A Vision of Light Read online

  I have never felt so utterly alone. It was a kind of exhaustion, as if I had worn myself out with weeping. Everything that I had thought was me was gone. I was married, but not married; a mother, but not a mother; alive, but not really alive at all. A stranger stood there who was nobody at all, a person without place, past, or future. For once I couldn’t even pray to blessed Mary and the saints. Even God had gone. My mind was as blank and empty as an open grave.

  It was then that I noticed the most peculiar thing happening to the light in the room. In the natural shadow that filled the unlit church, something very strange, like a veil of light, was slowly descending from the high, arched ceiling. I stared up at it, fascinated, as it crept downward. My mouth opened, and as my left hand opened convulsively, the pears in my apron rolled away onto the floor, giving off a sweet, bruised scent. As the veil descended toward the ground, I sank to my knees in the center of the empty floor. With my hands clasped before me I continued to gaze upward in wonder at the changing light within the veil. Great bright shapes of light, somehow thicker and yellower than the soft golden light of the veil, trickled down it, like the patterns made by honey that spills over the edge of a jug.

  As I watched the patterns of light shifting, descending, and surrounding me, I was seized with inexpressible ecstasy. I have tried and tried since to find words for what happened, but no human tongue can describe it. My soul was grabbed up and, after rising, began to spread itself into the universe. Or rather, the universe and my soul were so enmeshed that it was impossible to tell where one began and the other left off. I looked down from a thousand miles and saw my poor physical body, kneeling and trembling. Should I return? Why bother?

  A deep voice all around me, welling up within and without my soul, said, “Go back, you have work to do.”

  Oh, no, no! my soul argued. Why be so narrow, so squeezed, ever again? But I felt it slipping and pulling downward, and soon was looking out of my own eye-holes again at the fading, shimmering veil of light. I do not know how long I remained there, but somehow my mind told me that I must go home. Hilde’s pears lay on the floor. I gathered them up automatically, without feeling, for my mind was dizzy and drunk.

  As I opened the church door, the light of the late-afternoon sun hit me like a blow, and I stepped forth into a world from whose pain I shrank. But something, something very odd, had transformed the scene before me. There was light, light in everything! A tree trunk was a great trickle of deep orange flame, rising from the ground, while its leaves were a shower of fluttering orange sparks. The grass was glimmering phosphorescent green. Before me a flock of sparrows fluttered upward, a half-dozen glowing circles of yellow-green. The very earth itself gave off a deep, warm luminescence.

  “What about rocks? Are only living things light?” And I looked carefully at a large stone and saw deep within it the dark, diffuse shining of orange-red.

  “What of things once living, but dead?” I looked at a dead branch, and the palest shade of the orange of its parent tree still played along its length. A bone glowed with a soft, pale, and exquisite green light.

  “Everything is light!” I was astonished. “We are all light, we are all one! Everyone and everything!” A fierce joy took hold of my entire being.

  I occupied myself, on the walk home, with looking at transformed things, creatures, and plants. I could see the insects hidden in the grass by their colored sparks. The road, the fields, the trees, were magical and fascinating.

  Still in a trance I opened the low door of Hilde’s dark hut. But I got a strange welcome there indeed.

  “Sweet, blessed Jesus, have mercy,” cried the old woman, as she backed away from the fire and into the opposite corner.

  What is wrong? I wanted to ask, but I could only move my mouth soundlessly. I tried, tried to speak, but words would not come out.

  Then I heard the deep voice booming within and without my ears, coming from the universe and rising up my spine as well. It said, “God is light.”

  Hilde fell to her knees and crossed herself. Did she hear it, too? I found my own voice and finally asked, “Dear Mother Hilde, what on earth is wrong?”

  “Margaret,” she answered in a shaky voice, “something, something is glowing about your head and shoulders. Orange light with golden points is flowing about your head. Your face shines, shines with a yellow light. I am very frightened of you.”

  “Oh, my dear, dear friend. I think I have gone mad. I am full of unspeakable joy.”

  “I have seen plenty of madwomen, and madmen, too, and it is not madness to shine and glow with visible light. It is something else entirely.” Then speaking brought her mind back to its sharpness, and she added, “Tell me, is it painful? How did it happen?”

