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Hannah Green’s sentences go on and on until the beginning of the thought is lost in a maze of words. I trace my fingers under the words, hoping to keep them in their place and create a linear thought. But how can I? This author wants me to journey with her in a spiral leading back, back in time and up, up to the Numinous. I let go and let her words flow over me. I look up and out after reading the first chapter. Yes, my world is still here, but I have been invited to go on pilgrimage this winter’s day. Not a pilgrimage on foot this time, but in my mind.
I remember my pilgrimage place: the statue, the incense, the flowers, the darkness, the candles lit, the hush, the awe. Walsingham, Norfolk, England. Ah. Awe.
“I was filled with a vision of a book about Saint Foy,” said Hannah Green. I sit here with the product of that vision in my hands. Hannah was inspired by the story about how St. Foy lighted all the stories down through the ages with the breath of her life, even as she gave her life to Christ.
This is the story, part of the story, the beginning of the story. In the time of the Emperor Diocletion’s Persecution, a young girl, who has twelve years, refused to sacrifice to the Goddess Diana. Dacien, the Preconsul insisted. On the sixth of October, the year Three hundred and three, at Agen, the young girl sang her “Song of Songs,” with these words:
“It is Him I would take as bridegroom . . . to me He is fair, to me He is altogether lovely.” And she refused to sacrifice. And so she herself was tortured and sacrificed. Stripped. Beaten. Burnt on a grill. And finally beheaded.
In this book, Hannah tells the story of people down through the years. She presents one day with herself and her husband John Wesley, whom she called Jack. Jack gets all the best lines. Hannah reveals and explains and discusses. Jack underlines all she says with a pithy sentence. These are the Hours of St. Foy. The book is divided thus: Morning: Descent into the Treasure; Afternoon: Ascent to the Dolmen of Lunel and Evening: Voyage around Conques.
I never forget, on any page, that Hannah is now dead. Yet she is alive on every page. Vibrant. Radiant. Nor do I forget that she only wrote two books in her life. And I remember that she loved her husband.
“Your husband? He is a good man?” they ask, the women of Conques, as they venture to be intimate with one another. “Yes, yes, he is.” “Moi, aussi,” they respond. And so here we are, book in hands, on the edge of intimacy, with a woman who lives, though she is dead, much like St. Foy. And this is a miracle.
The story of St. Foy is gleaned from Bernard’s book, Liber Miraculorum Sanctae Fides, Book of the Miracles of St. Foy. The story is interlaced with the story of Hannah and the people of Conques as well as the years of history between early 300’s and the late 1900’s. All the weary, wonderful history: Charlemagne. The German occupation. Miracles. The building of the monastery. A Romanesque Church dating to the eleventh century.
History compresses and expands in this book, pointing the way to the Eternal Presence. Our author leaps back and forth over the centuries and into eternal mysteries and we take her lead and leap with her. There is a day, a life, a century, a millennium, almost two.
There are photographs throughout the book - so evocative in black and white. I wish for more. I wish I could live in this little town. Each section of the book begins with a fine sketch of a pilgrim shell, a line drawing by John Wesley. This book is a pilgrimage and we are all pilgrims. This book wears its shell, as do all pilgrims on the way.
The words in this book are distinctive. So many languages - Latin, French, patois, Langue d’Oc, English. And her words, I must stop to look up - faience, mandorla, parvis, palladium, baldachin, intaglios, reredos, tympanum, chalcedony, sistrum, glyptic, dolmatic, chthonic, thaumaturgic, chevet. An education.
In the afternoon Jack and Hannah ride their bikes. They meet Monsieur Denis, “swaying a bit as if he were passing with difficulty through curtains of time.”
“I was standing here dreaming of my youth,” he laughs at himself.
On they ride to the Dolmen, with nearby standing stones and menhirs. On to LePuy, which is on the Pilgrimage Route to Santiago, where once in the third century, the Blessed Lady appeared. Now there is a cathedral of LePuy.
Hannah Green attempts to explain the unexplainable: the holy sites of the earth, the places of power, places where force is concentrated. “Central to my thinking,” she says, “somethig is there, some force that could be felt, energy that had been at LePuy since the beginning of time. These are the haut lieux, high places, cosmotellurique. Saint Jacques, Le Puy, Conques.
“Walsingham,” I add sotto voce.
The third part of the book is the evening in Conques. Jack and Hannah savor a supper of asparagus, and strawberries, and goat cheese. And then they visit the great tympanum over the western door of the church. They love to see it come alive with the shadows of the setting sun on a June evening.
Hannah Green tells of the inhabitants of Conques and how their features reflect the features of the Virgin Mary, of Jesus, of all the figures cut in stone on the tympanum, carved in the twelfth century. “How wonderful,” she says, “to live in a place where the artists of past centuries preserved in their work, the faces we see still engaged in the tasks of everyday life.
Suddenly the people in the book come alive. Rosalie and Charlou, Madame Benoit, Pére André, Jean Ségalat and his beloved Emmanuelle. Jean says, “Ah, Anne, are you putting me in your book?”
“I smiled,” writes Anne, Hannah, “because then, I knew he knew I was writing a novel, a literary work about Conques and its mysterious central presence - Saint Foy.”
I smiled too, for now I knew that all these people were alive for Hannah as they are alive for me. And they knew that she was writing about them. Jean began to tell her things, details, illuminations, aperçus, confidences. Hannah remembers the words of her teacher, Mr. Vladimar Nabokov:
“It is the details, Anna, the divine details that make a work of literature.”
At the end of the book, at the end of the day, Hannah goes home. Jack is painting. She looks with fondess on her writing place and writing implements, on her manuscript. “Always I read, hearing it all, either in my head or really out loud - in the unself-conscious trance of work . . . I listen.”
She writes, “I think of Conques as the ear of Saint Foy and her ear reaches the ear of heaven. The statue of Saint Foy wears earrings shaped like lanterns which have with oval garnets and moon white opals, and minute pearls set in gold.” There is always some new detail, some new understanding in her study of Saint Foy.
Hannah Green ends her book. “Now it is midnight, the hour of matins and the wings of my mind hover over my book. My book has brought so much to me as I work to bring it to life and inform it, absorbing knowledge which is absorbing me and leading me towards Christ the Word.”
She ends where she began, with the dream, her vision, of stars forming a cross in the sky. I close the book and sigh. What a journey. And now it is over. Hannah Green wrote only one other book, The Dead of the House. Maybe I will find that book and set off on another journey.
Little Saint by Hannah Green. Random House. NY. 2000. ISBN: 0-394-56595-9 |
