Grace withheld

Filmmakers turn Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited upside down | Megan Basham

I remember when I first read Brideshead Revisited during college. Beyond Evelyn Waugh's great wit and penetrating satirical voice, what struck me most was how well his portrayal of aristocratic Oxford student Sebastian Flyte and his social circle applied to many of my own acquaintances. How well, in fact, it applied to myself.

Many of us—raised by believing parents, attending church every Sunday until we went away to school—straddled the same line. On the one hand ambitious to fit into a world we could never fully feel reconciled with, on the other possessing too much knowledge of the truth to risk our souls by abandoning it.

Eventually some of us closed the door on the still, small voice completely and became like Sebastian's friend (and Brideshead narrator), Charles Ryder—cynically and scornfully atheist. Others, like Sebastian's beautiful and more self-controlled sister Julia, continued on in a sort of half-life, willfully remaining in the spiritual shallows. And others, like Sebastian, were finally, mercifully broken by sin, with no strength left but to crawl to the cross.