Читать книгу There are Victories - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 10

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The soul, Montaigne remarked, discharges her love and hate upon substitute objects when the true and natural ones are wanting. The exhausted female spider approaching her moment of death continues to spin the protective web-covering after the eggs have been destroyed and substituted by the cunning naturalist. So Ruth found in the Church a receptacle for the love which normally should have flown to her mother. The still, brooding quality which marks the virginal opening of the flower (slowly, imperceptibly) needed the emotional solace of a mother, needed the assuasive comfort of warm breasts. But this was lacking and she turned to the Church ritual for comfort; to ritual the power of which lies not so much in the uttered words but in the very act itself: the catharsis of confession, the via dolorosa, the rosary, holy communion. She loved the Church: the medieval twilight of the high-arching nave of the cathedral, weighted with mystery; the deep gloom stabbed here and there by flickering points of candle light, the deep resonant tones of the organ during High Mass; the magic words of the priest as he bowed and struck his breast three times—“Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.”

Her body quivered with awe and emotional tension as the surpliced priest knelt, adored the Sacred Host and then rising, elevated it as the three mystic chimes of the altar bell sounded faintly. The world outside the convent, the world of the flesh, the worldly world in which her stepfather and mother moved, seemed remote and unimportant at such moments. And after the priest uttered the three final words in which all the pomp and authority of the Church were contained: “Ite; missa est”—go; the mass is ended—she walked with her comrades into the blinding light of day, out of one world into another. As she moved down the steps on to the flagged walk, her face was suffused with a glowing expression such as Joan of Arc must have had when she valorously faced her stupid accusers.

As the convent sundial circled off Ruth’s years (she read the motto of the dial carelessly, not understanding its prophetic legend), she began to mature into nascent, beautiful womanhood. Now that she was more calm, Sister Constance said that this serenity, too, was an evidence of God’s call to the girl. Hers is the beauty, the sister said, which comes from the soul, the outer evidence of inner grace.

——A saint beautiful in body as well as in soul. And I, by the grace of God and the Lady of Sorrows, shall be the handmaiden to bring her to the throne of the Lord.

The ritual of the Church, her music (she now played the massive Bach preludes and fugues), the affection of the sisters, the air of quiet devotion—these were symbolized in the physical convent: the ivy-covered walls, the time-colored limestone, the gray wall tracery, so that many years afterward when she remembered these peaceful days she said: “Ah, the old convent! What an old and familiar friend!”

But then it was too late.