The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition (60 page)

The only time I spoke to her and got a good look at her, I realized one thing: she possessed the secret of Harlem, she knew the way out of the labyrinth. For her the paradox had ceased to exist, she was no longer in the cauldron, except by the pure accident of physical presence, which counts for nothing since the cauldron is almost entirely of the moral order. And when I saw her and spoke to her, I saw in this tired, serene, and holy face the patience and joy of the martyrs and the clear, unquenchable light of sanctity. She and some other Catholic women were sitting on chairs by the doorsteps of the building, in the relatively cool street, in the early evening: and the group they made, there, in the midst of the turmoil of the lost crowd, astounded the passer-by with the sense of peace, of conquest: that deep, deep, unfathomable, shining peace that is in the eyes of Negro women who are really full of belief!

Seeing the boys and girls in the library, I had got some insight into the problem of Harlem. Here, just across the street, I saw the solution, the only solution: faith, sanctity. It was not far to seek.

If the Baroness, biding her time, letting the children put on plays, giving them some place where they could at least be off the street and out of the way of the trucks, could gather around her souls like these holy women and could form, in her organization, others that were, in the same way, saints, whether white or colored, she would not only have won her way, but she might eventually, by the grace of God, transfigure the face of Harlem. She had before her many measures of meal, but there was at hand already more than a little leaven. We know the way Christ works. No matter how impossible the thing may look, from a human angle, we may wake up one morning and find that the whole is leavened. It may be done with saints!

For my own part, I knew that it was good for me to be there, and so for two or three weeks I came down every night and ate dinner with the little community of them, in the apartment, and recited Compline afterwards—in English—all together, lined up in the narrow room in two choirs. It was the only time they ever did anything that made them look like religious, and there was not much that was really formally choral about it. It was strictly a family affair.

After that, for two or three hours, I devoted myself to the task of what was euphemistically called “looking after the Cubs.” I stayed in the store that was their play-room, and played the piano as much for my own amusement as for anything else, and tried, by some sort of moral influence, to preserve peace and prevent a really serious riot. If a true fight had ever started, I don’t know what would have happened. But most of the time everything was peace. They played ping-pong and monopoly, and for one little kid I drew a picture of the Blessed Virgin.

“Who is that?” he said.

“It is Our Blessed Mother.”

Immediately his expression changed, became clouded over with a wild and strong devotion that was so primitive that it astonished me. He began crooning over and over: “Blessed Mother ... Blessed Mother,” and seized the picture and ran out into the street.

When August ended, and Labor Dav came, the Baroness had to leave and go to Canada and I left to make the second Trappist retreat, which I had been promising myself ever since I returned from Gethsemani in the spring. But I did not have the time or the money to go to Canada. Instead, I had written to the monastery of Our Lady of the Valley, outside Providence, Rhode Island, and had received an answer to come the day after Labor Day.

Driving through Harlem with Seymour, the Saturday before Labor Day, I felt for Friendship House a little of the nostalgia I had felt for Gethsemani. Here I was, once again thrown back into the world, alone in the turmoil and futility of it, and robbed of my close and immediate and visible association with any group of those who had banded themselves together to form a small, secret colony of the Kingdom of Heaven in this earth of exile.

No, it was all too evident: I needed this support, this nearness of those who really loved Christ so much that they seemed to see Him. I needed to be with people whose every action told me something of the country that was my home: just as expatriates in every alien land keep together, if only to remind themselves, by their very faces and clothes and gait and accents and expressions, of the land they come from.

I had planned to spend the week-end before going to the monastery in somewhat the same way that everybody else in the country spends Labor Day week-end: trying to get some rest and recreation, which is certainly a very legitimate thing for them to do, at least in itself But God, in order to remind me of my exile, willed that this plan of mine, which was primarily ordered to please no one but myself, should not be completely successful.

