The Poeisis of the Ordinary Being;a Cosmic Liturgy

3.1. A Loving Cry of God Against God

From her childhood this was a poet who lived a profound dichotomy. Marie Noël was interiorly divided because of a division of the world which harks back to what she had been told about God. There was Lucidity and Love; ⁹ the only good of Love and the only evil of Pride; ¹⁰ the divine law which said “Eat” and the one which said “Love”; ¹¹ “God in the form of Christ” and “God in the form of Zeus.” ¹² Although she had a personal relationship with Jesus, developed from an early age, ¹³ there was another more distant relationship she had with the one she called God, whom she approached with “great respect, from a great distance,” in line with the religious conventions of her time: “For me, he was very distant, a sort of judge, a severe sacred Being who watched over everything without us being able to see him and who ought greatly to be feared.” ¹⁴

The result of this terrible chasm between God and God was a set of very contrasting relationships with Him whom she loved but from whom she fled while loving. For her, the liturgy was the place of this ambiguity. On the one hand, it was the primary source-place, which she discovered thanks to her grandmother, a place of inhabited habits, which in her childhood was “the entrance into a sublime world” comprised of “Night” of tinkling sounds, of silences which allowed “the inconsolable cry of humanity” to echo. On the other hand, it also could be the place of uninhabited habits: “genuflections, signs of the cross, immobility, silence, a complete pattern of church behavior that we left behind when we went outside, in the same way the altar boys take off their red robes after the service to run and shout in the square.” ¹⁵

The same dichotomy can be detected in her writing sometime later, about a holiday at Villiers-Nonains. ¹⁶ At church, when the liturgy is ruined by the “grimacing cantor, with a face like a monkey” and who was swallowing “the Latin of the Credo the wrong way down” it gives her the urge to burst out laughing. Whereas the room of the house where she was staying provided her with “a bed with white curtains, gathered up as if into a chapel,” with a statue of “the holy Virgin,” with “trembling bouquets of grasses,” so a complete atmosphere which in her own way she consecrated by her desire for God to transfigure the stuff of daily life. In her lamenting that she had never been able “to attract the Holy Virgin” as did the little shepherdess at Lourdes, ¹⁷ despite deliberately staying near to the fountains many times, Marie Noël did probably open Heaven, in her own way—in the way poets have of piercing narrow realities to reveal their full dimensions.

Marie Noël was keenly aware of this mission of unifying the world entrusted into the hands of poets. On the day after meeting with André Blanchet, who was planning to write about her work, she sent him a mimeographed note which said:

Analyze, dissect, tear apart what I have put together, divide what I have united, reduce to their diverse elements what I created in life's élan.

The child about which Marie Noël is talking here is, of course, her poetic work, the fruit of her work of bringing the world to birth, the task which fills the life of every poet. She was so attached to the Catholic liturgy—which she described as a “Gift made to the crowds” ¹⁹ —that she expressed her fear that one day she might see it end and asserted that the only feast that would be left in which people would find pleasure would be “the thunder of loudspeakers, speeches by ministers … And wooden horses!” ²⁰ However, she also had another fear, that of not being able to do this work of being a poet, which was hers, so prone to dilapidation, of being scattered to the many winds of pressing ordinary needs, even those that were the most pious. ²¹ From what she reserved for her great work, I would like to present—to correspond to the four liturgical sanctifications mentioned earlier (time, space, living beings, and inanimate things)—four revelations of the world's desire: time and dwellings; then, living beings and inanimate things.

3.2. Revealing the Sanctity of Time and of Dwellings

In praying the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church celebrates “The Canticle of Praise, unceasingly hymned in heaven and brought into this world of ours by our High Priest Jesus Christ.” ²² This means that the sanctification of the Hours is celebrated in a subtle relationship which unites time and eternity, unites the unfolding of chronological time and the permanence of a single moment that is unique and living, ²³ and unites heaven and the land of exile. This poet's relationship to time and space is one of surprise founded on the vivid experience of emergence. The emergence being always that of an individual, of the world in which this individual appears, and of the mystery which unites them in their origin and their end.

