One of the greatest delights of the religious faith is to abandon
ourselves to gratitude, to be able to thank, from an overflowing heart,
the moral being to whom we feel indebted for our wealth.
Why then, since I have long lost this faith, do I still feel each day,
and several times a day, the great need of singing the canticle of
Francis of Assisi, the lovely canticle in which he says:
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, and unto all Thy creatures, especially
our gracious brother the sun, who gives us the day and through whom
Thou showest us Thy light. He is beautiful and radiant with a great
splendor. He is the symbol of Thee, Most High.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the moon and the stars,
fashioned by Thee in the sky, clear, precious, and beautiful.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the wind, and for the air
and the clouds, for the pure sky, and for all the time during which
Thou givest to thy creatures life and sustenance.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our sister the water, who is so
useful, precious and clean.
Praise be unto Thee, O Lord, for our brother the fire, through whom
Thou illuminest the night. He is lovely and gay, courageous and
strong.
Praise unto Thee, O Lord, for our mother the earth, who sustains us
and nourishes us, and brings forth divers fruits and flowers of a
thousand colors and the grass.
A poet has transposed these divine strophes into the harmony of French
verse and sings thus:
I shall praise you, Lord, for having made so lovely and so bright
This world where you wish us to await our life.
Now, I know very well that in this world I am not awaiting life, I am
living. I know very well that it is here I must live and lose no time
about it. My gratitude is all the more pressing, all the more intense.
What if it does rise to an empty heaven, that infinite gratitude!
It will not be lost. And is that heaven ever empty to which we breathe
out so many dreams, where there trembles so much beauty!
The sweetest of human voices has said: “Lay up for yourselves in heaven
the treasures that do not perish.” Perhaps we shall be pardoned if we
dare to murmur: “Lay up for yourselves, in this world, the treasures
that do not perish.”
They will not perish, these treasures, O my son, and all you whom I
love, they will not perish if you thirst to discover them only that
you may share them with others, that you may bequeath them to a devout
posterity.
They will not perish if they find their being, their supreme reason, in
that region of the soul where believers have raised up the tabernacle
of a God.
V
THE LYRICS OF LIFE
I
During the cruellest hours, when the war about me has been heaping
agony upon agony, when I have been able to find nothing, nothing to
which I could any longer attach my confidence and my need of hope, I
have often been surprised to find, running through my head, one of
those airs that I know so well, those airs that I love and that escort
my soul, like watchful and radiant personages, through the chaos of the
days. And I would think bitterly: “Just fifteen quite simple notes! but
they carry a meaning so beautiful, so profound, so commanding that they
would suffice, I am certain, to resolve all conflicts, to discourage
all hatreds, if men knew them well enough to sing them all together
with the same attentive tenderness.”
It may be that the philosophy which absorbs you is one that leaves no
room for indulgence. Perhaps you feel yourself full of bitterness for
your fellows, perhaps you have made up your mind not to see in the
activity of the living any but motives of greed and covetousness. Do
not laugh! Do not be in too great haste to prove yourself right! Above
everything, do not rejoice in being right in so dismal a fashion.
I say it again, if certain pages of Beethoven were better known to
those who suffer and slaughter one another they would succeed in
disarming many a resentment, they would restore to many a tense face a
soft, ineffable smile.
If you do not believe this, you are not accustomed to living among
simple people, you have never watched an irrepressible class of little
children whom their master dominates and calms by making them sing,
you have never heard a multitude of people intoning a hymn in some
cathedral, you have never seen a great flood of workingmen, in some
foul slum, break into the rhythm of a revolutionary song, perhaps you
have never even seen a poor man weeping because a violin had just
recalled to him his youth and the obscure thoughts he believed he had
never in all his life confessed to anyone.
Think of all these things and then form some notion of what it is
the thoughts of the great masters can do with the soul. Why, why
is it not better known, this thing which is, indeed, knowledge and
revelation itself? Why does it not reign over the empires, this which
is sovereignty, grandeur, majesty? Why is it not more ardently invoked
in the hour of crisis, this that teaches, equally well, fruitful doubt
and serene resolution?