Unlocking the Fortress of the Heart
By Maria Bonvissuto
When my parents gave me Michael O’Brien’s latest book The Lighthouse: A Novel for Christmas, I felt a tad skeptical. Though I’m a big fan of O’Brien, who is not only an excellent Catholic writer but also an artist and iconographer, his newest novel sounded dull compared to many of his other books.
A few days later, tears were welling up in my eyes as I hungrily turned page after page. I couldn’t set the book down—and it wasn’t because it was a thriller. The Lighthouse is one of O’Brien’s slower, subtler works, but the lyrical beauty of its prose and its rich meditations on loneliness, self-gift, and belonging are haunting. It cracks open your heart and sheds light on places that you would rather keep hidden.
In an interview with The Catholic Weekly, O’Brien describes his intentions for the book: “I hope the readers could take away from the book a desire to look up, and to move from loneliness and isolation into the realm of love and communion with others.” It is this meditation on the absolute need within each of us for communion that pierced my heart while reading The Lighthouse.
O’Brien’s story centers around a lighthouse keeper named Ethan McQuarry, who has spent most of his forty years tending a lighthouse on Cape Breton Island, overlooking the Atlantic. A lover of solitude, Ethan is a quiet, seemingly unremarkable man, perfectly content to spend most of the year completely on his own on the island, cut off from land and other people by the water.
Ethan very deliberately keeps himself hidden. He carries deep wounds in his heart from a terribly painful experience of abandonment in his past. Because of this, although he’s perfectly capable of interacting with others, Ethan has an aversion to any kind of vulnerability. He is determined to keep to himself so as to protect himself.
Ethan retreats into his lighthouse, using it as a fortress of his own to keep out the world. Yet, the very structure that he tries to use for protection is anything but hidden. It’s an unmistakable beacon, sharing light with everyone who passes by. It embodies the very call that Ethan is given—a call to share his gifts, his personality, and his love with people outside of himself.
Sure enough, Ethan can’t resist this call forever. He experiences a series of unexpected “intrusions” into his intensely private life. He meets a young woman hiking along the coast, a drunken old man who tries to commit suicide out on the ocean, an eager college student who’s studying biology and wants to explore Ethan’s island.
At first, Ethan is resentful of these intrusions. However, his heart begins to wake up in a way it never has before. The more he learns to accept human connection instead of running away, the more he learns how to love and be loved. The injuries that he carries from his past begin to heal. The very thing he was most afraid of ends up being his path to wholeness––and, in becoming whole, he also becomes free to give himself to others.
He eventually realizes the futility of his efforts to fix his pain by cutting himself off from others. In a heartrending passage, Ethan cries out for the many moments of love he missed because of his fear, even going so far as to mourn the family he never had.
Ethan’s story moved me deeply because I saw my story in his. Too many of us have experienced the crushing pain of being rejected or abandoned. When this happens, we’re faced with the temptation to harden our hearts and make vows of self-reliance. We promise ourselves that we will never ever let such a thing happen to us again. We build tall walls around our hearts and feel safe in the fortresses we’ve constructed. But these fortresses can become prisons where our hearts wither.
Ethan is a drastic example of this. But his life reflects an interior disposition that manifests itself in different ways among different people. Maybe it’s in the person who can never bring herself to ask for help; the person who has given up trying to make friends; or the person who’s outgoing and good with people but who doesn’t know how to talk about her feelings or desires with those closest to her. We can convince ourselves of the lie that we’re not worth knowing or that letting someone in behind the walls of our fortress is too dangerous. For a while, we can buy into the lie that we don’t need anyone else.
But eventually, our need for others catches up with us, just as it caught up with Ethan. And, just like Ethan, if we open ourselves up to the right people, healing begins and fear drains away. We may even realize with wonder, as Ethan does, that it’s not just that we need others––they need us. They need our vulnerability, the desires and dreams and kindness of each of us. To withhold ourselves, to stay in our own little fortresses, is to deprive the world of a richness and beauty that God intended for it from the beginning.
This need for others is not a liability but a blessing. God wants to touch our wounds and heal us through others. He wants us to experience something of the loving union found in the Holy Trinity through our communion with others. This communion requires an openness that might seem frightening or impossible, but The Lighthouse is a gorgeous portrayal of the truth that the rewards far outweigh the risks.