It is without doubt in her early childhood, with her very great audacious receptivity, that Marie Noël discovered this emergence of the inevident moment in the midst of mechanical time:

So the months had passed. They had become years when, one cold winter morning—which of my first winters was it? the second? the third?—Grandmother announced the day which would soon be coming and which would be like none other … I heard “Le jour de Noîle”. Christmas Day. ²⁴

Her grandmother was her “great speaker,” ²⁵ whose words “arrived in front of you and stopped for a moment to teach you what they knew about the good, the beautiful or the useful, in the same way that the clock knows and tells you what time it is.” ²⁶ So now grandmother announced the coming day just as one might present a guest, or as one might hear the day of judgment being proclaimed. This Christmas Day was like a door opening the time here to the time there, like a seed of eternity turning over the soil and making it produce its fruit:

Christmas … Inside, outside, though invisible, joy was in the air. It came to meet you from a land that cannot be seen, which suddenly comes near, surrounds you, opens up in the shadows; and perhaps you can soon enter it by divine surprise; and perhaps there was an Angel waiting behind the door; and perhaps on the black staircase it's possible to meet him; and perhaps this whiteness floating in the garden in the evening was a piece of the Holy Virgin's veil … ²⁷

So it is that everything is transformed by this coming, which is not just the coming of a being, of an angel, or of the Virgin Mary, but the coming of a world which is around this world, surrounding it to transform it, to save it; and to make visible that transformative power which announces the promised fulfillment at this particular moment of time. Marie Noël continues her narrative by observing “the eyes of the so threatening, so hostile dark corridors, were—as recently as yesterday—watching you and were leading you in friendship from one place to the next.” ²⁸

The metaphor of this world being transformed by the in-breaking of the Kingdom is also found in many of her Christmas stories. In one of these, the heroine Rose is transported to the junction of two realities—heaven and earth—and experiences, in the intimacy of the relations which unite her to others, what the Council fathers affirmed in evoking “the fullness of Christ” to which the liturgy builds up those who celebrate it:

deep down, I had a heart so small that I only had room for people from the neighborhood and the parish. I had no idea even of where the others were. But now it has become so big that everyone from every country can enter into it, just like entering the church. The more there are, the more it contains. And there's even space left for those who are missing. ²⁹

The reality of the heavenly eternity to which the feast of Christmas gave Rose unlikely access did not pull her away from her responsibility here below. Quite the opposite, this definitive instant into which she enters for a moment, yet at the same time remaining in some way outside it, sends her out into a world that has become broader, to an enlarged fraternity, extending even to feeling the loss of the missing other.

It is by contact with such a unique and vibrant moment, made habitable either by a happy memory or by a foreboding, that the human person truly comes alive to themself, is born to themself, to this world, to time, to all those dimensions of being human that otherwise would have remained alien. When Marie Noël evokes her own birth, “a winter evening—a Friday in February—not knowing where, into new life,” she adds the detail not only that “Auxerre did not yet exist” but even that “nothing—not even me—was real,” ³⁰ “as if I was not yet quite born enough.” ³¹ Where many people see in someone's birth simply the date on which they enter the race where everyone has a place, until it is time for them to leave it, Marie Noël understands that “being born is a great adventure,” and that this adventure “continues through slow months, long years, in the half-light where, one after another, little doors open to allow the world to come in and waken the sleeping soul and day after day to bring it thing after thing, so as to build up a man or woman on this earth, making them people who know their way around the country roads.” ³²

It is along these country roads that great and small set out on the pathways which lead to Paradise. In her poem whose title is Chemins (Pathways), Marie Noël contrasts great and small. She explains that adults “make their way, looking everywhere for the key to the world,” as they “meander through fields in their deepest soul,” ³³ “carrying the weight of their crimes, night wrapped round their over-tight forehead, and the abyss of the heavens which they have suffered in their wide-open eyes.” ³⁴ Little ones, however, just have to be content to follow “the well-trod pathways of Love” with their “poor everyday feet.” For Marie Noël, awareness of the Incarnation is a sharp spur, piercing even the least appearance of banality:

When hearing these lines of thanksgiving is it possible to be deaf to the thanksgiving which the Son raised up from his incarnate flesh, one day, within history: “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants” (Mt 11:25) [NRSV]?

When Marie Noël admits that her “first place-friend was the cathedral,” she very quickly adds “not the one in the main square, for important funerals and major feasts, but the everyday church where you could go in any time of day by the side door, in front of which there was only the little weekday square, with the sacristy courtyard and the Sisters’ house.” ³⁶ It is quite understandable that Marie Noël did not look for God primarily in the grandeur of a strange or foreign place. The maneuver of extraction that she employs throughout these lines, replacing an important place with an everyday church, is an opportunity to anchor the haughty singularity of this exceptional place in the banal ordinariness of town squares and houses where people live.

