Entering into the most important phase of our life in Christ, there's a little episode that introduces this whole section and gives it a very particular slant. So it's Easter. And the nuns in church are singing the twelfth response of the Cistercian night office. Surexit Dominus Dei Pulchra, the text says, the Lord has risen from the tomb. The whole text goes, he who hung on the wood of the cross for us, alleluia, let the heavens rejoice and earth exult before the face of the Lord. Then you repeat, the Lord has risen from the tomb. And then as Alice is looking through her window with her sister, who's also with her at this time, it seems as if the whole church has caught on fire. And the whole place is just surrounded with this blaze of fire.

[01:02]

And so they're ready to call for the fire engines. And even her sister sees this. And then all Alice does is to say, oh, quiet, it's all right, tachi. And that's all that happens. But this is a wonderful, you know, like a little story by Kafka of about three or four lines that says something enormously significant. And what this is saying is that this is a community of the resurrection, that Jesus has come forth from the tomb, and now the whole of the world about him is just blazing with the glory of the resurrection. It's on fire with light and with heat and with warmth. And so, essentially, Alice sees that her community is a community of the Resurrection. Now, I think this is enormously important for us. I think maybe this is one of the reasons Don Damas has chosen a Mount Savior and you have for your patronal feast, the Feast of the Transfiguration, when something of the glory of God, the glory of Christ, just breaks through his sacred humanity.

[02:11]

But what Or Moses and Elias talking about the approaching death of the Lord Jesus. So you have these two things combined. So at any rate, our communities have got to be surrounded by the glory and the fire of the resurrection, which is the Holy Spirit. And we have to be really and truly communities of the resurrection, where this is the deepest experience of the community as a whole. And I think this is one of the things that attracts people to our monastic communities, when they know that Jesus was risen from the dead. because they recognize in some obscure way that he's living his glorified life in our communities. You know, it's a very weird thing. We're not going to be talking much about the resurrection explicitly and the passages which follow, but in the present economy of salvation, resurrection and passion and death go together. And I don't think you can explain how it is, for example, that some of the people who suffer the most, and you really understand that they have deep, deep experience of pain, are also the ones who are the most serene and truly joyful.

[03:23]

and how one doesn't exclude the other, and it's not exactly all the time as if suffering will lead eventually to great joy. The two just seem to coexist. Now, that's not true for all of us. We can't generalize. Each of us has his special vocation. And one of the things, you know, that impresses me so much in 17th century French spirituality, there's some things, and some of the great saints there, that I just can't stand. And I don't have to stand, because the Church is so vast, and there's so many types of sanctity in Christ, and so many different types of personality, you know, that we don't have to be able to relate to all of the saints. In fact, we would go crazy if we tried to. But it's incredible how so many people can live from just one tiny aspect of the mystery of Christ. You can live your whole life contemplating Jesus in the crib. or their whole lives contemplating Jesus on the cross. And this may be better in a sense to have a balanced spirituality, but we just have to take the graces of the good God gives us, okay, and just rejoice and grow in with that grace.

[04:35]

But as I said, I think it's just wonderful when our communities are clearly communities of the resurrection, And that doesn't mean going around singing allelu, [...] but that's what it's in. It's just living from this light of Christ that's present and palpable in our communities. So that's what we have at Mount Savior, I know. And I think what we have, to a certain extent, in my own community, I guess some of it. So then that leads I'll do a couple of little episodes. And now to the first of an important series of episodes that we just might be tempted to draw forward because it doesn't seem to be all that big. A local nobleman has died, and he's been a really mean character. He really hurled the book at practically everyone, but extremely strict, and not done much to spread a great deal of joy around him. And so now he dies, and he faces his personal judgment, and he gets his richly-deserved comeuppance.

[05:42]

But Alice is upset about this, and she compassionates him. And so she prays very intensely that his sufferings after death will be alleviated, and of course they are. But now this, I think, is the first time in the life that her relationships with others besides the community extends outside the community. So just one individual soul at this point, and all that she's doing is praying for this person. Now we're going to see how this is going to grow and develop. And the next paragraph tells But she suffers within herself so much the violence of charity that she strives with great solicitude for the salvation of the whole human race, for a great many of those who are living, and then there's a long sentence that I'll skip, but also for those who are fast beyond death and the sufferings of those in purgatory.

