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Authors: John Crowley
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proper invocations, interceded on the petitioner's behalf with the remoter divine figures, who then altered the weather or the natural order, sped mailmen on their way, and of course healed the sick and saved the lost or the endangered.
The Oliphant children weren't equipped to argue with claims which Sister Mary Philomel had after all a large authority to make. She told them Jesus had promised: if you asked it would be given to you, period. If you asked for bread, God wouldn't give you a stone.
"But if you ask for a real gun or a hundred pounds of candy you won't get it,” Hildy warned Warren and the others after school. “God won't give you what's not good for you. Just try it."
Which cut out almost everything you might want to apply for, especially since the decision about whether the item was or wasn't good for you wasn't yours to make: it never was. And yet His promises remained; Sister Mary Philomel took as given that they were to be acted on, and when she prayed for His aid with the intercession of His Saints it wasn't in the self-mocking way that Winnie sang out:
Dear St. Anthony
Please find my keys for me
Or I won't get to the grocer-ee.
So they all wore their itchy and unmanageable phylacteries and their tin medals on ten-cent beaded chains (Where did she get this stuff, Pierce later wondered, did she spend her own pin money on it or did it just come naturally out of her concealed and bottomless pockets?), and for a week Pierce worked on believing that a dim ectoplasmic glow somehow generated in the corner of his room was a vision of the Virgin, or maybe the Holy Ghost, come to answer his prayer that Joe Boyd quit trying to pick fights with him; and Hildy learned to ask her Guardian Angel to wake her up in the morning so that she would have time to bathe and dress more carefully than she was accustomed to, and in a way more pleasing to Sister: and it worked. Sam thought that was funny too.
It wasn't unlike the commitments of make-believe: it required the same division into a proposing and an accepting self, the same quick discarding of unrewarding instances, the same communal intensity of effort. It was like wishing, too, the objects more restricted, but requiring the same surrender to desire, the willingness to accept provisionally (for as long anyway as the wish, or the prayer, filled up the heart) the primacy of desire over common reality. Sister Mary Philomel called it Faith.
From the beginning she felt a special responsibility had been placed on her for these smart wild children. Miss Martha had come at nine and left at noon, having handed out assignments she might or might not remember to ask for next day. Sister Mary Philomel left at noon, a dark frigate under sail, walking down the hill toward the hospital and her lunch; and then at two, to the children's horror, she sailed back again, her arms full of papers and projects, to pester her charges for an indeterminate length of the afternoon. She had no real commission for this; she said she was there only to “tidy up” in the schoolroom and prepare for the next day (prepare what?), but the very ambiguity of her afternoon presence within the compound gave her scope Miss Martha would not have dared take. There were plenty of things active children could be set to doing instead of watching Garry Moore on television.
What Sister Mary Philomel couldn't know was that her fuss-budgeting disrupted more than idleness. The Invisible College had business, Pierce had far-ranging researches to complete. He experienced an anxiety almost unendurable to know that the nun was nearby, even if not actively interfering; anxiety that she would put her black-shod foot through the thin fabric he and the others had woven. His faith was not as strong as hers.
* * * *
When he came later on in life to study history, unavoidably learning something of the history of the Church in which he had been raised, Pierce would experience a definite but unnameable thrill when
The Oliphant children weren't equipped to argue with claims which Sister Mary Philomel had after all a large authority to make. She told them Jesus had promised: if you asked it would be given to you, period. If you asked for bread, God wouldn't give you a stone.
"But if you ask for a real gun or a hundred pounds of candy you won't get it,” Hildy warned Warren and the others after school. “God won't give you what's not good for you. Just try it."
Which cut out almost everything you might want to apply for, especially since the decision about whether the item was or wasn't good for you wasn't yours to make: it never was. And yet His promises remained; Sister Mary Philomel took as given that they were to be acted on, and when she prayed for His aid with the intercession of His Saints it wasn't in the self-mocking way that Winnie sang out:
Dear St. Anthony
Please find my keys for me
Or I won't get to the grocer-ee.
So they all wore their itchy and unmanageable phylacteries and their tin medals on ten-cent beaded chains (Where did she get this stuff, Pierce later wondered, did she spend her own pin money on it or did it just come naturally out of her concealed and bottomless pockets?), and for a week Pierce worked on believing that a dim ectoplasmic glow somehow generated in the corner of his room was a vision of the Virgin, or maybe the Holy Ghost, come to answer his prayer that Joe Boyd quit trying to pick fights with him; and Hildy learned to ask her Guardian Angel to wake her up in the morning so that she would have time to bathe and dress more carefully than she was accustomed to, and in a way more pleasing to Sister: and it worked. Sam thought that was funny too.
It wasn't unlike the commitments of make-believe: it required the same division into a proposing and an accepting self, the same quick discarding of unrewarding instances, the same communal intensity of effort. It was like wishing, too, the objects more restricted, but requiring the same surrender to desire, the willingness to accept provisionally (for as long anyway as the wish, or the prayer, filled up the heart) the primacy of desire over common reality. Sister Mary Philomel called it Faith.
From the beginning she felt a special responsibility had been placed on her for these smart wild children. Miss Martha had come at nine and left at noon, having handed out assignments she might or might not remember to ask for next day. Sister Mary Philomel left at noon, a dark frigate under sail, walking down the hill toward the hospital and her lunch; and then at two, to the children's horror, she sailed back again, her arms full of papers and projects, to pester her charges for an indeterminate length of the afternoon. She had no real commission for this; she said she was there only to “tidy up” in the schoolroom and prepare for the next day (prepare what?), but the very ambiguity of her afternoon presence within the compound gave her scope Miss Martha would not have dared take. There were plenty of things active children could be set to doing instead of watching Garry Moore on television.
What Sister Mary Philomel couldn't know was that her fuss-budgeting disrupted more than idleness. The Invisible College had business, Pierce had far-ranging researches to complete. He experienced an anxiety almost unendurable to know that the nun was nearby, even if not actively interfering; anxiety that she would put her black-shod foot through the thin fabric he and the others had woven. His faith was not as strong as hers.
* * * *
When he came later on in life to study history, unavoidably learning something of the history of the Church in which he had been raised, Pierce would experience a definite but unnameable thrill when
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