And so, once again, I was back in the world. The New Haven train sped through all those industrial towns, with occasional flashes of blue water and pale sand and greyish grass all along the line at the left. I read a story in the New Yorker about a boy who, instead of becoming a priest, got married, or at least fell in love or something. And the emptiness and futility and nothingness of the world once more invaded me from every side. But now it could not disturb me or make me unhappy.
It was sufficient to know that even if I might be in it, that did not compel me to have any part of it, or to belong to it, or even to be seriously begrimed with its sorry, unavoidable contact.
III
BACK AT ST. BONAVENTURE’S THEY GAVE ME A ROOM ON THE north side of the building, where you could see the sun shining on the green hillside which was a golf-course. And all day long you could hear the trains in the Olean freight-yards crying out and calling to one another and ringing their bells: the sound of journeys, sound of exile. I found that, almost without realizing it, I had little by little reorganized the pattern of my life on a stricter plan, getting up earlier in the morning, saying the Little Hours about dawn, or before it when the days got shorter, as a preparation for Mass and Communion. Now, too, I took three quarters of an hour in the morning for mental prayer. I was doing a lot of spiritual reading—Lives of Saints—-Joan of Arc, St. John Bosco, St. Benedict. I was going through St. John of the Cross’ Ascent of Mount Carmel and the first parts of the Dark Night for the second time in fact, but for the first time with understanding.
The big present that was given to me, that October, in the order of grace, was the discovery that the Little Flower really was a saint, and not just a mute pious little doll in the imaginations of a lot of sentimental old women. And not only was she a saint, but a great saint, one of the greatest: tremendous! I owe her all kinds of public apologies and reparation for having ignored her greatness for so long: but to do that would take a whole book, and here I have only a few lines to give away.
It is a wonderful experience to discover a new saint. For God is greatly magnified and marvelous in each one of His saints: differently in each individual one. There are no two saints alike: but all of them are like God, like Him in a different and special way. In fact, if Adam had never fallen, the whole human race would have been a series of magnificently different and splendid images of God, each one of all the millions of men showing forth His glories and perfections in an astonishing new way, and each one shining with his own particular sanctity, a sanctity destined for him from all eternity as the most complete and unimaginable supernatural perfection of his human personality.
If, since the fall, this plan will never be realized in millions of souls, and millions will frustrate that glorious destiny of theirs, and hide their personality in an eternal corruption of disfigurement, nevertheless, in re-forming His image in souls distorted and half destroyed by evil and disorder, God makes the works of His wisdom and love all the more strikingly beautiful by reason of the contrast with the surroundings in which He does not disdain to operate.
It was never, could never be, any surprise to me that saints should be found in the misery and sorrow and suffering of Harlem, in the leper-colonies like Father Damian’s Molokai, in the slums of John Bosco’s Turin, on the roads of Umbria in the time of St. Francis, or in the hidden Cistercian abbeys of the twelfth century, or in the Grande Chartreuse, or the Thebaid, Jerome’s cave (with the lion keeping guard over his library) or Simon’s pillar. All this was obvious. These things were strong and mighty reactions in ages and situations that called for spectacular heroism.
But what astonished me altogether was the appearance of a saint in the midst of all the stuffy, overplush, overdecorated, comfortable ugliness and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie. Therese of the Child Jesus was a Carmelite, that is true: but what she took into the convent with her was a nature that had been formed and adapted to the background and mentality of the French middle class of the late nineteenth century, than which nothing could be imagined more complacent and apparently immovable. The one thing that seemed to me more or less impossible was for grace to penetrate the thick, resilient hide of bourgeois smugness and really take hold of the immortal soul beneath that surface, in order to make something out of it. At best, I thought, such people might turn out to be harmless prigs: but great sanctity? Never!
As a matter of fact, such a thought was a sin both against God and my neighbor. It was a blasphemous underestimation of the power of grace, and it was an extremely uncharitable judgement of a whole class of people on sweeping, general, and rather misty grounds: applying a big theoretical idea to every individual that happens to fall within a certain category!
I first got interested in St. Thérèse of Lisieux by reading Ghéon’s sensible book about her—a fortunate beginning. If I had chanced on some of the other Little Flower literature that is floating around, the faint spark of potential devotion in my soul would have been quenched at once.
However, no sooner had I got a faint glimpse of the real character and the real spirituality of St. Therese, than I was immediately and strongly attracted to her—an attraction that was the work of grace, since, as I say, it took me, in one jump, clean through a thousand psychological obstacles and repugnances.