[06:54]

And now, instead of just praying for them, she wants to take upon herself the sufferings of these four souls in purgatory. Now, this is a further stage. We have to be very careful when it comes to things like reparation. I know in the old days, like Gethsemane, one got the feeling sometimes that it was a somewhat trivial thing. You toss off three Hail Marys to the holy souls. I mean, that can be a good thing. But we have to be extremely careful that this is serious. And it's just not a matter of flicking a few drops of holy water to some poor benighted soul. It means a real deep identification. Now, in God's economy, nothing is going to be able to replace, say, the love of a person who doesn't love God and should love God. I mean, this is something absolutely unique. And no matter what I do, that's not going to absolutely replace that or make full amends for that.

[08:02]

And yet there's something, this union of us all. that it's really important that all of us feel our identity with each other, this great, great cosmic mystery. And some people feel a little bit uncomfortable about this theme of purgatory. I'm most comfortable with it myself. And I had a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful experience a couple of years ago. I had a stroke, and agreeing on bus stations in Cincinnati, and usually agreeing on bus stations that my most mystical experiences occur. But at any rate, And when I realized what was happening, I didn't know how far it was going to go. And as a matter of fact, I just lost the use of my right hand in this right part of the face, so it wasn't all that serious. But immediately, you know, there were two things that came to mind.

[09:03]

that I had never been able to resolve in recent years. And that was a very bad relationship with one of the brethren in the community and with another monk outside the community. And I really felt anxious about this. These were the two things, you know, that hadn't been worked out and resolved. And so I thought about it, and then I realized there was nothing more that I could do about it. I'd done what I could, and I just have to leave it up to the mercy of God. But I can tell you, at that moment, you know, the idea being purified in God's love, and that all of the things we can't take care of, you know, in this existence, that it doesn't make that much difference. That God, with his love, is going to take care of it, and the final purification, that is one of the most consoling doctrines, I think, in Catholicism. And I remember years ago, Fr. Lewis giving a conference for All Souls Day. And I think he'd been quoting St.

[10:05]

Catherine of Genoa, who wrote a very interesting, rather difficult treatise on purgatory. But anyway, St. Catherine's attitude is that when you die and you have something to atone for, you want desperately to get to purgatory as soon as you can and be purified so that you can get to heaven as quickly as possible. So now the holy souls want to be where they are and in this process of being more and more purified. So it's not a question of a type of suffering, a gory suffering, being imposed on them. This is something that they embrace with their whole heart and soul. And Father Lewis said, you know, the fire of purgatory is exactly the same as heaven. He says there's no difference between heaven and purgatory except one thing. In Purgatory, you haven't yet been completely purified of everything that keeps us from receiving God's love and all of its fullness. There's still some kind of an obstacle that we can't quite define. But in Heaven and in Purgatory, it's the same infinite love of God.

[11:13]

And then he went on and he laughed and said, now this might sound heretical, But he says, there's no difference between heaven and hell. He says, hell, it's the same love of God that surrounds everyone, but it's an infinite love that one refuses voluntarily, a free will for all eternity. So that is all the love of God I left, if that's the tremendous stuff. And so at any rate, Alice now is going to have deep experiences of profound union and communion with those who are just immersed in God's love, and purgatory, that's purifying them, and she wants to be more and more identified with them, and they're theologically impossible. Jesus' life has never been so far as, you know, condemned by the Holy See, but he's going to be united even with the damned in hell. And I can't begin to explain this theologically. I don't think anyone can. But the quality of her love is so vast that it reaches the full cosmic dimensions of the mystery of Christ.

[12:19]

Her life is growing now. Now remember how she was born in this little town at that time of Scherbeck, which is now part of Brussels. And she just has to go down the road a mile or two to get to her community at La Cambra. And then she gets sequestered from her community and her leper's hut, and that's where she can move back and forth between the church and the leper's hut. We're going to see how in a few minutes that she's no longer able to go to church and she's no longer able then to get out of her bed. And she's going to become paralyzed, and her life is going to become more and more constricted. And now, as all of this is happening, her spiritual experience just takes on inverse proportions. It's like a spiritual catalog. I mean, first, within her community, she's just the life and the light of the whole community. And then this community of Lakandra begins expanding. She's praying for those, the neighbors around.

