Giovanna’s religious ambivalence

Giovanna’s religious ambivalence is defined by her use of prayer without belief and by the anger that follows when religious stories make suffering seem ordained rather than relieved. In a period of family upheaval, she asks God to preserve her family, though she doubts that God exists; later, reading the Gospels at the prompting of her interest in Roberto, she recoils from their account of divine power, pain, and resurrection. Prayer serves first as a private effort to hold disaster at bay, then as a practice she recognizes cannot guarantee an answer.

Prayer Without Belief

During a crisis involving her parents and their friends, Giovanna tries to understand the conflict through partial clues and fears that her own disclosures may have helped set events in motion. She asks God to let the quarrel between her father and Mariano concern politics and history rather than her aunt’s report of what Giovanna had told her father. Her prayer is an appeal to keep the family’s troubles within bounds she can bear, even though she continues not to believe in God.

The appeal grows more desperate as she imagines that the family’s relationships have been damaged beyond repair. Giovanna blames herself for insisting on meeting Vittoria and going against her parents’ wishes, then asks God to put things back in order. The request gives her a way to articulate her fear that everything will collapse; prayer offers a form for that fear, not evidence that she has acquired religious faith.

The Failure of Prayer as Protection

Giovanna’s uncertainty is bound to her limited understanding of what has happened among the adults. She sees the consequences of a quarrel, a strained household, and a bracelet presented to her as her own, but cannot make the surrounding gestures and explanations cohere. She knows more than she can admit to herself, and prayer becomes a means of pleading for the return of a stable family rather than resolving what she does not understand.

When she later speaks with Don Giacomo, she confirms that she has been praying despite her disbelief. Asked whether it helped, she says it did not and describes prayer as a kind of magic that ultimately fails. The exchange gives explicit form to the contradiction already present in her earlier appeals: she keeps addressing God, yet does not trust prayer to change events. Her answer is not a triumphant rejection of religion so much as a plain account of disappointment.

Reading the Gospels

Giovanna begins reading the Gospels because she likes Roberto, who knows them well, and hopes the books might lead her toward the love of God she associates with him. Instead, the texts feel like accounts of real people and real places, not fables arranged to make faith inviting. She becomes agitated by what she reads, and the prospect of discussing it with her father is difficult: she fears that her reaction would turn into a comparison between the heavenly Father and her own father.

The Gospels unsettle her because they depict a God who watches human beings endure hunger, illness, terror, and cruelty. Giovanna resents the idea that people are being observed as they choose between good and evil while remaining vulnerable to suffering. She is especially disturbed by the story of God’s son: his suffering and death, the father’s failure to answer his cry for help, and the resurrection of a mutilated body. The promise of eternal life does not reassure her; she finds the image of the resurrected dead frightening and cannot see why death should be followed by endless life.

Fatherhood, Suffering, and Sympathy

Giovanna’s reading makes the language of divine fatherhood painfully close to ordinary family life. The God she encounters in the Gospels resembles, in her judgment, an unloving father who gives a hungry child stones, snakes, and scorpions instead of bread. The comparison brings religious authority into contact with her experience of human family relationships, making the idea of a heavenly Father a source of anger as well as fear.

Rather than accepting the texts’ moral arrangement, Giovanna finds herself taking the side of creatures living under harsh conditions, including those who are far from ideal. She is moved when they manage to express genuine feeling from within their suffering. Her reading also sharpens her sympathy for her mother, whom she sees as having been used by her ex-husband and then placated with flattery that exploits her capacity for deep feeling. The episode therefore connects her religious doubts to a broader refusal to treat suffering as justified simply because it belongs to a divine or familial order.

An Unresolved Practice

Giovanna’s religious ambivalence does not end with a settled doctrine. She can pray while disbelieving, call prayer unsuccessful, and continue reading sacred texts even as their account of God angers and frightens her. Her questions about divine power, suffering, and resurrection remain questions; the evidence offers no conversion or reconciliation that would resolve them.

The contrast between prayer as a hoped-for intervention and prayer as failed magic captures the tension of her position. Religious language gives Giovanna a way to plead, think, and test the idea of a father who watches over children, but it cannot promise the family’s repair or make suffering acceptable. Her response to the Gospels is consequently both personal and ethical: she challenges the authority that permits suffering and aligns herself with vulnerable people whose capacity for tenderness survives it.