I had gone about it the way I had done things in the old days: I had decided just where I wanted to go, and just what I wanted to do, for my own pleasure and recreation. I would go, I thought, to Greenport, at the end of Long Island. There I would find some quiet place, and spend the days reading and writing and praying and meditating and swimming. After that I would cross the Sound on the New London Ferry, and go from there to Providence and to Our Lady of the Valley. And Lax thought that if he could get away from the
New Yorker
office in time, that Saturday afternoon, he would go to Greenport too. But he did not seem very definite about it.

I called up Seymour. Seymour said: “I will drive you to Greenport.”

Having exacted some assurance that he meant what he said, I went out to Long Beach.

Seymour was at the station, with a lot of his friends and associates, people in Long Beach with whom he had once started a kind of an enterprise for turning the whole town into a Greek City State—the Athens of Pericles. We all started out in the car.

Having gone three blocks, we stopped, and everybody got out. And he said: “We are going to have lunch in this restaurant.”

We took a few spoonfuls of bad food. Then, back into the car.

As I expected, Seymour turned the car around and started off in the direction, not of Greenport, but of his own house.

“I forgot my camera,” he explained. Seymour never had a camera.

So we spent the afternoon in Seymour’s sailboat, in the bay, and we landed on a sand-bar, and Seymour taught me some tricks in ju-jitsu. He had been learning ju-jitsu in a gymnasium on Broadway, considering that he would be able to use it in the war, if he got drafted: a little something to surprise the Japanese.

The next day, we started out for Connecticut. That was when we passed through Harlem. Seymour was going to find his wife, in Greenwich Village, and drive her to New Haven, where she was in a play at a summer theater. He did not find his wife in Greenwich Village, but somewhere in the Seventies where it was decided, after a long, secret argument, that she was not going to Connecticut that afternoon. Meanwhile, I tried to sneak away and take a train from Grand Central to somewhere where I would find the equivalent of the nice quiet room in Greenport.

(At that precise moment, although I did not know anything about it, Lax, having gone to Greenport, was searching for me in all the hotels and boarding houses and in the Catholic church.)

Finally, very late, Seymour and I sat in a traffic-jam on the Boston Post Road, and argued about the war.

He drove me all the way out to Old Lyme, and it got darker and darker, and everything I saw made me miserable. I could nowhere identify anything to suit my Labor-Dav-Week-End dream.

Just before midnight I threw down my suitcase in a dirty little hotel back in New Haven, and finished saving the Office of that day. Seymour had vanished, silent and nervous, into the darkness, with his car, alleging that Helen was even now arriving in New Haven on the train.

As far as I knew, the plan was she would go to the summer theater and pick up some sewing or knitting or something, and then they would both drive back, at once, to New York.

“You see—” said Divine Providence—“you see how things are in the world where you are living. You see how it is with the plans and projects of men.”

On the bright Tuesday morning when I rang the bell at the monastery gate, at Our Lady of the Valley, the sky was full of blue, and walking into that deep silence was like walking into heaven.

Kneeling in the tribune, with the sun pouring through the windows on to a great, curiously bloodless Crucifix, and with the chanting of the monks taking my heart home to God and rocking it in the peace of those majestic thoughts and cadences, I worked my way, or was led, rather, into a retreat that was serious and practical and successful—more than I realized. There were none of the great, overwhelming consolations and lights that had practically swamped me at Gethsemani: and yet when I came out again at the end of the week I was conscious of having acquired nourishment and strength, of having developed secretly in firmness and certitude and depth.

For I had come out of Harlem with what might well have been the problem of another vocation. Was it that? In these eight days, ending with the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady, the matter had made itself more or less clear. If I stayed in the world, I thought, my vocation would be first of all to write, second to teach. Work like that at Friendship House would only come after the other two. Until I got some more definite light, I should stay where I was, at St. Bonaventure’s. Had I been afraid, or perhaps subconsciously hoping, that the question of becoming a Trappist would once again become a burning issue here? It did not. That whole business remained in its neutral, indefinite state: relegated to the area which my mind could not quite perceive, because it was in darkness, and clouded with almost infinite uncertainties. One thing I knew, here at the Valley I was filled with the same unutterable respect for the Cistercian life, but there was no special desire to enter that particular monastery.

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.

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!