[13:24]

And then you might say her ministry extends to the whole world. Wherever people are in need of God's mercy and love, wherever there's human suffering, Alice is a part of that. And this is something I think that a lot of us experience, to some degree, coercively, in our monastic life. And one of my favorite books is called, let's see, what is it, in English, The Diary of a Country Priest by Zurich Baranaya. And I think it was made in a movie years and years and years ago, but I think that must have been a little after I came to the monastery. But it's an incredible thing. You know, it's one of these French novels by Bernie Nelson, which almost nothing happens except inside the minds of people, and everyone talks a lot. It's real deep, but I could never cope with more than, may it be, two pages at a time, because you'd have to stop and think and reflect and pause a lot. So the book isn't written for all of us. But anyway, this holy young priest gets stuck out in a country parish, and the people are really mean.

[14:35]

And he loves the parish, and he loves this community, but it's just a group of Christians who have never really experienced the joy of being Christians, and totally unresponsive, just kind of moribund and filled with this kind of lethargy, what Cassian calls achelia, this lack of responsiveness to the real realities. So he's a washout from the Carthusians. Very, very sensitive man who couldn't stay with the courtesans. And he comes from a very pothesant family, but enormous sensitivity. He's a real poet. So he just keeps a journal. And one of the early pages, he speaks, he's talking about prayer. He says, the usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist, will work for years to make himself a man of prayer.

[15:38]

And that's not good domestic spirituality. We don't work to make ourselves men of prayer. We give ourselves to the mercy of God, and if God's mercy is provenient love, that turns us into men of prayer, if God wants us to be men of prayer. And then he says, any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with a shadow, or even less, a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people, and he's talking about monks now, find until their dying day, I won't even say such great comfort, since they put no faith in the solace of the senses, but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer. Of course, suggestion, in quotation marks, say the scientist, you know, the psychologist, self-suggestion at this prayer.

[16:41]

Certainly, the scientist can never have known old monks wise, shrewd, unerring in judgment, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream. An unusual opiate. Opium is our religion. Opium are the people. An unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity. Now, when you see a real man of prayer, and I'm going to ask you a tradition item, you see someone who is intensely himself and someone who really is an essential part of the community and who is really united with the whole of mankind in this universal charity.

[17:51]

Now, one of the things I don't like about This particular text Bernard knows is just wonderful and so insightful, but also he does have his limitations. He speaks about these old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgment. Well, I've known plenty of old monks, you know, who are dumb and make mistakes all the time. and aren't particularly aglow with any kind of a passionate insight, but who nevertheless just have instinctively, with the grace of God, this tender compassion and this feel of a solidarity with the whole human race. And it's not all the time much to look at, but it's something that's really there. So anyway, that's an interesting text. And this is something what Alice is experiencing.

[18:52]

And so now she's united with everyone who needs the love and the mercy of God, whether on this side of life or on the other. And then towards the feast of Saint Barnabas, now in 1149, this is June 11th, I think, she's so far gone that she gets anointed But our Lord tells her that she has one more year that he's going to ask her to live. And he tells her that this year that's coming is going to be the most fruitful year of her whole life. But it's going to mean a very painful, deeper even, intensification of her union with him and his paschal mystery. And so then she loses now the sight of one eye. She's eventually going to be blind. And she offers it up for special intention. The Roman emperor has just been anointed and crowned. And so she offers her right eye that he may receive spiritual wisdom, and she enters into physical darkness.

[20:05]

She's praying that he may be enlightened with a spiritual vision, which God knows he needed rather desperately. And this is another thing. We're praying for all of these intentions, for what's happening in the world outside, and that's the most wonderful thing in the world. And we don't have to worry about praying for concrete intentions. I have a little bit of a suspicion for those whose prayer intentions are always so diffuse and so general that they don't apply ever to any concrete individual. I don't know, I guess we've all heard the joke about loving humanity but not liking people, individual people. And so, you know, it's good, you know, when we have these general intentions, that's important and marvelous, but we have to be able to pray, you know, for this very local and international intentions, too. The novice master at her monastery, Conure, from Georgia, Oh, he's the most wonderful guy in the world. He wanted to join Mother Teresa in India.

