On Windmills Or Here's to Faith

In Spain, the children (I was chaperoning 20-some highschoolers) didn't really know anything about Don Quixote. I tried to explain it to them, but then the tour guide started to show a movie called "Donkey Hote" about a donkey, which did not help my effort. And another tour guide called him "Don KIX-ZOTE"--once again, the children were confused, and I had to be like, "the donkey-guy." Alas.

But! From the remarkable, remarkable Monsignor Quixote, which is about a priest who is friends with a communist:

[The priest] had dreamt that Christ had been saved from the Cross by the legion of angels to which on an earlier occasion the Devil had told Him that He could appeal. So there was no final agony, no heavy stone which had to be rolled away, no discovery of an empty tomb. Father Quixote stood there watching on Golgotha as Christ stepped down from the Cross triumphant and acclaimed. The Roman soldiers, even the Centurion, knelt in His honor, and the people of Jerusalem poured up the hill to worship Him. The disciples clustered happily around. His mother smiled through her tears of joy. There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt and no room for faith at all. The whole world knew with certainty that Christ was the Son of God.

It was only a dream, of course it was only a dream, but nonetheless Father Quixote had felt on waking the chill of despair felt by a man who realizes suddenly that he has taken up a profession which is of use to no one, who must continue to live in a king of Saharan desert without doubt or faith, where everyone is certain that the same belief is true. He had found himself whispering, "God save me from such a belief." Then he heard the [communist] Mayor turn restlessly on the bed beside him, and he added without thought, "Save him too from belief."


[The picture is from some little town in which Cervantes may or may not have lived. You can just see the tiny, tiny windmills on the horizon.]