Читать книгу There are Victories - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 8

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Between Ruth and the realities of life (the mysteries of childhood), stood the mystic ritual of the Church. It was soothing, like the warm ample breasts of a mother. In its bosom one forgot; forgot darkened hallways and corridors, the whispering profundities of adults, the dark, forbidding sins which haunt the minds of Catholic children, the eyes of shabbily dressed men who looked strangely at the girls as they sometimes paraded through the Montreal streets, the vague matters of which the older girls spoke in undertones (marriage, love, birth, death). To Ruth the Church was sanctuary; sanctuary from life and the need of facing it. A dimly lit sanctuary with thin, curling wisps of incense in which music swelled and ascended to the arched ceiling of the nave.

Once when Ruth had lied to Sister Espérance, the thought of her sin tormented her all week. But on Sunday a feeling of peace and forgiveness came over her as the priest intoned: “Sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop and I shall be cleansed: wash me and I shall become whiter than snow.”

And at night in bed the rich phrases echoed in her ears:

——I am sinful but the Lord will sprinkle me with hyssop, sprinkle me, sprinkle me, and I shall become whiter, whiter than snow.

The words soothed and reassured. One prostrated oneself before the Lord and he sprinkled the body with hyssop and one was cleansed.

——He wouldn’t sprinkle the clothes with hyssop. You were naked and hyssop was sprinkled on the naked body. And I shall become whiter than snow.

It was a long time afterward that she learned with keen disappointment that hyssop was a sort of caper.

“Like those used in the sauce that went with boiled mutton,” she thought.