[21:08]

And she's a shrewd old lady. And she told him, you'd do better going to Trappist Monastery. So as a young fellow, he went to Conyers. Deep, deep, deep life, but a man of utmost simplicity. And so he's a master novice now. And in his room, he has a word cross, a wooden cross, And on it, he has a lot of photographs of his family and people with whom he knew and loved in college and other places. And then he takes things out of newspaper clippings from time to time and changes things around. People who were mass murderers, for example, or the local family down the road. And you just have a kind of a feeling that he looks at all of these pictures and then he prays explicitly for each one of these persons. And that's a good thing for us to be able to do. I shouldn't say something is a good thing for all of us to do something like that.

[22:10]

Maybe it is in a general way, but each of us has his own particular grace. And we can clutter up our lives with a lot of dharmakī practices, but each one has to find his own special way. I'm thinking of one 12th century monk. He was a real monk, but he was illiterate. So he had to stand there in choir, and he knew the penitential psalms and a few things like that. So he just united himself as best he could with the prayer of the community. But he loved the community. And as he stood there in choir, he would go down the rows on each side of the choir and pray explicitly for each of the brethren that way. I think that's a wonderful thing to do from time to time. Okay, for now, at Septuagesima, a Sunday, of the year that she dies. And we all know what the context of Septuagintes on a Sunday is. That was the Sunday when the catechumens were enrolled. And when you heard in the gospel about the workers going out into the vineyard of the Lord,

[23:14]

And the first reading was reading from Corinthians from St. Paul about the race. It's a question of sharing the agony, the race of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so at this point, Alice goes to church and they sing the entrance anthem. The pains of death have surrounded me and the mounds of hell have closed me in. And as she leaves the church afterwards and hobbles back to her little hut, she turns back and she looks at the church and she realizes that she's never going to be able to go into the church again. So her life becomes more constricted. And then there's something that happens on the next Sunday sex, the Jason of Sunday. And then on the Ides, the third day before the Ides of March, I think that's the 13th of March, she begins a type of experience that remains with her for the rest of her life until the last two days before she dies on St.

[24:22]

Barnabas's Day. This is absolutely weird. She begins suffering the pains of those in purgatory, and from time to time, those we've seen in hell. And as I said, theologically, you just can't explain this. And yet the text says, Ataman, Semper Quasi Neplexu Iesu Iacuit Quodam Moro. And yet, all during this time when she's suffering, she's lying in the embrace of Jesus. in some way. I think that this is just absolutely incredible. You know, in St. John's Gospels, it's wonderful to see the structure. Remember when the first two apostles called John and Andrew, Jesus turns around, he has his conversion towards us, and he asks them, what are you seeking? The same question that we're asked when we come to the monastery. And then he invites them to come and follow him, and they stay with him that day.

[25:23]

And then you have all of these different groups of peoples and individuals who are seeking Jesus in different ways. And you have these meetings between Jesus and these individuals, you know, like in the Garden of Gethsemane, whom were you seeking Jesus in Nazareth. But they're seeking him in this horrible way, and they're repelled. But at any rate, the first disciples can dwell only this brief time, these few hours with Jesus at the beginning of their apostolate. But what Jesus is doing is leading them where they're going to dwell in Him, in the Father. This is the real place where Jesus is, in the Father. And He's going to dwell in us, and we in Him. And as a question that's coming and taking up our abode in the very depths of the Blessed Trinity, And remember John is the beloved disciple, and this funny idiom that you find after the mandatum, The Beloved Disciple is lying in Sinu Iesu, in the bosom of Jesus.

