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PAR TIS A N R'EVIE W
tricks and temptations of emptiness, for still he was empty of prayer and
of 'feeling. Now that he forbade himself images and dwelt within the
discipline of his body his knees and his back began to hurt worse than
ever and he began to think with quiet and increasing amazement of
young men, boys really, hardly older than he was, not much older than
George anyway, who knelt like this on Chapel stone the whole night
through in prayer and vigil, their weapons and armor blessed and wait–
ing, soberly shining in the lambent gloom, before the Mass and the
Communion and before that greatest moment of their lives when their
King touched the flat of the sword to the shoulder and the young
man stood up and was assisted in putting upon himself the whole
armor of God and rode forth into the glittering meadows of daybreak
for the first time a knight, a knight errant, seeking whatever wrong
God might send him to set right, whatever tests of bravery and chastity
the huge world might hold in ambush for him. 0 but I can do better
than this, he exclaimed to himself in self-contempt; and he thought
with envy and reverence of the early time which had belonged to those
shining young men, and he pressed down with all his strength and
weight, first on one knee and then on the other, so that it was hard not
to cry out, and he held his back still more rigidly upright, and he was
pleased to find that now, by the way he held his hands out, even his
arms ached, deep into the shoulders.
But it's so little to do! he thought, imagining the first, living
Crucifix; and he did his best to imagine one hand, against splintery
wood, and the point of a spike against the center of the open hand,
and a great hammer, and the spike being driven through, breaking a
bone, tight into the wood so that the head was all buried in the flesh
and the splintered bone, and then to be able to say,
Father forgive them
for they know not what they do.
And that's just one hand, he
r~minded himself. How about both hands. And both feet. Specially both
feet crossed on each other and one spike through both insteps. How
about when they raise up the Cross with you on it and drop it deep
into the hole they dug for it! And imagining that moment he felt a
tearing spasm of anguish in the center of each palm and with an
instant dazzling of amazed delight, remembering pictures of great saints,
shouted within himself,
I've got the Wounds!
and even as he caught
himself opening his palms and his eyes to peer and see if this were so
he realized that once again this night, and even more blasphemously
and absurdly than before, he had sinned in the proud imagination of
his heart. 0
my God,
his heart moaned, 0
my God! My God how can
You forgive me!
I'll have to confess it, he realized. I can't. Not this.
How can I confess
this!
