Père Philippe sat on the floor of the sanctuary, his legs tucked under him, before the monstrance, adoring the Blessed Sacrament. His black robe, the grey heart and cross embroidered near his heart, normally hung slightly short over his lanky arms, but he had rolled the sleeves up, the better to sit in contemplation.
Since he had become a Passionist, particularly since he had become the hermit of the chapel in the Black Mountains, he had found his place. From the time of his childhood, death had been a familiar: it was not just that he was regularly in attendance at the bedsides of those who had died, whose earthly bodies lay in state, usually in the beds they had slept in in the villages they had lived. It was the village custom, so he and other children shared the same experience, although his mother was more pious than most, his father not so much, his brothers and sisters still less.
It was that he was incapable of distracting himself for long from the brutal fact that however one distracted oneself, in the end, whether the casket was ornate or just a pine box, the physical ceased to be. Watching others (which he did naturally, without judgment) he marveled at their ability to plunge into their studies, or games of soccer, or whatever activity seemed most pressing at the time.
He was not without a sense of humor, or incapable of affection. Even as he watched others, he delighted in their natures: some persons were cheerful, others choleric, a few melancholic, still others agitated, or indolent. Few he thought malicious; most deviated from their resolutions, whether to save more, or work harder, or settle down; but that which caused their natures to, at times, betray them into acts they later regretted, was not something in their own natures, but their susceptibility to false promises, whether in advertisements, on the radio or from salesmen of one sort or another.
In the end, most lives would be put right, he firmly believed that. For himself, though, he felt a call that was stronger than that of any advertisement, radio announcer or salesman. He wanted to be closer to the presence of that he had experienced in the quietest moments of his life, whether by the bedside of a man whose agony had ended in a sigh, then stillness; or the radiance of a bride and groom fully committed to each other on the day of their wedding;, or alone, walking in the mountains around the village, or reading the life of St. John of the Cross, the mystic.
His decision to join the Passionists was not taken lightly. The Passionists' mission is to teach the world how to pray. To teach how to pray, one must first know how. Yet prayer can mean many things: supplication, confession, glorification, are only three of the purposes of prayer. The prayer the Passionists teach is that prayer that would lead to union with God, a state beyond which there is no more to know.
Yet to reach that state beyond which there is no more to know is very, very hard. Père Philippe had been a Passionist for eighteen years and he had struggled at first to understand exactly what he was doing and why. Even among his fellows, he was unusually solitary. After ten years in various parishes in cities, he was assigned to this chapel, where he could work alone, an assignment he relished secretly because in an hermitage he could practice his devotions while remaining at the disposal of any villagers who chose to celebrate the Mass with him, rather than in the church in the village.
In this way, he devoted himself to saying Mass (everyday but Mondays), leading the prayers to Mary, the Blessed Mother; adoring the communion wafer and writing about the Holy Spirit. He had had some success with his writing: a religious publisher had printed two of his books, one about the Apocalypse, the other about Babel. His superiors at the seminary and the diocese's office were pleased.: someone so retiring, so ill-suited to running a parish, with its financial demands and intrigues, had managed to draw a following.
Those who prayed the Mass with Père Philippe would often say that they had never encountered a priest like him.
"He has the real faith--"
"When he preaches, he is full of feeling--"
"He speaks from his heart--"
"But his books are difficult to understand--"
He could be said to be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. But his approach, which led to detachment about money concerns, encouraged prayer and simple charity towards others, could be summed up as not so much a way of thinking about the world, as a technique for managing in it.
That technique involved the development of a finely-tuned interior antenna from which God could transmit. Everything that interfered with the frequency at which God worked, only blocked the signal or caused it to come in at a weak frequency. Prayer, such as most were instructed in --the recitation of words of adoration during a weekly liturgy, -- could help, followed by the taking of communion, through which God freely gave of himself. Yet despite providing a base from which the faithful could take strength, there was more to be had, Père Philippe knew.
Not everyone was prepared --or needed-- to know God as Père Philippe knew HIm. When he said the Mass, he frequently did not look directly at his congregants, but upwards, beyond the stained glass of the little chapel in the Black Mountains, to God. The reason being that when he was saying the Mass he felt the most outward signs of God's presence, invisible but immanent, coming through the ancient stones.
During the Revolution of 1789 and the Terror that followed, the authorities tried to sell the chapel to have it demolished. A curé's brother managed to buy it, preserving the building until it was safe again to say the Catholic Mass in France. The chapel had been a dependency of the 8th century Benedictine abbey in the village and was now almost a thousand years old. Of course God was comfortable here, Père Philippe thought, which was why Mass was a daily conversation with the Lord, and not an empty ritual.
Père Philippe looked at his watch: there were five minutes to go before the start of Mass. He had been sitting on the floor of the chapel for almost thirty minutes, along with a handful of his parishioners. He got up from the floor and walked over to the monstrance. Lifting it from the altar, he raised it high over the heads of his parishioners, turning first to their right, then to the center, then their left. He set the monstrance back down on the altar table, opened the cut glass door in which the sacrament was kept and gently removed it, placing it on the paten, on which he carried it to the tabernacle, while his parishioners watched him walk to the side altar. At the altar, he removed a quantity of communion wafers and added them to the one on the paten. He returned to the altar table and left them there.
In one swift movement, he slipped through the side door that led to the sacristy. It was time to put on his celebrant's attire. Mass would begin once he returned in his vestments, the assembled standing in a gesture of respect. As he made the sign of the Cross, God would make himself known again, not as he had in the Blessed Sacrament, but through the person of Jesus Christ, who would then become the Blessed Sacrament, remitting sins and if only briefly, giving those present a glimpse of the possibility they might overcome the finitude of the body via the Spirit.
Père Philippe prayed quickly, before he began the liturgy, only to God, that he might be His worthy servant. Only an empty vessel could take the Spirit in, could send it out to others, Père Phlippe was happiest when he most emptied himself. It happened rarely, but sometimes he felt himself only an instrument. At those times he felt also the most wonderful release from anything that had been troubling him. After so many years as a priest, he had made so little progress. Yet he felt the call again, each time he entered the sanctuary, a new beginning. Then and there, at that moment, a new beginning: it called him on.
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