[26:31]

Now, that's what the Latin text says, in Cor por Jesu, that's what the Greek text says, too. And then the learned exegetes, excuse me, I don't mean to sound sarcastic, but the exegetes rightly point out that this is a Hebrew idiom, and it means in a place of honor, or close to Jesus, or something like that. It's in the bosom of Jesus, in the heart of Jesus, in the very depths of his existence that we've been talking about. Now there's something profound here. There's a parallelism between you and me, because we're all beloved disciples, being in the bosom of Jesus. and the Word being in the bosom of the Father. That's how the prologue begins. No one has seen the Father except the Son who is in Sinopatris, in the bosom of the Father, in the heart of the Father. So there's not only this parallelism, but there's inclusion within inclusion within inclusion. The Son is in the heart of the Father, and we, the beloved

[27:33]

Sons of God, the beloved disciples, are in the heart of Jesus. And this is exactly where Alice is right now. Throughout all of her sufferings, no matter what it is, no matter what comes to her, she's in the very depths of the heart of Jesus, in Signo Ieso. And so then, after that, she's experiencing this as towards Pentecost, and she loses her left eye, which she offers up for King St. Louis in France, who's off on a crusade. And so she feels very much concerned about the cross of Christ and the struggle against the pagans. And so, at any rate, it speaks about her tremendous maturity and love. And there are a few more episodes. And then we get to Good Friday, and of course she's blind now, but she has a kind of spiritual intuition, a spiritual vision you might say, and so she's standing now at the window, and this is very interesting, it's at night, after the night office,

[28:45]

And it says that this is the time when she either used to read, when she still had her eyes, or prayed, or knelt. And the technical term here is to veniam petere. That means to bow down and kneel and touch the ground. And this was a form of prayer. We used to do this in my own monastery when we made a mistake. But we'd kneel, not kneel down, but lean over and touch the ground with the tips of our fingers. Looking back, it must have looked awfully silly. Yeah, I suppose it did look awfully silly. But this is an old Greek custom, too. When you go to the Greek liturgy, you'll see them making what they call these metanoias, these great prostrations, and they have different kinds of prostration. And they'll kiss the hand and then touch the ground with their fingers. And that's a kind of a mini version of touching the ground and kissing it with their lips.

[29:48]

They have that too, but that's a more advanced form. But at any rate, people used to pray by genuflecting, up and down. It was a physical form of prayer, a body language prayer. And this is very helpful. I think it should be helpful for us. When she can follow the office, that's great. When she can read, that's fine. When she can pray, that's great. When she can't do those things, then she does as much as she can, and just her physical posture now becomes an expression of prayer. I think we've kind of lost that tradition, but I think it's a good thing in the privacy of ourselves, you know, from time to time we're completely shot or we're sort of falling asleep. just to kneel up and down a few times and honor the Blessed Trinity. Well, that's not true of everyone. As I said, each one has to have his own gimmicks and be creative along these lines. So, at any rate, this is what she's doing. And she has this vision of our Lord in his passion.

[30:52]

So she's completely blind now, but she's never had a clear spiritual vision. And he says, Look, therefore, deeply, and the Latin word for look here is inturere. That means to look into the very heart of things. It's much stronger than the common word videre, to see. Look, therefore, diligently and consider how many and what kind of fathers that I have borne of the human race. And then at that moment the vision disappears, and it says from that moment and more and more she burns, and the Latin word is exorcit, if her ardor could indeed possibly increase. She burned to know how the human race would be able, frui suor edaturi, enjoy It's Redeemer. So it's not enough for Alice that she be in God and with God if her brothers and her sisters throughout the whole world can't

[32:03]

do the same thing. And so there's this kind of a collective experience that's so necessary. She doesn't want to go to heaven unless we can all go to heaven. She feels that much identified with the whole human race. And so this desperate feeling of wanting this type of experience of God's love to be communicated to the whole human race. So to enter into a monastic community and really get deep in the mystery of Christ, I guess it's a vagary, I guess it's the whole of our tradition. What is it a vagary about? If you're praying, you're united to the whole human race. Well, it's for real, brethren. I mean, it really is for real. Not all of us understand that or realize it. Let's see. Okay, maybe I'll have time to read a pertinent text this evening about this. So, at any rate,

[33:06]