Describing her later years, she admits that she is no longer “very devoted” and that apart from “the morning Mass” she does not pray very much. ³⁷ This admission is not so much to distance herself from God but rather to let him draw closer to her: “But God is in my house. In my comings and goings I do not speak to Him, I do not even think about Him. But He is not far away. All it takes is for me to turn my head away from my work, for me to take a moment to seek him out and I glimpse him in some shadow, mixed with my poor walls.” ³⁸ God in her house, God mixed somehow with her walls—God is revealed as her space and she throws out into the void these terrible yet fascinating words: “God, I have nothing more than Him in the world. A dangerous space that knows no limits in which I sometimes get lost.” ³⁹ Fully conscious of the greatness of God, she retains within herself always the need of the “very close warmth of human dwellings” to which angels with folded wings bring back any saint who has climbed too high “an air that is too sharp, too hard” which “sometimes breaks the heart and provokes bleeding.” ⁴⁰

In the story titled “The Christmas Journey,” the elderly Amatre, who has come from Paradise to take Rose to spend Christmas Eve there, says that he is taking her home so she can see her parents. When the old lady is surprised that her childhood home should have been moved so far away, Amatre replies: “Oh! All the good houses that have nothing to be ashamed of go up to Heaven sooner or later,” adding about his apparel, “up there, everyone's clothes become beautiful when they arrive there.” ⁴¹ Everything that has been inhabited by a human person, the house where he or she started their life, the piece of clothing that was in fact the dwelling which was closest to them, their Sunday best, the red kerchief that the child had to wear to school, all is lifted up in the ultimate reality.

This means that the very same Marie Noël who asked herself if eternity was “life with neither time nor space” ⁴² was able to combine in the language of her stories and poems what a strictly conceptual reasoning had split apart for her: denying a simplistic continuity of time and space beyond earthly reality was no longer an end in itself, but a means which lets the poet confer upon time and space that hope which the liturgy sows.

3.3. Revealing the Sanctity of Living Beings through Inanimate Things

As we all know full well, liturgy is not just the sum of its rites, nor is it limited to what the liturgy says and what it does in a very explicit way. The liturgy is innervated by all the instances of growth, by the surges within living beings which prepare it and make it possible. What is more, the most luminous offertories have their roots nowhere else than in the furrow of the black soil where the ear of corn springs up. As for the wood of choir stalls from where holy praise is lifted up, it comes from the same forests of which our cupboards, our houses are made. Doubtless, we need the help of the poet to appreciate fully that this earthly world in which we live is a tremendous network of connivances quivering in all things, graced by being grazed by the Word.

Through her poetry and her prose, Marie Noël never stopped casting light on the stuff of everyday life, the inanimate things that people sometimes think need to be devalued in order to make living beings seem more noble, when in fact they are often the cushioning supports without whose help our soul might be lost. When Marie Noël engages with her body, telling it to defend her from her soul, this is what she says:

do not die, be alive, do not leave me all alone. […] Eat, drink, get fat, be thick so that it will be less acute. Protect me against it as much as you possibly can. Defend me with all of your substance, with all of your weight, with all the earth stuck to your feet. Save me from it! ⁴³

It could be said that this “prayer” is a liturgical prayer, given how much the supplication it makes resonates in perfect tune and in harmony with the bass and painful note of Adam's sin, and with that fundamental note which is “the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all” (Heb 10:10) [NRSV]. The poet, in the seeming paradox of this appeal to lowliness and weight, is doing nothing other than singing the praise of the Word who, according to Maximus the Confessor and John Scotus Eurigena, is “heavy with the fatness of the letter” (meaning the Word as Scripture) but also, as the Word incarnate, with the fatness of “the visible nature,” of the nature of this world and everything in it. ⁴⁴ If liturgy is more than the grace of elevation, then this means that since the first human words which God addressed to human beings, since Christmas, God also lives in gravity. Whatever there is in the liturgy that is ascensional is also saved by the fat materiality which guarantees the universality of the divine work.

When she evokes the festival days of her youth, Marie Noël explains how even the maid was transformed by the event. As well as her beautiful, starched muslin dress and her fluted bonnet she put on white cotton gloves which “changed her usual hands into extraordinary ceremonial objects.” ⁴⁵ The appearance of these ceremonial objects, thanks to being revealed by the white cotton, remind her of the maid's hands and of her awareness as a child that hands are not just lumps of flesh in service to the tasks of this world. Rather, in the troubled waters of these oft-times obscure tasks, they were seeking out the pathway to elsewhere.

