September 14
FEAST OF THE EXALTATION OF THE HOLY CROSS
There has been a
legal change of seasons, and the monastic fast has begun today. It
is cool again, and the leaves of the sycamores are already
beginning to turn yellow and brown. We brought down our mattresses
and blankets from our dormitory cells and spread them out in the
bright September sun. My mind is full of Saint Francis on Mount
Alvernia.
A moment ago,
someone was playing the harmonium in the novitiate. Our psalms
sound very wistful and strange on a harmonium: plaintive,
sentimental and thin, as if they were rilled with an immense
nostalgia for the heaven of the books of meditations. It reminded
me of the night Father Alberic died, three years ago. I watched by
the body in the middle of the night, and then went back to the
dormitory and could not get to sleep, even when I stayed to catch
up my two hours while the others went down to church for the Night
Office. Finally they sang Matins and Lauds of the Dead, for Father
Alberic, and I could hear the garbled music coming into the
dormitory through the back of the organ pipes–that great,
big, dusty closet full of muffled chords! The poignancy of that
music was very affecting. It seemed to sum up all the sufferings of
the long life that was now over. Poor little gray Father Alberic,
writing the history of the Order on scraps of paper up in the
infirmary! All the relief, all the mystery, all the unexpected joy
of his meeting with God could be guessed at in those strange
harmonies. And so, this morning, the sound of this harmonium in the
novitiate (it has begun to play again) chimes in with the last days
of a two weeks' battle, and I feel a wistful and chastened sobriety
filling my heart, as if I were one of the eight human survivors of
the deluge, watching the world come back to view from the summit of
Mount Ararat!
In the tempest, I
have discovered once again, but this time with a peculiarly
piercing sharpness, that I cannot possess created things, 1 cannot
touch them, I cannot get into them. They are not my end, I cannot
find any rest in them. We who are supposed to be Christians know
that well enough, abstractly. Or rather, we say we believe it.
Actually we have to discover it over and over again. We have to
experience this truth, with deeper and deeper intensity, as we go
on in life. We renounce the pursuit of creatures as ends on certain
sacramental occasions. And we return, bit by bit, to our
familiarity with them, living as if we had in this world a lasting
city. . . .But creatures remain untouchable, inviolable. If God
wants you to suffer a little, He allows you to learn just how
inviolable they are. As soon as you try to possess their goodness
for its own sake, all that is sweet in them becomes bitter to you,
all that is beautiful, ugly. Everything you love sickens you. And
at the same time your need to love something, somebody, increases a
hundred times over. And God, Who is the only one who can be loved
for His own sake alone, remains invisible and unimaginable and
untouchable, beyond everything else that exists.
You flowers and
trees, you hills and streams, you fields, flocks and wild birds,
you books, you poems, and you people, I am unutterably alone in the
midst of you. The irrational hunger that sometimes gets into the
depths of my will, tries to swing my deepest self away from God and
direct it to your love. I try to touch you with the deep fire that
is in the center of my heart, but I cannot touch you without
defiling both you and myself, and I am abashed, solitary and
helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to
me.
But this sadness
generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of
created things, for they are pure and perfect and they belong to
God and they are mirrors of His beauty. He is mirrored in all
things like sunlight in clean water: but if I try to drink the
light that is in the water I only shatter the
reflection.
And so I live alone
and chaste in the midst of the holy beauty of all created things,
knowing that nothing I can see or hear or touch will ever belong to
me, ashamed of my absurd need to give myself away to any one of
them or to all of them. The silly, hopeless passion to give myself
away to any beauty eats out my heart. It is an unworthy desire, but
I cannot avoid it. It is in the hearts of us all, and we have to
bear with it, suffer its demands with patience, until we die and go
to heaven where all things will belong to us in their highest
causes.