We've got to take this union with the mystical body, and I guess even this non-mystical body of people, outside any kind of formal adherence or knowledge of the mystery of Christ, extremely seriously. And I want to tell you about a book that means a great deal. to me, which expresses something like this. Now, the guy who wrote it is a German. I suppose he's dead now, if he was written shortly after World War II. A wonderful poet, but I don't think known at all in this country. His name is Albrecht Goers, a Lutheran pastor, and a man who was born in the classical tradition. The name of the book is called The Burnt Offering, Das Bratopfer. And it's a very, very simple book, you know, not many pages. And briefly, there's this butcher's wife in a large, undesignated town at the beginning of the Second World War, when the Jews are coming under more overt persecution.

[34:18]

And this butcher's wife, her husband belonged to the local volunteer fire brigade, And the local synagogue burns down, and she asks him, you know, why couldn't you have been put out there plenty of times? And he goes, Greta, don't ask questions. And so at any rate, she's never had any contact with Jews at all, and any contact that she's explicitly known about. But he goes off, and he goes off to the Russian front. He gets conscripted. And so she's left alone to run the shop. And so then the officials of the town designate her butcher's store, or her meat store, as the one place in the whole town where the Jews can come to get their meat. They're excluded from the other stores. And they're allowed only to come for the weekly ration of meat, which isn't all that big, at the beginning of the Sabbath.

[35:22]

So, in order to get their meat through their shopping, they have to break the Sabbath. And so, you know, all of these German housewives are there, and they say, oh, Greta, you better wear a gas mask when those Jews come, or how does it feel to have to serve these Jews, and so forth. It's horrible. But she's a good woman. Now, when the story begins, it's a story that begins by flashbacks. There's this young man who's taken a job in the nearby library, and he rents a room on the second floor of her house, and he notices that she's marked with this burn, this scar on her forehead. He kind of casually wonders how she got it. And, well, at any rate, As the story progresses and she writes down the account of this for this young man, she tells about how she begins having to serve the Jews in her meat store.

[36:23]

And there's this old rabbi, his name is Rabbi Ehrenbach, and he's the head of the Jewish community. And she's a good woman, very, very kind, and she begins noticing things that are happening. And the people realize instinctively that there's a certain kindness in her. And they'll leave messages on their packets of meat and ask, for example, someone will come in and say, I'm shopping for so-and-so, they have the ration card, but she doesn't need her meat this week, which means the person has been deported and is gone, or the person has committed suicide. And then she takes care of little kids so the mothers can do shopping elsewhere. You know, just ordinary acts of courtesy and kindness, which these people in this community just aren't used to receiving. And so finally comes the day when Rabbi Ehrenbach is there, and all of a sudden he says, Shalom. And the people are gathered in a historic stop, and then he prays in Hebrew.

[37:30]

It's the Sabbath prayer. You know, this is a new experience for her. And then this terrible scene where these two Nazi stormtroopers, who were keeping watch on the place when the Jews were there, come in one Friday night, and one of the guys is drunk. And he says, he goes up and he pulls the rabbi's beard, and he says, you better not eat so much meat, because it's going to hold you back in your ascension, going up in the gas chamber. And she hears all of this, you know, the people are just absolutely shocked. And then shortly after, the rabbi is deported outwards to someplace. And then she finds herself, one Friday evening, herself saying, Shalom. And, you know, she's a Lutheran, I guess, a kind of a conventional Christian. But she's beginning to experience that more and more, this pain of all of this. Well, there's this terrible scene where this guy who's drunk is creating a scene.

[38:38]

Everyone looked at Goliath, she calls him, this big brute of a fellow. Only two or three customers pretended they hadn't heard, and one of them went up to me to state his order. I couldn't attend to him at once, for I had to see to this Frau Valesky. She had put her bag on the floor and stood there trembling all over. She was a musician's wife and was expecting a baby any day now. I knew quite a bit about her. She'd had the effrontery to apply for the supplementary ration for expectant mothers in the fourth month of her pregnancy. about a half a pint of milk and a few ounces of sugar and flour. Her application had been returned with a statement, what a Jew's bastard needs is abortion, applied to the health department, section D. She preserved this document in her handbag and had once shown it to me. I read it, looked carefully at the stamp and signature, even making a mental note of the typist's initials.

