Atlantic Classics, Second Series

by Unknown

As I begin this letter there flashes into my mind the last sentence which I wrote to you a year ago from Greece—that my little world was crumbling. And since then how your own world has been shattered, and the universe almost set reeling in its course! I remember how I talked on in that letter about areas of experience, blocking you off into twenty-year periods! I thought then that only the years would carry us into new seas. But in twelve months you have been swept from the moorings of your middle life. France is again facing the enemy as she did in your boyhood, but now your sons are risking lives more precious than your own. Your wife and daughters are nursing the wounded and the stricken. You, 'too old to fight,'—and so in a flash set forward into old age,—are nevertheless finding your pen tipped with passion instead of with philosophy. One of your lyrics is being sung in the trenches. You are no longer an intellectualist, but a voice of France. And thousands upon thousands of other men and women are experiencing a similar metamorphosis. Who knows what new philosophies and religions will be born?

I have been wondering whether you would still call Plato an intruder and vagabond in Hellenism. Greek thought changed under the shock to Athenian civilization caused by the Peloponnesian War. By this abstraction do we mean anything else than that Plato and other men had brought home to them the transitoriness of prosperity, the helplessness of morals, learning, and art before a recrudescence of primitive violence, and the limitations of humanism? The material stage in those days was small,—little states wage a little war,—but in view of her spiritual importance the suffering of Athens was a world-experience of the first magnitude. Possibly Plato seems to you now less a vagrant than a pilot.

For certainly our 'new religion,' if we bring one to birth, cannot be composed of truths wholly unknown before. Some of our new creative energy will go into stripping the veil from the face of that Reality which men at one time and another have beheld. I find it easy to believe this because through an intensive personal experience of my own I have been brought to perceive a truth which is two thousand years old. Last year I argued about Christianity, choosing this part, discarding that. This year I have knelt and touched the hem of the seamless robe. The experience would be too intimate and sacred to reveal were it not bound up with your own. Let me tell you about it. It is the only way in which I can talk with you about your sons who are facing death and suffering.

I wrote you that I was called home from Athens by my mother's illness. She died last month. During the intervening months revelation after revelation came to me. My mother had grown worse rapidly and at first I was shocked to my innermost heart by the change in her. All her strength seemed turned to weakness. Her rich and varied life had shrunk to the hushed quiet of a sick-room. Her tranquil face had become haggard. Her eager intellect had slipped away from her. There was nothing left of the beautiful Hellenism of her life. A Periclean Greek would now have seen in her only an illustration of the shadow lurking within the sunshine, the tragedy of bodily weakness and old age and death.

And since she no longer had riches to offer, what had become of her Christianity? The question could not frame itself, for I was caught and lifted out of my despair by the swift impression that about my frail mother there glowed a radiance which outshone the sunlight of her active years. The dayspring from on high had but put to flight the lesser stars. Every one who could see her was conscious of it. One of her nurses said to me, 'She is so different from the weak people I've seen before. I feel so warm, somehow, when I'm with her.'

A further revelation was that my mother was done with life and with us. She was exquisite in her treatment of us, managing in receiving still to be the giver. One day she said to me, unforgettably, 'You are making pain and sickness very beautiful.' But that inward eagerness of hers which had led me to believe that she had the Greek feeling for this world was now turned toward a new and vaster world. She had exhausted the experiences of this life—marriage and children, work and achievement, knowledge and beauty, joy and sorrow. In seeing this I saw too how far short they fall of the potentialities of an immortal soul. With her energy and imagination she had drained every drop out of them, but now she tossed them aside for some new wine.

The only time she ever spoke to me of the death which I was sure she knew was drawing close, she did it lightly, with that humor which was a part of her sanity. The doctors had just left her room after consulting about some new form of her sickness, and she turned to me with a smile and said, 'Don't repair me too often! I shall never get free if I don't get worse.' But she told a friend of her own age that nobody could imagine how eager she was to be gone. 'I can hardly wait,' she said, 'to find out about it all. The only thing that troubles me is that the others will be sorry.' I am not sorry. Since she wanted eternity without my grief, she shall have it.

In the last few months Nature did us one of her not uncommon services. Much of my mother's physical strength came back to her, as if at the end the body was determined to be a fit mate for the soul it had so long accompanied. She could move about once more in her little polis. During my last visit at home I was enchanted by a sweet and bubbling gayety which seemed to flow from some hidden spring of contentment. A week later she died swiftly, before I could reach her. All our friends talked to me of the light in her face during that week, and an old bedridden Irish servant, telling me of a visit from her, exclaimed, 'I kept thinking that she was just like a bride, dressed so beautifully and looking so happy.' The Christian figure of the soul and God! The old Celtic eyes had seen the truth. Of such substance was my mother's faith in a future life. It was, indeed, the evidence of things unseen! I perceived the fresh heart of Christianity in a belief so aged that it had built the pyramids centuries before it set up the temples at Eleusis. Never again shall I be found chattering while the great trumpet blasts for immortality echo down the ages.

But before my mother's death another veil had been lifted for me. Behind it I found the meaning of the cross. The experience will hardly bear words. It was very simple, the issue of intimate daily living, but it transformed one human mind as Bible and church, history and art had never done. On the day it happened to me I was open to no impressions from without. The weather was severe in our northern town whose normal beauty is not un-Greek in its austerity and lucidity. A stormy east wind drove dark clouds across the sky, and our firs and pine trees loomed black and forbidding. I turned from the window to the soft loveliness of my mother's room. There my heart and mind were closed to all abstract thought and large emotions, for the nurse was away and I was absorbed in the details of thermometer and medicines. My whole being was centred in the hope that I might make my mother comfortable during those hours. With inexpressible tenderness I began to bathe her, doing for her in her frailty at the end of life what she had so often done for me in mine at the beginning. Then it was that my eyes were opened. You know what a Greek would have seen in a body worn with age, emaciated by sickness, bearing many marks of suffering. But I beheld in it the central beauty of the world. If the noblest of the marble Aphrodites had stood in the room I should have recoiled from her in horror. I knew that my mother's sickness was due to her prodigal waste, for us, of her natural strength. Her flesh had been spent for us—for me. In a sudden supreme moment I was at one with the disciples, passionately loving the friend who had given his body to be broken for them; at one with the mad Christian iconoclasts, shattering heathen statues; at one with the mediæval artists, painting and carving the crucified Christ.

Later I came to see that only in that hour had I grasped the significance of my mother's life. At first I had thought of her suffering as subordinate to her love, an incident among her sacrifices. Now I know it to be a sacramental reality, preëxistent in all her earlier beneficence and at the end the earnest of her immortality.