The Matthew Passage

English 363
April 28, 2010

The Matthew Passage:
Damned Ideology in Mountains Beyond Mountains

    Before Tracy Kidder leads us up the crisscrossing trail through the religious manifesto of the Matthew Passage in Mountains Beyond Mountains, we've already become familiar—if a bit uncomfortable—with the multi-faceted persona of Dr. Paul Farmer.  Farmer is shown as an agent for grace, an iconoclastic saint, and an avid, delighted practitioner of deep, abiding faith in the midst of 20th century academia and secular medical science.  He becomes familiar, because we are show Farmer in several of his guises and see his work as if at first hand; uncomfortable, because most of that work as been among the "wasteland" and "slums" in regions of the world that are, at best, "littered with ... garbage, garbage on fire, and with ramshackle-looking developments, like ... strip malls that had moldered before being completed" (135).   Somewhere amidst this familiar discomfort, Kidder allows Farmer to display in vivid terms, his working compassion and to challenge to us—as readers, as humans—to find in ourselves some measure of care, concern, and action for those born into the global rural squalor of poverty and disease.

    One of the first impressions Kidder shows is Farmer self-description as "'a poor person's doctor,'" but, as Kidder tells us honestly, "he didn't quite fit my preconception of such a person" (7).  What follows is a seeming paradoxical personality assessment that we will come to understand is part of the conflict within Farmer that drives him to perform his work:

[Farmer] clearly liked the fancy restaurant, the heavy cloth napkins, the good bottle of wine.  What struck me ... was how happy he seemed with his life.  Obviously [he] could have been doing good works as a doctor while commuting between Boston and a pleasant suburb—not between a room in what I imagined must be a grubby church rectory and the wasteland of central Haiti.  The way he talked, it seemed he actually enjoyed living among Haitian peasant farmers.  At one point, speaking about medicine, he said, "I don't know why everybody isn't excited by it." (7)

Although this description is intended to summarize the dichotomy of Farmer's personality, it becomes something more akin to a personal testament, crossing over into religious experience.  Kidder says that Farmer "smiled at me, and his face turned bright ... a luminescent smile.  It affected me quite strongly, like a welcome gladly given, one you didn't have to earn" (7).  This precise account is easily analogous with what theologians call Grace—that is, a spontaneous, unmerited divine gift.

    The concept and importance of grace is an idea which separates not only Roman Catholicism from the Calvinists and Protestants, but, in Mountains Beyond Mountains, can also be seen as what separates Farmer from his more urban and conventional fellow medical practitioners.  His acts of grace are seen by both those he works with and treats as being the reason he is considered to be not only happy—as exemplified by his point about being excited by his work—but also that dreaded religious term in the midst of a secular world: Dr. Paul Farmer is also a pious man.

    After Farmer secures a spot in a homeless shelter for an ailing alcoholic and drug abuser named Joe—secured with false promises that Joe will no longer engage in habits that Farmer himself enables Joe to continue—Farmer visits the shelter on Christmas, bringing presents for everyone.  Farmer's gift for Joe is a six-pack of beer hidden non-discretely in a paper bag.  In Farmer's method of healing, he considers a six-pack of Budweiser as the healthier alternative for the ailing alcoholic than Joe's preference of a 1/2 gallon of vodka.  "As Farmer was leaving the shelter, he heard Joe say to another resident, just loudly enough to make Farmer wonder if Joe meant him to overhear, 'That guy's a fuckin' saint.'"  Kidder expounds upon Joe's comment, "It wasn't the first time Farmer heard himself called that.  When I asked him his reaction, he said he felt like the thief in Hawthorne's novel The Marble Fawn, who steals something from a Catholic church and, before making his escape, dips his hand in holy water" (16).  Even as Farmer performs his acts of grace for those ailing souls in the homeless shelter on Christmas, he breaks the very rules that govern the addicts being taken in.  Farmer may be a saint for his manner of treatment, but his role of divinity is an iconoclastic one.  It is a contradiction he noticed in himself years earlier while still in Harvard medical school.

    There was a time in human history when mythology accounted equally for science and religion, but in more modern society, the two are usually viewed as being counterpoint, if not outright the antithesis of the other.  It was not a binary Manichaeism which Farmer ascribed to, and he makes this clear when he voices, "'the fact that any sort of religious faith was so disdained at Harvard and so important to the poor—not just in Haiti but elsewhere, too—made me even more convinced that faith must be something good'" (85).  Kidder weighs this animosity, telling us that Farmer "'was taken with the idea that in an ostensibly godless world that worshipped money and power or, more seductively, a sense of personal efficacy and advancement, like at Duke and Harvard, there was still a place for God, and that was in the suffering of the poor'" (85).  This epiphany then is when Kidder brings us to the rise on our own mountain trail where we see just ahead our intended destination—the summit of our thesis: the Matthew Passage.

