As we’ve entered the month of November, and particularly as we celebrated All Souls Day, the Catholic faithful may have turned their minds and prayers to those who have gone before us. We mourn those suffering and damned souls who spurned Christ’s mercy until the bitter end and pray hopefully for those who accepted it, all the while never knowing who falls into which group. For those who have a devotion of praying for the holy souls in purgatory, it may feel particularly poignant this year as All Souls Day fell so close to Election Day in the United States. In a time when “we the people” feel so divided, it is entirely possible that Catholic Americans are unknowingly praying for their departed political foes. In Christ’s relentless pursuit of us all, conversions can be quiet, even silent, finally accomplished after waging a hard-fought war against the promptings of grace.  

If, as Bernard Berenson says, “literature is the autobiography of humanity,” then Brideshead Revisited is perhaps the preeminent example of the persistent promptings of grace and the gradual conversion of sinners. It often seems that many of our political leaders are outspoken in their disgust of and rejection of Christ and His Church, while others claim to be aligned with Christ but are only half-heartedly so, at least publicly. In the Marchmain family, whom Brideshead follows through the voice of their friend Charles, there is a similar pattern. Some members are pious, some have one foot in and one foot out of the Church, and some are openly at odds with the Church. Although there are many elements of this masterpiece that deserve to be explored, what is most interesting and most relevant to this discussion is the slow promptings of grace in the lives of the less devout characters. Evelyn Waugh went so far as to title the third part of the book “A Twitch Upon the Thread,” a line taken from a Father Brown mystery story quoted by Cordelia, the Marchmain’s daughter. In this excerpt, G.K. Chesterton (the author of the Father Brown stories) says that the detective “caught [the thief] with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” For Julia, Sebastian, and Lord Marchmain, the members of the family who had left the Church in differing capacities, as well as the unchurched Charles, this metaphorical thread had certainly allowed them to stray far from the fold of the Church.  

The reader will begin to see the twitches on the thread, the small promptings of the grace, even in the early parts of the story. For example, when Charles robustly dismisses the childhood faith of his new friend Sebastian, Sebastian responses almost sadly by saying, “Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.” If Sebastian could only fully convince himself that the doctrines of the Church were nonsense, how much freer would he feel! Instead, it is after many years of suffering and debauchery that Sebastian finally comes back to the Church, ultimately finding acceptance and a sense of home in the place he had spent his life running from. He lives out the rest of his life at a monastery, as a lay brother, the monks having accepted his instability. Although Sebastian’s reversion is visible, the reader is not privy to his interior thoughts that led him back to the Church. 

However, in the reversion of his sister Julia, we see the drama of her interior struggle as she first resists but eventually accepts the outstretched mercy of Christ. At the cusp of beginning her adult life, she decides to “shut her mind against her religion” so that she is more able to live in the world as she desires. She marries a divorcee outside of the Church, becomes disenchanted by her husband, has a failed love affair, and finally reconnects with and begins an affair with Charles, the narrator and friend of the family. Both in loveless marriages and willing to have a public affair, they seem to find real happiness in being together. However, it slowly becomes clear that Julia is not fully able to shut her mind against her religion and her guilt and confusion eventually explode out of her, confounding Charles, who remains fairly confused by the family’s warped sense of religion. As she wrestles with her faith and her place in it, she declares: “But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself off from his mercy.” She decides that she and Charles must break things off and she begins again to live within the bounds of the mercy of the Church. 

For Lord Marchmain, his silent conversion comes after many decades of hating, fearing, and hiding from the Church he adopted in his marriage to Lady Marchmain. Now separated from his wife and living with his mistress, he comes back to the family estate to die. His more pious children, Bridey and Cordelia, insist upon having a priest come to administer Last Rites. He resists, backed by Julia and Sebastian, for many days. Finally, in a silently dramatic moment before his death, he consents simply by making the Sign of the Cross. This profound gesture marks his conversion, although the reader never learns the details of his journey or of his final thoughts. This unexpected conversion marks a turning point in Julia and Charles’ journey back to the Faith. 

In the epilogue, it is revealed that Charles has become Catholic. Again, the reader does not learn of the specifics of his interior life during his conversion, but as the story had progressed, there had been too many twitches upon the thread to go unnoticed. In the final chapters of the book, an avalanche is used as a recurring motif. Charles feels unable to resist this avalanche and, as seen in the epilogue, he has been swept away in the avalanche of God’s grace and mercy. 

The work of God in the novel Brideshead Revisited serves as a powerful reminder of the silent and relentless nature of Christ’s love for and desire for all people to be united in His Church. The characters in Brideshead spend years, or decades in some cases, living far from the Church, either indifferent to Her or openly hating Her. However, miraculously, they all remained open to the twitches on the thread: “The preparation of man for the reception of grace is already a work of grace” (CCC 2001). For those of us who may be estranged from family members, or who feel the divide in our nation particularly sharply, sometimes this is all we can do; to pray for those who have strayed to be open to feeling God twitching on their thread.