In the winter of 1926 Father went to Murat. Murat is in the Cantal, the old Province of Auvergne, a Catholic province. It is in the mountains of central France, green mountains, old volcanoes. The valleys are full of rich pastures and the mountains are heavy with fir trees or raise their green domes into the sky, bare of woods, covered with grass. The people of this land are Celts, mostly. The Auvergnats have been more or less laughed at, in French tradition, for their simplicity and rusticity. They are very stolid people, but very good people.
At Murat, Father boarded with a family who had a little house, a sort of a small farm on the slope of one of the steep hills outside the town, and I went up there to spend the Christmas holidays, that year.
Murat was a wonderful place. It was deep in snow, and the houses with their snow-covered roofs relieved the grey and blue and slate-dark patter of the buildings crowded together on the sides of these hills. The town huddled at the foot of a rock crowned by a colossal statue of the Immaculate Conception, which seemed to me, at the time, to be too big, and to bespeak too much religious enthusiasm. By now I realize that it did not indicate any religious excess at all. These people wanted to say in a very obvious way that they loved Our Lady, who should indeed be loved and revered, as a Queen of great power and a Lady of immense goodness and mercy, mighty in her intercession for us before the throne of God, tremendous in the glory of her sanctity and her fullness of grace as Mother of God. For she loves the children of God, who are born into the world with the image of God in their souls, and her powerful love is forgotten, and it is not understood, in the blindness and foolishness of the world.
However, I did not bring up the subject of Murat in in order to talk about the statue, but about M. and Mme. Privat. They were the people with whom we boarded, and long before we got to Murat, when the train was climbing up the snowy valley, from Aurillac, on the other side of the Puy du Cantal, Father was telling me. "Wait until you see the Privats."
In a way, they were to be among the most remarkable people I ever knew.
Any person who knows me knows that Christmas is my jam. Therefore, I love Merton's description of Murat in deep snow during the yuletide season. And the huge statue of the Virgin Mary towering over the entire town. It speaks to my Catholic childhood, where the walls were adorned with pictures of the Sacred Heart and a statue of the Blessed Mother looked down on family dinners from her perch on top of the china cabinet.
In this time of pandemic, I find my mind retreating to these simpler times, when life wasn't a daily struggle. Even before Covid-19 entered the global consciousness, my life had become difficult in many ways. Now, facing a kind of plague of Biblical proportions, I feel like everything that I thought was important and consequential is being stripped away. Each day brings one less thing, one less comfort.
This morning, when I got to the hospital to report to work, I had to stand in line. At the front of the line, I had to answer a series of questions ("Have you been experiencing fever or respiratory symptoms in the past week?" and "Have you traveled outside the Upper Peninsula in the past two weeks?" and "Have you been in contact with anyone who has been outside of the Upper Peninsula in the past two weeks?") And then entered another line to have my temperature taken. Only after passing this screening was I able to get my badge scanned and enter the building.
It was surreal, as if I was living in some kind of police state. Now, I know that all this is being done in the interest of public safety, but that knowledge doesn't make this newest change any easier. And a new (or old) language has entered the public domain, one that Orwell identified in 1948: doublespeak. Messages layered in double-negatives. Announcements made and then minutes later retracted, rescinded, revised, or revoked. This is the new normal.
That is why I allow myself to indulge in nostalgia these days. Yes, the old days were not all sunshine and rainbows. There was still poverty and racial injustice and homophobia and xenophobia and war and pestilences. There hasn't been a time since Adam and Eve walked out of the Garden (metaphorically or literally, depending on your belief system) that human history hasn't been rife with these plagues, physical and existential.
For tonight, however, I hold onto memories, like Christmases of the past. My daughter's first Christmas. She was twenty days old. Fit into my elbow and slept there like a beautiful gift. I hold moments like that close to me right now. Dip into it like fresh water from a cold well.
Saint Marty wishes you all beauty and rest.
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