    Dr. Farmer performs his medical work for the poorest, most diseased, and impoverished people this world has to offer.  This work is accomplished not because of, but despite numerous bureaucratic, political, and financial hindrances placed in his way.  Frequently, Farmer must leave the remote locations of his medical work to travel to Moscow, Lima, New York, or Boston, to obtain funding, medical supplies, or other materials.  In discussing this need to interact with politicians and corporate business personnel, Kidder perhaps inadvertently illustrates clearly the point Farmer will later make in a reference to the Gospel of Matthew:

When he was younger, Farmer used to come and go ... in jeans and a T-shirt, until he realized this upset his Haitian friends, who always dressed up to travel.  Then Père Lanfontant told him that if he was going off to represent them to the world, he should wear a suit.  Farmer owned two but had loaned one to a friend.  He preferred the black one anyway, because it allowed him, for example, to wipe the fuzz off the tip of his pen onto his pants leg while writing up orders at the Brigham, catch a night flight, say to Moscow or Lima, and still look presentable when he arrived. (184)

It is hidden here among these words in which Farmer displays his faith in such a profound and integral manner that it becomes blind commonplace in his everyday life.  Kidder tells us that Farmer has two suits, but had loaned one of them to a friend.  A page later—when Farmer relates his Matthew Passage—the connection is linked, and once noticed, becomes as if our perception is cleansed and we gaze into the infinite divine.

    Kidder describes a drive along a remote road in the Haitian wasteland and seeing emaciated beggars, barefoot children, and starving livestock.  Kidder makes a Biblical comment—"if you've done it unto the least of them, you've done it unto me"—meant to impress Farmer, and the doctor replies:

"Matthew twenty-five," said Farmer.  "Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me." He went on, paraphrasing, "When I was hungry, you fed me.  When I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink.  When I was a stranger, you took me in.  When I was naked, you gave me clothes.  When I was sick, when I was in prison, you visited me.  Then it says, Inasmuch as you did it not, you're screwed."  He smiled, swerving around another giant rut in the road. (185)

This, then, becomes the mustard seed of all that Farmer does.  He finds joy, not in the suffering of others, but in his work to ease that suffering, even if that ease comes, as it almost always does, in a temporary form.  Instead of trying to find the loopholes in his faith—like that which might be found in a bigoted, derogatory man who lives his life deliberately blind to those who suffer around him only to make a death-bed conversion to his own Lord and Savior in a vain attempt for grace and forgiveness—Farmer enacts his faith with delight and graciousness, though the road he chose leads him through hardships he could have avoided for a much easier, much more comfortable path.  It is not the vague idea of grace and redemption Farmer deals with, it's the filthy, bloody sort that exists in the forgotten and ignored vectors of our planet.  The difficult sort that comes about when treating sick and tubercular patients in Cange, Haiti, or the seemingly insignificant act of loaning one of his two suits to a friend—"I was naked...and you clothed Me" (Matt 25:36, NASB).  Farmer lives his faith with deliberate joy, not with snide duplicity.  He does what he does not out of fear of damnation, but out of love.  Not love as some poetic ideal, but love as a verb of doing, of being.  Farmer welcomes those giant ruts in the road which he travels, and gladly swerves past them en route to the next place where compassion is needed.  He does not seek material rewards for his actions, as performing charity for recognition negates the intention and purpose of such work.

    Farmer's journey is our journey as readers, as people.  A trek up the crisscrossing path of a mountainside.  And Kidder has guided us through the Matthew Passage, we have reached a wayside on our trail.  A overlook where we can take a respite and look around to see from where we've come, to take in where we might go from here.  We may spend a while here to enjoy the accomplishments of our own hard work.  We see there is a path down the other side of this summit, and, in the distance, another mountain to climb; more ruts to traverse.  This is a geography we don't just look at, we have to read it.

    There is always going to be another mountain.

    There is never going to be some grand reward for this labor.

    We climb the next mountain because that's the path.  The journey is the reward, not some possible destination.  If we journey well, the destination will be gracious and welcoming whenever we reach it.

    There are more mountains beyond these mountains, another sick person along our path, another asshole who will snark about the world's problems without contributing to any solution, another situation that confounds/delights/infuriates/astounds/inspires and perhaps, sometimes, will make us cry.  No matter what anyone does—you, me, Tracy Kidder, or Paul Farmer—the poor, like disease and atrocity, will be with us always.  It's how we deal with what is inside ourselves where all work begins.  We must be healthy if we intend to for our work to help others.  Farmer could not treat his sick patients if he were ill himself.  He shows us that obstacles are to be overcome; fear is merely an opportunity to exercise courage.  And, as we climb the next mountain to find who might be ill, we may, at times, feel too much which will lead to frustration at the seeming futility of it all.  We rationalize the situation, and ask ourselves:

    —What can we do?

    Tracy Kidder has given Dr. Paul Farmer a voice to reply to us by example:

    —Do what we can.

    That, as Farmer has shown, is the quintessential essence of charity and compassion.  And the keys to the kingdom of heaven in this world.

    The view from this summit is divine, but now we must, like grace, descend again to take up our travels along the next path.



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