'Agatha of Little Neon': A Story about How to Carry Love's Load

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

She had no interest in controlling her temper because she had no idea how to control her love.

 By Melissa Walsh

The secret sauce of good fiction, as food for the soul, is didactic, curious prose sprinkled with generous pinches of empathy. Claire Luchette cooked up a soul's delight in her debut novel Agatha of Little Neon.

Yearning for Community
Agatha, a young sister (not "a nun"), narrates. She's a young woman growing self-awareness about her identity and troubled past as she serves a small community of recovering alcohol and drug addicts in a halfway house known as Little Neon. She serves with three other young sisters, whom Agatha presents to the reader from behind a veil of private pain and an emerging sense of identity that could prove inconsistent with her sisters', and the church's, religious values. This sense of herself comes into focus when she serves as a math teacher at a girls parochial high school, in addition to her service at Little Neon. She manages both roles without training in social services or education. Empathy and dedication to study and prayer seem to qualify her well as an impactful servant leader. She is mindful to pray for others; when she prays for herself, it is for understanding and loving others better. 

The story is less about religion than about how dedication to loving others grows wisdom and about the strength required for profound kindness. Agatha values a practice of treating each person as valuable, as a unique human being designed for purpose. Perhaps, for her, this is the most direct approach toward achieving sacred community.

Myth of Comfortable Holy Community
Agatha's approach is inconsistent with the conventional American dream. We know that many, or most, Americans are conditioned to laud the success of the individual, measured in dedication to one's work, paying one's bills, spending time with one's family. This American breed of individuals fence themselves into what they mark as “mine” and worship what’s locked up there — apart from holistic society, or segregated from parts of society they perceive as dangerous or in conflict with their ideal for American society. They seek to remove themselves from random bad luck by pulling their weight. To those who struggle, they say, "Just pull yourself up." In doing so, they generate what is noted by analysts and journalists as “marginalized groups,” or "broken families, or "at-risk youth," or "the homeless," or "displaced families," or "underserved communities." Their approach to community breaks it, because it is selfish, self-serving.

Those who worship the American myth of the comfortable life with a happy ending are those who marginalize the marginalized, fossilizing conditions for people labeled as such for generations. They would like to put the marginalized in a box to dwell outside the white picket fence, where they are to remain until they are no longer viewed as unsafe or unholy. They flee with their families and churches from aging neighborhoods to new havens, leaving behind empty shells of schools and churches for a neglected, broken community left behind. They seek walls to safeguard their homes, schools, and churches as sacrosanct. They determine that strangers behind these walls are unsafe and treat them that way, citing the Second Amendment.

Love Moves toward Risk
Agatha doesn't seek belonging inside those walls. Among the so-called marginalized, she finds community; she finds her best self though she struggles to bring healing even as her best self. As she moves deeper into an understanding of what it truly means to love others, the less she is able to tolerate a comfortable and happy congregation of worshippers in denial of what Love commands.

Throughout the story, Agatha reflects on her respect and affection for the four sisters' aged, no-nonsense leader, Mother Roberta. In her narration, Agatha recalls witnessing a moment when "rage shot through [Mother Roberta] and turned her electric," yet, despite "disappointments of every size and scale," she continued serving: "Now I think it had something to do with love," Agatha narrates. "The church she loved had never become what she wanted; the church she'd loved all her life was reluctant to change. She had no interest in controlling her temper because she had no idea how to control her love."

Mother Roberta is Agatha's north star for finding her way along the rocky, hilly, thorny terrain of serving others who are afraid and hurting, building emotional muscle for the unwavering strength and firm commitment that Love demands. 

As the story moves and as Agatha builds her emotional muscle, her wisdom sharpens and her disappointments with the religious community increase. She sees flaws in how her peers practice Christian service, despite their obvious strengths. She discovers a mercilessness among her peers toward the men and women in crisis they were called to serve. For example, upon witnessing Right-to-Lifer protest activity at a women's health clinic, which her sisters support, Agatha narrates, "And I was thinking of mercy, how it can make gravity lift, so sinners float awhile, and every fallen leaf returns to its mother tree and is welcomed back to the branches of the living." 

Contrasting with this disappointment, the reader is treated to Agatha's delight with the birth of a baby, born into poverty during a winter storm. Agatha reflects, "It's easy to be fooled by joy, to think it will never abandon you, never leave room for hunger and fear."

I believe that Agatha would agree with C.S. Lewis' thoughts on how to love others well, as prescribed in his essay, The Weight of Glory, “It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter", Lewis writes; "it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. ..."

Agatha learns how to carry Love, with an understanding of how heavy the load is.

© 2021 Melissa Walsh

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