Report to Grego (57 page)

Jorgensen turned and pointed with fervent joy to holy Assisi with its ancient walls, moldering acropolis—the Rocca Grande—and huge three-leveled fortress-like church of Saint Francis.

“Shall we return and see it?” he asked.

We took the road leading back to Assisi. Lean, fiery-eyed peasants
kept passing us, preceded by pairs of oxen, the celebrated all-white oxen of Umbria, plodding with heavy gait beneath the yoke, their twisted horns garlanded with ripe ears of grain. A young peasant girl with raven-black hair and a silver voice greeted us cheerily.

“Pax et bonum!”
Jorgensen responded, returning her “Good morning” in the Franciscan manner.

He pointed to the great basilica at Assisi's foot. Inside it, Francis's tiny little chapel, the Porziuncola, was to be found. “There in the Porziuncola,” he said, “I fell on my knees for the first time, involuntarily, as I gazed at the Saint with the five wounds in his body. But I felt ashamed, and got up angrily and left. What made me kneel, what happened to me, I kept asking myself in a rage. But at the same time, an inexplicable sense of peace invaded my deepest being. Why, why, I asked myself again, why should I feel such relief? And truly, this happiness exceeded anything I had tasted in my life up to that point. But despite this, something inside me did not want to believe. It scorned everything supernatural and placed its confidence in only one thing: the human intellect, in whatever the intellect said. This was what stood at the doorway to my heart and prevented the miracle from entering.”

“Well—and then?” I asked impatiently, seeing my companion fall silent once more. “How did deliverance come to you?”

“Calmly and without noise, as it most always does. Just as a fruit ripens and grows sweetly succulent, so my heart ripened and became sweetly succulent. Suddenly everything seemed simple and certain to me. The agonies, hesitations, and battles all ceased. I sat at Francis's feet and entered heaven. Francis, Francis himself, is the Brother Gatekeeper who opened the door for me.”

We were finally nearing Assisi. The sun shone on the city's blood-tinted, half-crumbled citadel; Saint Clare's diminutive, silver-voiced bell began to toll merrily, cacklingly, like a highland partridge.

“You must forgive me for talking so much about myself,” said Jorgensen. “Consider it a confession. I am more advanced in years than you and I enjoy confessing to my juniors—because that is the only kind of confession, perhaps, which can be of any benefit.”

In order to hide my emotion, I said laughingly, “Ah, if only Francis were truly the gatekeeper of heaven—what joy! He would
usher in saints and sinners, believers and infidels, even millionaires. Yes, and even the most repulsive of animals: rats, worms, hyenas.”

“That would be anarchy,” said Jorgensen without smiling. “Not only anarchy, but injustice.'

We passed beneath the fortress gate. The Convent of Saint Clare was on our left, the house where I was staying on our right.

“I'll come up with you for a minute to say hello to the old countess,” said my companion. “I remember her when I first came—the most beautiful noblewoman in Assisi. She was widowed at a young age and never remarried. I remember that she used to mount a white horse and inspect her estate—the olive groves and vineyards. If she had lived in Saint Francis's time, she might have become his Saint Clare.”

“I wonder if she shares your religious belief.”

“Don't you see her face?” Jorgensen answered. “It is radiant!”

We mounted the steps. It was chilly in the huge deserted palazzo and a fire was burning in the countess's room. Her servant Ermelinda had begun to set the small low table and bring coffee, milk, and whole-wheat bread to her mistress. Seeing us, she added additional cups. We sat down.

Yes, the aged aristocratic face was truly radiant; the large, velvety, raven-black eyes had remained untouched by time. The door leading to the garden was open; a blossoming rose bush glittered in the sunlight.

“Where did you two go so early in the morning?” inquired the countess. “I'm sure you were talking about Saint Francis.”

“How did you know?” asked Jorgensen, glancing at me with a smile.

The countess laughed. “Because a moment ago when I went out into the garden, I saw you in the distance headed this way, and you were both wrapped in flames!”

