Lamy of Santa Fe Read Free Page B

village patroness, Our Lady of Good Tidings—Notre-Dame de Bonne Nouvelle. On her altar in her side-chapel she stood in diadem and free-flowing carved robes, holding her naked child, who wore a little crown as He gazed upward into her broad-cheeked face in which lingered a composed merriment. She looked like a farm woman of Auvergne. Her healthy face glowed with simplicity above the gold leaf of her amply folded and tucked garments. Her eyes were dark, her high cheekbones were marked by smile shadows, and her closed lips seemed to indicate that she knew what she knew, and that what she knew was good. She was about ten inches tall. Jean Baptiste became her familiar at the age of five, when he began to pay her long and frequent visits in a “grande devotion” which was later recalled when his childhood was mentioned. Their silent dialogue established a meaning—a view of life—never to change for him.
    A certain pathos dwells in the localism of childhood—who could know what horizons awaited far away, not for all, surely, but perhaps for one or two? But the children of Lempdes, innocent of futures, must always have seemed much the same at any period, and thus Lamy, where they played—limpid small boys with shining caps of hair and dark clove-like eyes and ruddy cheeks, in the dusty walled streets, where tiny kittens blinked and dozed, and hens wandered loose with gravel in their voices, and dogs lay in the center of the lanes in perfect confidence of rest undisturbed. No life was precisely like every other; but in the village, as in that part of the great world to which it was attached, all human matters drew order from a common source so strong that its flow of influence could not be separated from any act.
    For the people prayed not only to God, in that equation which had no true form but inner conviction, but also to history. From the dawn of the Middle Ages until the century of Lamy’s birth, the Church had grown to be the teacher of all things—the proprieties of custom, the styles of philosophy, the seemliness to be searched for in the relation between body and soul, earth and the unseen. Man’s single life, and the life of the state, the life even of the Church’s own servants, could show every range of human capability, from good to evil, throughout the centuries; yet the mystery of the need for truth and communion beyond the self persisted in an unbroken line of faith whose very monuments seemed as eternal as what they represented,in all their variety, from the Islamic striped arches in Notre-Dame de Port, dating from 1099, to the groined elements meeting like hands in prayer high above the floor of the cathedral of Clermont. The church building made of this world’s materials by men’s hands was the gateway of prayer which led beyond death. To enter those dark caverns of worked stone and lofting shadow, those aisles where light shifted high in the air under the passage of the day, those obscure corners by pillar or arch, and to face the altar where the body of God could be addressed privately in the tabernacle where it lived, was to draw a secret line from the cares and hopes of a short life to eternal mercy.
    Every age marked by a distinct historical style is an age of faith. The object of faith may change, but the impulse to define and live life in terms of a system of belief is constant. Great acts have been done in the name of many different beliefs. To understand any such act and the individual who gave it interest for us, it is necessary to take as a given element, regardless of our own relation to what we see as reality, the absolute and sometimes glorious significance of the faith which moved him.
    The Catholic form of this view in Lamy’s time lay at the foundation of the state, the town, the family, and the person. It was as naturally expressed by believers as life through the act of breathing. Believed in, its formalisms were not burdens but aids to a