will do, implying that Flagg is a symbol for their own evil. Mother Abagail then reflects on liberal Protestant views about the devil:
“…Abby grasped what Nick meant right off. It wasn’t much different from the talk of the new preachers who had got on the land in the last twenty years or so. There wasn’t really any Satan, that was their gospel. There was evil, and it probably came from original sin, but it was in all of us and getting it out was as impossible as getting an egg out of its shell without cracking it. According to the way these new preachers had it, Satan was like a jigsaw puzzle—and every man, woman, and child on earth added his or her little piece to make up the whole. Yes, all that had a good modern sound to it; the trouble with it was that it wasn’t true. And if Nick was allowed to go on thinking that, the dark man would eat him for dinner.”
This is a profound quote for different reasons. For one, Mother Abagail thinks that an idea may sound reasonable, but that doesn’t make it true. That’s the sort of thing that I’ve heard from conservative Christians, but Mother Abagail speaks from her own personal experience: she knows Flagg is real because she has interacted with him (and there are conservative Christians who claim that such is the case with them, that they’ve had experiences of the devil). Second, Mother Abagail believes that one needs to believe in the existence of Randall Flagg in order to beware of him. This resembles something else that I’ve heard from conservative Christians: that Satan tries to encourage us not to believe in him because then we cannot resist him.
There may be merit to these ideas. I think, though, that belief in the devil has also had some rather horrible consequences, such as the Salem Witch Trials. I remember a pastor telling us how to resist the devil, and he said that we can identify the devil’s activity when a pastor has a bold idea for the church, and someone in the congregation has doubts about it, saying “But pastor…” So we can see that the devil is at work when someone dares to dissent from a pastor or church? That’s one way to encourage authoritarianism! Perhaps the authoritarianism is what’s Satanic, not the dissent!
I know some people who believe that the devil is merely a symbol for our own sinfulness, that we don’t need an actual being to trip us up, since we do a fine job tripping ourselves up. There may be something to that. At the same time, I can understand one feeling that he or she is swimming upstream by trying to live a moral life, almost as if there is something external that wants him or her to fail.