The Fourth Sunday in Lent

When Jinx and I went for our walk this morning, a group of cows was standing near the horizon, the pink-hued sun about to rise behind them. One of the cows was clearly trying to calve. I waited and watched for a minute, but Jinx was cavorting around in the field adjacent to that one, and I didn’t want to disturb the mama while she was in such a difficult situation, so I walked on. By the time we returned, she was gone. I don’t know if she gave birth to the calf, or if she simply relocated. There are so many spring calves in the pastures right now, it would be difficult to tell one from the other. Like the flora, the local fauna bursts free into the world with almost violent beauty, relentless and insistent as an infant’s laugh.

Last night, Mrs. Orr and I watched a movie that we enjoyed very much, a film called So Big. I can remember seeing the novel on which the movie was based on the shelf of the high school library when I was a teenager, though I was never moved to pick it up and flip through it. After watching the movie, I think I would like to read the book. The film version starred Jane Wyman, who also starred in two of my favorite movies, The Yearling and Johnny Belinda. So Big was sweet and moving and decent. Watching a movie like this, it’s easy to believe that the Hollywood people nowadays sacrifice goats or hold black masses or tattoo themselves with triple sixes, the contrast between then and now being so great. Today, almost all art and popular media reeks with the intentionally ugly.

I’ve been thinking and praying quite a bit lately about redemptive suffering, about Purgatory, about my place in this world and the next. Reading through some stories of lives of the saints has prodded me along this path, and one of the ones I’ve read recently that has deeply impressed me has been a little biographical sketch (available online here) of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney. I knew nothing about this saint until reading this portrait, and now I find that I cannot stop thinking about him. The level of commitment to Christ and of self-denial and of purity exhibited by Vianney was astounding. The pain endured, the losses suffered, the lowliness of spirit. How can a man be this way, I asked myself, unless the spirit of Christ is truly working within him?

And this morning, walking the gravel strip between fields of cows and beneath clouds of birds, a quite unexpected thought came into my mind.

I want to be a saint.

I walked a bit farther, and then Her voice came into my mind, just as clear as the water in the stream down the hill. Oh, do you? And why?

My feet continued on, my mind continued working, my eyes seeing Jinx loping along but not really seeing anything.

It came again, Her voice.

Do you want to be a saint, or do you want to be seen as saintly? I could detect a sweet, sincere smile in the voice.

And the question troubled me.

I spent the day pondering the question. The answer will be an important one, and I want to be settled on it before I let my thoughts start riding off on their wild horses again.

And now, my beloved wife is sitting over there in her chair, absorbed by the book she’s reading. Dixee is curled into a gray comma in her little bed by the hearth, and Jinx is stretched out like a miniature paint horse on the love seat, ribs rising, paws trying to reach the dream-earth so he can bound across the pastures of his spirit-world, the one he visits in the hours when he is warm and dry and within the sound of the voices of those who love him.

Monday will come an hour earlier than I’m used to, but it will be a gift like all the days I’m given here beneath heaven, days of searching and choosing my steps through this odd landscape, a landscape in which virgins pray for me and immortal beings watch me, and I keep asking the questions and trying to watch the horizon, the horizon where changes in the weather show up first.

~ S.K. Orr