And here is what strikes me as the most phenomenal thing about her. She became a saint, not by running away from the middle class, not by abjuring and despising and cursing the middle class, or the environment in which she had grown up: on the contrary, she clung to it in so far as one could cling to such a thing and be a good Carmelite. She kept everything that was bourgeois about her and was still not incompatible with her vocation: her nostalgic affection for a funny villa called “Les Buissonnets,” her taste for utterly oversweet art, and for little candy angels and pastel saints playing with lambs so soft and fuzzy that they literally give people like me the creeps. She wrote a lot of poems which, no matter how admirable their sentiments, were certainly based on the most mediocre of popular models.
To her, it would have been incomprehensible that anyone should think these things were ugly or strange, and it never even occurred to her that she might be expected to give them up, or hate them, or curse them, or bury them under a pile of anathemas. And she not only became a saint, but the greatest saint there has been in the Church for three hundred years—even greater, in some respects, than the two tremendous reformers of her Order, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila.
The discovery of all this was certainly one of the biggest and most salutary humiliations I have ever had in my life. I do not say that it changed my opinion of the smugness of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie: God forbid! When something is revoltingly ugly, it is ugly, and that is that. I did not find myself calling the externals of that weird culture beautiful. But I did have to admit that as far as sanctity was concerned, all this external ugliness was, per se, completely indifferent. And, what is more, like all the other physical evil in the world, it could very well serve, per accidens, as an occasion or even as the secondary cause of great spiritual good.
The discovery of a new saint is a tremendous experience: and all the more so because it is completely unlike the film-fan’s discovery of a new star. What can such a one do with his new idol? Stare at her picture until it makes him dizzy. That is all. But the saints are not mere inanimate objects of contemplation. They become our friends, and they share our friendship and reciprocate it and give us unmistakeable tokens of their love for us by the graces that we receive through them. And so, now that I had this great new friend in heaven, it was inevitable that the friendship should begin to have its influence on my life.
The first thing that Therese of Lisieux could do for me was to take charge of my brother, whom I put into her care all the more readily because now, with characteristic suddenness, he had crossed the border into Canada, and sent us word by mail that he was in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Not that this was a very great surprise to anybody. As the t
ime came closer for him to be drafted it began to be clear that he didn’t care where he went so long as it was not into the infantry. Finally, just when he was about to be called, he had gone to Canada and volunteered as an airman. Since Canada was already long since actually at war, and since her fliers went relatively quickly into action, where they were badly needed, in England, it was at once evident that John Paul’s chances of surviving a long war were very small. I suppose he was the only one who ignored this. As far as I could gather, he went into the air force as if flying a bomber were nothing more dangerous than driving a car.
So now he was in camp, somewhere near Toronto. He wrote to me of some vague hope that, since he was a photographer, they might send him out as an observer, to take pictures of bombed cities and to make maps and so on. But meanwhile he was doing sentry duty, on the ground, along the length of a great wire fence. And I set the Little Flower as a sentry to look out for him. She did the job well.
But the things that happened in my own life, before two more months had passed, also bore the mark of her interference.
In October I was writing long letters, full of questions, to the Baroness, who was still in Canada—and getting letters just as long in return, full of her own vivid and energetic wisdom. It was good for me to get those letters. They were full of strong and definite encouragement. “Go on. You are on the right path. Keep on writing. Love God, pray to Him more.... You have arisen and started on the journey that seeks Him. You have begun to travel that road that will lead you to sell all and buy the pearl of great price.”
To sell all! The thing had not bothered me so much, in September, and I had left it aside, to wait and see what would develop. It was beginning to develop now.
For now, in these days, I was often alone in the chapel, under those plain beams, watching the quiet Tabernacle, and things began to speak inside me. This time, it was a much deeper impulsion, the expression of a much profounder need. It was not a movement of love stretching out to grasp some external, tangible good, and to possess it: not a movement of appetite—intellectual if you like, but still of appetite towards some good that could be seen and felt and enjoyed: a form of life, a religious existence, a habit, a Rule. It was not a desire to see myself vested in this or that kind of a robe or cloak or scapular, and praying this way or that way, or studying here, or preaching there, or living in this or that kind of a monastery. It was something quite different.
I no longer needed to get something, I needed to give something. But here I was, day after day, feeling more and more like the young man with great possessions, who came to Christ, asking for eternal life, saying he had kept the Commandments, asking, “What is yet wanting to me?” Had Christ said to me: “Go, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and come, follow me”?
As the days shortened and grew darker, and the clouds were getting iron grey with the threat of the first snows, it seemed to me that this was what He was asking of me.
Not that I was a man of great possessions. Everybody on the staff at St. Bonaventure’s was called a professor. That was in order that the title might compensate us all, more or less, for what we did not get in pay. The salary I got was quite sufficient to enable me to practice evangelical poverty.
The thought that first came into my mind was this. I still had some money that my grandfather had left me in a bank in New York. Perhaps what should be done was to give that away, to the poor.