Would this obscure quest for light have been really complete if the route which it took was only that of sacred gestures bizarrely purified of any trace of profane history? If the only way they could be expressed was in the language of “sacred hymns, deemed unintelligible”? ⁴⁶ If Marie Noel came to the defense of the grandeur of these hymns, and to that of “the traditional liturgy” most usually against the temptations of a “verbose religion,” ⁴⁷ it is precisely because she knew full well that the truth which is expressed by the liturgy belongs not just to the order of comprehension, of intelligibility. In defending the liturgy against a tendency to wordiness, it is because she knows that “there are lots of words in the Word of God. God does not speak to humanity with the more or less convincing discourse of human beings, but also, when humanity falls silent, by an inner reach of which words know nothing.” ⁴⁸

It is just such one of these words within the Word which is sung by the things which surround us in silence. Things collected, much-loved, chosen, forgotten—the things which give shape to the places of our daily life form an empire which reaches out well beyond the domains of what is useful or tasteful. Whatever the density of things that go to make up that part of the world which is our personal territory, we certainly all have a door, a table, an armoire, and some items of clothing which we find necessary in this world, which anchor us in time and space. Be we prince or pauper, we are familiar with both the nobility of velvet and the roughness of sack-cloth, and we know full well that in choosing to go some way toward one rather than the other we are looking for comfort or opting for asceticism. How difficult it is to make a choice of direction for our life without the dirt of the road, without places, without the things which protect or endanger us!

Marie Noel has interpreted this close mutual belonging between beings and things in a song to which she gave the title “Improperia and shroud song.” The liturgical and Christic reference is evident, but the links which these verses reveal are so powerful, so laughable to a rationalistic mind-set, yet so sincerely human in the way they make accessible our deepest weaknesses which are waiting to be cured … or crowned. My companions, o you, my enclosed things In the house of evening, you are mine for life, My faithful ones, you who would have loved me more by far Than my sons and later than my daughters would have served me. O my furniture, squashed around the living me In the love of my eyes from the hearth to the window, See the great day of wrath is coming, My companions when you also will betray me. The day is here when out through the wide-open door These things to whom I was mother and sister will chase me out, And you will consent all together to my being lost And motionless, all of you, you will watch it happen. My door in front of which I poured clean water And washed the morning pathway, o my door, You will leave me out like a piece of rubbish That no step endures, no threshold lets pass. For you, twice a day, o my table, I prepared The renewal of fresh food And the joy of blue borders on honest china … And you will leave me out to rot. For you, to keep you beautiful in your old age I was unstinting with wax, o my proud armoire, And even before I did my own, I wiped your face … And you will leave me out to fall to dust. […] You will surrender me to whoever, man or women, would take me Like someone abandoned to irremediable fate, Like someone convicted at the end of their human journey Being taken out forever for the horrible secret. And who nobody follows in the shadows—except for just one O my only companion in the shadow, my shroud, You alone of all the sheets—which of the twelve? One evening you will come out of the armoire … you alone! You will come to take defeat for your spouse. […] O clothing of my final end, pale sheet, So poor that one would be ready to sacrifice you And you will come quite white, so large, you will come To sponge the shadow where my filthiness will be crying. You will come, forever stretched out over my shame, To wipe my eyes but without ever healing them, And throw over my lost flesh, o lost sheet, The supreme torch of eternal mercy. ⁴⁹

Can we not imagine hearing in these words the voice of Marcel Pagnol's cuckold baker, taking it out on his runaway cat so as to ease the distress of having been rejected; if that animal had not happened to be going past at just that moment, would he have been able to express his pain, would he have been capable of being human, of hanging on nonetheless to love? Without her furniture, without her unmovable things, without that last sheet, unfolded as a shroud, would Marie Noël have been able to speak of the grandeur of hoping for eternal mercy?

Countless men and women are attached to their things, to their houses, to their old armoires, without really knowing why, and yet they are attached to them. Sometimes it can happen that they even feel guilty about it, that they dream of being like angels, those angels who are said to be only spirits but who are pictured wearing the finest gold and silver brocade. These men and women, without being really aware of it, are nevertheless carrying out the lowly, somber and necessary work of giving to these fragments of the world, shaped by human hands, the soul that they would never otherwise have if not for the memories that these people associate with them, if not for the secrets of eternity which these people's affections place in them.

By way of final echo to the Christmas meditations, built from splinters of wood from a humble crib, I would like to refer again to Romano Guardini who reminds us that without this veritable awareness of the Incarnation, the hope of Resurrection—toward which every liturgical action is oriented—cannot be but considerably diminished:

And what are the limits of a man's body? Surely his clothes belong to it since they performed the double function of protection and expression. What of his work tools, the articles he kept about him, his house, his much-loved garden; what of the whole sphere of his life? … In the resurrection, form, substance, life, all will rise. ⁵⁰