[39:44]

If one could dictate a sentence like that one to a secretary, there wasn't much one couldn't do. Frau Zaleski, I said, now, don't worry. She replied, deathly pale, I'll feel better in a moment. I went back to the customer, who, quite unmoved, seemed repeatedly forwardering. The big fellow, this is the German strong trooper, started again. Whiz-bang, whiz-bang, you'll fly through the air with the greatest of ease. It looked as if he was about to perform some sort of war dance, and finally he leaves his companion, trying to get him to quiet down. Goliath opened his eyes wide and shot out one arm. It seemed incredible to him that anyone should dare to put him in his place, and now he erupted. That's a lot of hogwash. Well, I'm doing them a real favor. Don't you start making trouble, Beck. Just keep your shirt on, will you? A real favor, I say, breaking it to them gradually, real bedside manner and all, just giving them a delicate hint that they'll soon be going up the chimney.

[40:52]

Can't you see that Farrah over there with the big belly? She's just beaming with gratitude, aren't you, Farrah, for telling her she didn't worry any more about the baby's diapers, those dear little shitty diapers?" Unter Sturms Führer, the young man called out again, and it sounded almost as if he was pleading. Then he took hold of the superior's arms. Hands off, damn you, he yelled in a drunken rage, but at the same time he made for the door with long, unsteady steps. When he had followed him to the door, the little fellow turned around and called out to me, You'll keep your mouth shut. I nodded. Why shouldn't I keep quiet when the stones themselves would speak? And then Adele is how she's continuing with her work, you know, and she's cutting out the week's coupons. And she begins giving each of the individuals more than the ration is called for. She just doesn't know why. She says, all I remember is that when they'd all gone and I realized I'd most probably never be able to make up this loss, I felt relieved and almost cheerful.

[42:01]

I could still hear the dreadful words re-echo around the shop. When I locked the door behind the last customer, I felt as if the whole burden had been lifted from my shoulders. An hour had gone by. I was sitting in my room and doing some sewing when I heard a faint knock at my window. I got up to open the door. I'm not very brave, sir, and this is what she's writing to this young man. I was very frightened. It was no longer as I had thought before. I mean the burden having been lifted from my shoulders. The burden was still there, as heavy as ever. It was Frau Zaleski, the musician's wife, who had come to see me. Open the door for a moment, please, she said. I unlocked it at once. Frau Zaleski had stepped back for a moment into the dark side passage and now returned, pushing something toward the door. It was a baby carriage. She pushed it straight through the outer door and into the room, the same room in which I'm writing this down.

[43:07]

The baby carriage stood in the very place where you were sitting the other night, and as far as I'm concerned, it's still standing there. Do take a seat, Frau Zaleski, I said. She sat down in the awkward way a woman sits down in her last weeks of pregnancy. Then she began. It's true. That's true what that man said. The one who is drunk, you mean? I wanted it to sound like a doubt, but I'd only to listen to my own voice to know that I'd said it without conviction. The world has become so bad that only the very worst is true. Yes, that one," the woman confirmed. The rabbi once said, God created wine to loosen the tongues of fools, that they may speak the truth and deserve that secret truth. And then silence. I kept my eyes lowered, then the woman's voice again. I brought you that baby carriage.

[44:09]

You have been good to me all this time. I thought, maybe you'll need it one day, Frau Walker. Later, I mean. And again, silence. Then, I must go now. Thank you again for everything. Where shall we put it? Oh, just leave it where it is, thank you. That's all I could think of saying. At the front door, Frau Zaleski turned her head once more. It was quite dark now, and I could hardly see her. But I heard her voice and thought to myself, a true child of Reibel Ehrenreich. That's what she's like. No, a true descendant of the ancient prophets. The sky was full of autumn stars that night. The last words I heard her say, and one doesn't forget such words, were so faint, and they sounded far away very softly. She said, And the word of the Lord came unto Abram, saying, Look now toward the heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them

[45:17]