H
ow clearly those days in Assisi came back to me, complete in every detail! I had not requested Francis's aid, yet here he was running to show me the way. If only I could find the strength! When I glimpsed him embracing lepers in the distance, I was overwhelmed with nausea and fright; when I saw him going about barefooted to preach, his face radiant with beatitude as people
hooted, drubbed, and stoned him, my heart stood up to resist. Though I was conscious of my abasement, I kept telling myself, Anything but that! Better to perish suddenly in an abrupt martyrdom. . . . To face jeering and derision day in and day out exceeded my endurance.

Direct contact with human beings I had always found irksome. I was eager to help them as much as I could, but from a distance. I did so with great pleasure, I loved them all and sympathized with them all, but from a distance. Whenever I came near, I found it impossible to tolerate them for long, they felt the same about me, and we parted. I have a passionate love for solitude and silence; I can gaze for hours at a fire or the sea without feeling any need for additional companionship. These two have always been my most faithful, most beloved comrades; whenever I fell in love with some woman or idea, it was because in them I found the principal characteristics of fire and the sea.

And furthermore (I told myself in order to justify my incapacity to follow Francis's ascending road), how can a Poor Man of God—another supernal Don Quixote, with equal artless simplicity, equal purity and love—how can such a man possibly reappear on earth in these times of Mammon and Moloch in which we live?

I said this over and over in order to console myself. I did not know that a new Poor Man of God had already made his appearance on earth; the lepers surrounding this one were Negroes. If I had learned about him during those critical, transitional days in Berlin which were urging me out of Buddhist inaction and into revolutionary action, I would have felt even more ashamed of my cowardice. I learned about him much—very much—later, when it was no longer possible, nor perhaps advisable, for me to change my life; when I had already taken an entirely different road in order to carry out my duty.

I was overcome with emotion on that August afternoon when I took the narrow road leading to the minuscule village of Gunsbach in the Alsatian forests. The Saint Francis of our day opened the door personally when I knocked, and offered me his hand. His voice was deep and peaceful; he looked at me, smiling from beneath his thick gray mustache. I had seen old Cretan warriors just like him—full of kindness and indomitable will.

The moment was well favored by destiny. Our hearts opened to each other. We stayed together until nightfall, talking about Christ, Homer, Africa, lepers, and Bach. In the late afternoon we set out for the village's tiny church.

“Let us remain silent,” he said to me along the way, deep emotion having suffused his rough face.

He was going to the organ, to play Bach. He sat down. . . . That moment, I believe, was one of the happiest of my life.

On our way back, seeing a wildflower at the edge of the road, I stopped to pick it.

“Don't!” he said, restraining my hand. “That flower is alive; you must have reverence for life.”

A tiny ant was parading on the lapel of his jacket. He took hold of it with untold tenderness and placed it on the ground, off to one side so that no one would trample it. Though he said nothing, the words “Brother Ant” were on the tip of his tongue, the tender words of his great-grandfather from Assisi.

When night came, we finally parted. I returned to my solitude, but that August day never sank below my mind's horizon. I was no longer alone. With unshakable assurance, this striver measured out his road in firm, youthful paces at my side. Though his road was not mine, I found it a great comfort and severe lesson to see him mounting his ascent with so much conviction and obstinacy. From that day onward I was convinced that Saint Francis's life had not been a fairy tale; I felt certain thereafter that man could still bring miracles down to earth. I had seen the miracle, touched it, spoken with it; we had laughed and kept silence together.

After that day my heart could nevermore distinguish between these two deeply enticing figures so far removed in transitory time, so closely united in eternity, that is to say in God's bosom. They resemble each other like two brothers: Saint Francis of Assisi and Albert Schweitzer.

The same tender, vehement love for nature. The hymn to Brother Sun and to Sisters Moon, Sea, and Fire echoes day and night in their hearts. Both hold the leaf of a tree at their fingertips, and, raising it into the light, see on it the miracle of the entire created universe.

The same tender reverential fellow-feeling for men, snakes, ants—everything that lives and breathes. Both see life as sacred;
both shudder with joy as, bent over the eyes of every living thing, they see the Creator reflected there in His entirety. Gazing at the ant, the snake, the human being, they make the joyous discovery that all things are brothers.

