"Lost Ground" reactions

William Trevor's short story packs saintly events around Milton's life in a way that is too blatant to ignore. What struck me the most was actually not the boy's death, but the doubt and lack of support that his family gave him. After seeing and kissing St. Rosa in the orchard and being compelled to preach about her saintliness in a predominantly Protestant neighborhood, Milton must have known that his words would not go over well. But his family was the worst offender to his faith, imprisoning him in his bedroom, being the first to "martyr" him before his actual death. There are saints that have been considered "fools for Christ" and Milton's family hangs this "wrong in the head" sign on him as a scapegoat to their embarrasement.

What Milton found while in his bedroom acting as a  hermit (a life some saints have taken up and lead), he "practiced preaching, all the time seeing the woman in the orchard instead of teh sallow features of Jesus or a cantankerous-looking God, white-haired and bearded, frowning through the clouds" (175).  The predetermined images that the Protestants had constructed of God needed to be torn down in Milton's mind in order to spread the truth of what he experienced. Similarly, Milton is provided a puzzle as entertainment while in solitary. But this puzzle also represents how Milton is piecing together his visions from St. Rosa and defining a new Christianity, one that is not endorsed by his family or neighbors and marks him as an enemy.  Milton wonders if he will finish the jigsaw; he had heard the story of Dudgeon McDavie dozens of times, and "yet it seemed a different kind of story when he thought about the woman in the orchard..." Christianity was being redefined through St. Rosa, and then through Milton. Like St. Catherine, Brigid, and Bega, Milton proved: "Your bodies a living sacrifice" (182). And it ends with the Catholic view of martyrdom when the family tells themselves "that Milton's death was the way things were, the way things had to be..."(183).