That was as far as I had advanced, when I decided to make a novena, asking for grace to know what to do next.
On the third day of the novena, Father Hubert, one of the Friars, said: “The Baroness is coming. We are going to drive up to Buffalo and meet her train from Canada, and bring her down here. Do you want to come along?” Early in the afternoon we got in the car, and started north, up one of those long parallel valleys that slant down towards the Alleghany.
When the Baroness got off the train, it was the first time I had seen her with a hat on. But the thing that most impressed me was the effect she had on these priests. We had been sitting around in the station, bored, complaining of this and that situation in the world. Now they were wide awake and cheerful and listening very attentively to everything she had to say. We were in a restaurant having something to eat, and the Baroness was talking about priests, and about the spiritual life and gratitude, and the ten lepers in the Gospel, of whom only one returned to give thanks to Christ for having cured them. She had made what seemed to me to be certainly a good point. But I suddenly noticed that it had struck the two Friars like a bombshell.
Then I realized what was going on. She was preaching to them. Her visit to St. Bonaventure’s was to be, for them and the Seminarians and the rest who heard her, a kind of a mission, or a retreat. I had not grasped, before, how much this was part of her work: priests and religious had become, indirectly, almost as important a mission field for her as Harlem. It is a tremendous thing, the economy of the Holy Ghost! When the Spirit of God finds a soul in which He can work, He uses that soul for any number of purposes: opens out before its eyes a hundred new directions, multiplying its works and its opportunities for the apostolate almost beyond belief and certainly far beyond the ordinary strength of a human being.
Here was this woman who had started out to conduct a more or less obscure work helping the poor in Harlem, now placed in such a position that the work which had barely been begun was drawing to her souls from every part of the country, and giving her a sort of unofficial apostolate among the priesthood, the clergy, and the religious Orders.
What was it that she had to offer them, that they did not already possess? One thing: she was full of the love of God; and prayer and sacrifice and total, uncompromising poverty had filled her soul with something which, it seemed, these two men had often looked for in vain in the dry and conventional and merely learned retreats that fell to their lot. And I could see that they were drawn to her by the tremendous spiritual vitality of the grace that was in her, a vitality which brought with it a genuine and lasting inspiration, because it put their souls in contact with God as a living reality. And that reality, that contact, is something which we all need: and one of the ways in which it has been decreed that we should arrive at it, is by hearing one another talk about God. Fides ex auditu. And it is no novelty for God to raise up saints who are not priests to preach to those who are priests—witness the Baroness’s namesake, Catherine of Siena.
But she had something to say to me, too.
My turn came when we were in the car, driving south along the shining wet highway.
The Baroness was sitting in the front seat, talking to everybody. But presently she turned to me and said:
“Well, Tom, when are you coming to Harlem for good?”
The simplicity of the question surprised me. Nevertheless, sudden as it was, the idea struck me that this was my answer. This was probably what I had been praying to find out.
However, it was sudden enough to catch me off my guard, and I did not quite know what to say. I began to talk about writing. I said that my coming to Harlem depended on how much writing I would be able to do when I got there.
Both the priests immediately joined in and told me to stop making conditions and opening a lot of loopholes.
“You let her decide about all that,” said Father Hubert.
So it began to look as if I were going to Harlem, at least for a while.
The Baroness said: “Tom, are you thinking of becoming a priest? People who ask all the questions you asked me in those letters usually want to become priests....”
Her words turned the knife in that old wound. But I said: “Oh, no, I have no vocation to the priesthood.”
When the conversation shifted to something else, I more or less dropped out of it to think over what had been said, and it soon became clear that it was the most plausible thing for me to do. I had no special sense that this was my vocation, but on the other hand I could no longer doubt that St. Bonaventure’s had outlived its usefulness in my spirit
ual life. I did not belong there any more. It was too tame, too safe, too sheltered. It demanded nothing of me. It had no particular cross. It left me to myself, belonging to myself, in full possession of my own will, in full command of all that God had given me that I might give it back to Him. As long as I remained there, I still had given up nothing, or very little, no matter how poor I happened to be.
At least I could go to Harlem, and join these people in their tenement, and live on what God gave us to eat from day to day, and share my life with the sick and the starving and the dying and those who had never had anything and never would have anything, the outcasts of the earth, a race despised. If that was where I belonged, God would let me know soon enough and definitely enough.
When we got to St. Bonaventure’s, I saw the head of the English Department standing in the dim light under the arched door to the monastery, and I said to the Baroness:
“There’s my boss. I’ll have to go and tell him to hire somebody else for next term if I’m leaving for Harlem.”
And the next day we made it definite. In January, after the semester was finished, I would come down to live at Friendship House. The Baroness said I would have plenty of time to write in the mornings.
I went to Father Thomas, the President, in his room in the Library, and told him I was going to leave.