The same compassion and kindness (expressed in action) for everything that suffers. Both chose lepers, the deepest and most horrible abysm of wretchedness and pain; one white lepers, the other the black lepers of Africa. I said compassion and kindness, but I should have said Metta; only this Buddhist word faithfully expresses the sentiment engendered in these two brothers by human suffering. In kindness and compassion there are two: the sufferer and he who compassionates the sufferer. In Metta, on the other hand, there is absolute identification. When I see a leper, I feel that I myself am that leper. The ninth-century Mohammedan mystic Sari-al-Sakadi formulated this consummately: “Perfect love exists between two people only when each addresses the other with the words, ‘O myself!'”

The same divine lunacy—renouncing the joys of life, sacrificing the small pearls in order to obtain the Great Pearl, abandoning the level road which leads to an easy happiness, and taking the savage uphill road which mounts between two chasms to divine lunacy. The lunacy of freely choosing the impossible.

The same guileless humor is seen in both: laughter gushing from the depths of a benevolent heart; joy, the dearly beloved daughter of a soul overflowing with riches; power to see and accept the countenance of everyday reality with tenderness and comprehension. The laughterless Spartans raised an altar to the god of laughter; the utmost austerity continually invoked laughter, for this alone is capable of helping a deep soul to endure life. . . . God endowed these two brothers with gleeful hearts, and because He did so, they journey gleefully to the summit of their endeavor, to God.

The same passionate love for music. What Thomas of Celano said about the one applies perfectly to the other: “An extremely thin partition separated Brother Francis from eternity. That is why he always heard the divine melody—through this delicate partition.” Listening to this melody, both feel a jubilation approaching ecstasy. “If the angels who played the viol in my dreams had drawn their bows over the strings just once more, my soul would
have torn itself away from my body, so unbearable was the beatitude.” Thus spoke the first; the second, I am sure, must feel the same extremity of beatitude when playing Bach.

Both have in their grasp the philosopher's stone which transubstantiates the basest of metals into gold, the gold into spiritual essence. They take disease, hunger, cold, injustice, ugliness—reality at its most horrible—and transubstantiate these into a reality yet more real, where the wind of spirit blows. No, not of spirit; of love. And in their hearts, like the sun over great empires, love never sets.

B
ut I learned all this too late; I did not know it during those crucial days in Berlin. When I viewed the human miracle in his tiny Alsatian hamlet, my fingers were already smudged with ink; I had been carried away by the profane mania to convert life into words, similes, and rhymes, had degenerated (I still don't know how) into a pen-pusher. What befell me was precisely what I most scorned: to satisfy my hunger with paper, like a nanny goat.

These two Poor Men of God were able to help me in only a single respect, the inestimable one of showing me that man is able, and has the duty, to reach the furthest point of the road he has chosen. (Who knows, perhaps at the end of the road all the various strivers will meet.) Thus they became models for me, lofty examples of persistence, patience, and hope. God bless them, for these two heroes of exploit taught me that only by means of hope can we attain what is beyond hope.

Encouraged by them, I made an attempt to conquer my nature; I pursued the path urged upon me by Itka's compassion, indignation, and smarting words. I did this for quite some time, and I do not regret it. When I returned to my natural path, I felt that my heart had become filled with human suffering and that the sole way to save oneself is to save others. Or to struggle to save others—even that is sufficient. I learned as well that the world is real, not a specter, and that man's soul is dressed in flesh—not in wind, as expounded to me by Buddha.

But while I toiled to make my decision, I remember, my brain offered great resistance. It was still wrapped in Buddha's yellow robe. What you intend to do is futile, it kept saying to my heart. The world as you crave it, where no one will suffer from hunger,
cold, or injustice, does not exist and never will exist. But I heard my heart answering from deep within me: Though it does not exist, it shall exist because I want it to. I desire it, want it at every beat of my heart. I believe in a world which does not exist, but by believing in it, I create it. We call “nonexistent” whatever we have not desired with sufficient strength.