And he said unto him, Thou shalt lie dot, dot, dot. And you remember the text says, Thou shalt lie descended to thee like a sand for the sea shore, like a whole wraith doomed to genocide in thy town. Well, then what happens? There's a herald that night, and she can get out of the house. But she doesn't. She just sits there and the house catches fire. And at the very last moment after she's lost consciousness, someone comes in, a Jew, and knows she's there and drags her out. And then only later she comes to herself. Well, the guy to whom she's writing this account, and she doesn't say anything about her remaining in the house and her getting this terrible scar from the fire that's going to mark her for life, she doesn't tell him about that. But a couple of months later, the guy is in a town, he's traveling, and he's looking for something to read in his hotel room, and he just finds some old newspapers.

[46:26]

And he finds a newspaper, and coincidentally, it has an advertisement in it about the reopening of the butcher shop, and after the return of her husband at the end of the hostilities. So he looks at the date, he sees that the paper is seven months old, and the advertisement says, high quality meat and poultry, specialist in black pudding, it says. And in the margin, curiously lost in that place, a biblical reference to Moses, Chapter 3, 2. You know, the Lutherans call the Pentateuch the Books of Moses, so 2 Moses is Exodus. Exodus 3, 2. Like an afterthought, Ed is in haste and looked on that page, as if inserted in the wrong place by a careless printer. But what was a built Bible reference doing here? You can understand the inclusion of a Bible reference in the obituary notice of a Christian, but what is the connection between black pudding and 2 Moses, Chapter 3? And so what he does, he doesn't have a Bible at hand and it's not the kind of hotel that might be likely to have a Bible.

[47:36]

And so it's about 10 o'clock and he knows this Friday night and the pastor, the local church, will be preparing his sermon. For he calls up the rectory and asks what this biblical text is. The pastor says, what can I do for you? I state my name and my request. A Bible text is what I need. One moment, please. The pastor's voice is calm and betrays little astonishment. Yes, here it is. The passage in question reads, And he, Moses, looked. And behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. The author goes on, and the bush was not consumed. I understood. It was a question long ago posed in silence and an answer slowly grasped. The question, whether there is one who can balance the terrible guilt of the age against the wild self-immolation of a butcher's wife, against this readiness to crawl into the fiery furnace.

[48:41]

This is just an astonishing passage. This woman is no theologian. She doesn't know anything about reparations or suffering with Jesus. But she just feels, you know, so terribly, this horrible thing in this human condition, that somehow she's ready to crawl into the furnace and offer her own life in this kind of wild, self-sacrificial immolation, in this kind of crazy way that you just can't express. But somehow she's bound up, you know, with this saving, this atoning for this situation. the terrible guilt of the age against this wild self-immolation of a butcher's wife, against this readiness to crawl into the firing furnace. And then he says, but one who would draw up this balance will say that God desires not sacrifice, that he delights not in burnt offering or in the peace offerings of your fat beasts, but only in a broken spirit and a contrite heart.

[49:42]

And then he goes on and makes reference to a few people who are involved in this. He says, in the burn on the woman's face because her holocaust wasn't accepted by God, you might say. Her life was saved. But in the burn on the woman's face, that sign will remain the sign that must not be interpreted otherwise than as a sign of love, of that love which maintains the world. And so the idea is that we all have to be ready to crawl into the furnace if God gives this vocation. And even if we don't have to, there still has to be this readiness to be identified with all of that, and to enter the heart of the mystery of Christ under the cross, always with the light of the resurrection already breaking upon us. Well, I don't understand this little novella, but it's for real. And when I read about the sacrifices of the Old Testament and so forth, and the sacrifice of Christ, we read the letter to the Hebrews about our union with Jesus, and the high priest, you know, what's the liturgy we read in the Vatican description of liturgy?

[50:59]

Jesus, the high priest, present and acting, and carrying out his high priestly ministry, and uniting ourselves with him in that. I always have something to do with that. I talked to him this morning, but we'll come to the end of Alice and her pastoral journey this evening, now our last session. So, don't let our helpers in the name of the Lord. Amen. It's in English? Yes, Joshua. It's put out by a wonderful publishing house. I haven't heard from them for a long time. They've never put out anything.

[51:36]

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