  “I thought I had died, and that death was beautiful. But a voice said I had work to do and must return. And I flowed back into my body, and looked out and saw all things, even the ugliest, made unspeakably beautiful with light. I am reborn, walking in a reborn world.”

  The old lady looked at me shrewdly, and tilted her head on one side, as if thinking about something. “You can’t walk about the world glowing. It isn’t done. I don’t understand how you can get a living if you look like that.”

  “I don’t know how I will live, Hilde, because I don’t know why I am living. Won’t it be shown to me somehow?”

  “I think it will, I think it will,” murmured Mother Hilde, nodding her head in deep thought. Then she looked sharply, very sharply indeed, at me.

  “I have thought of something,” she said. “A test. See these hands of mine?” She lifted up her hands, which had knots at every finger joint. “It has always been my greatest fear that the pain which knots my hands will one day steal them from me. You know I can no longer spin. But on the day when I can no longer pick herbs or catch a baby’s head, on that day begins my death from starvation.” She walked toward me with her hands held in front of her.

  “Touch my hands, Margaret. Touch my hands and pray them healed.” I reached out and clasped her hands in mine. In my mind I said a prayer, held for a moment the image of soft, supple, whole young hands in my mind, and closed my eyes. I felt a strange kind of energy, that was not really me, flow through me, followed by a kind of draining, as if strength were leaving me, as the glow in the room subsided.

  “Why, Margaret, this is wonderful! Look at my hands move! The pain has gone and they feel quite young again!” She clasped each finger in turn and moved it out straight, so that I could see that already the joints moved easily. And in the days that followed, the swellings and knots at the joints were dissolved from within.

  “Margaret, you have found your task. Here is your gift. You are meant to do good, great good!” said Mother Hilde, holding her hands before her and wiggling the fingers as she admired their movement.

  “But, Mother Hilde, the light does not shine now. I don’t think I can do it again.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, walking all around me sagely, like a hen inspecting a large worm, “the light is much less. Scarcely a glow at all. That is because you drained your power in the healing. If you renew the light again, you can heal again.”

  “But how shall I renew the light? I never called it in the first place.”

  “What were you doing when the light came upon you?” Mother Hilde is a clever woman, cleverer than I am, although I do not think I am stupid.

  “Praying and not praying. I was in perfect quiet, and thought of nothing, and myself as nothing.”

  “Then I will leave the room, and you shall do it again, and see if the glow returns.” And she did. With great quiet and care I knelt exactly as before, and put my mind in that precise state of nothingness. The last thing I thought of before I emptied my mind was the light.

  I stayed that way a long time, until I noticed that the room was glowing around me. Not with the fierce golden glow of the veil, which I think now I am never destined to see again, but a soft, sweet, infinitely peaceful orangish glow. I felt as if something soft rested on m
y shoulder. I thanked and blessed God, and arose.

  “Yes, yes,” said Mother Hilde, bustling into the room. “You definitely glow again. I saw you start, and then a soft orange glow arose from your head and shoulders.”

  “You saw? You were watching?” I was appalled.

  “Through the latch hole, my dear. What do you expect? You know how curious I am.”

  “Good friend,” I said, patting her hand, “if I had known I was being observed, then I couldn’t have done it.”

  “So I guessed, so I guessed. But you must forgive me. For if I had not, how would we understand your gift? Besides, I promise you truly, I shall never watch again, if you want it so. My curiosity is fulfilled. Yours is a true gift, sent by God, to do good in the world.” She was moving about busily, but then she stopped suddenly and looked directly at me.

  “But tell me,” she asked, “now that you glow and pray, will you still promise to bury my bones?”

  “Of course, of course,” I promised. “I am still the same in all ways but one. A sinner, and undeserving, and your friend.”

  BROTHER GREGORY HAD SPLASHED himself with ink, so fast had he written down the words while Margaret was speaking. As she looked at him, his hands were shaking, his lips compressed, and his face drained of color. He looked up from his work.

  “In the name of God, woman, I conjure you, are you lying in the tiniest particular?”

  “No, Brother Gregory, it is as true as my tongue can tell it.”

  “Do you know what this thing of which you have spoken is?”

  “I know,” said Margaret calmly. “That is why I told you the part before was necessary.”

  “This is unjust, not right at all,” fumed Brother Gregory. “I wore the hair shirt, I fasted, I prayed days and nights without sleep. I offered Him my pure body, and God, who withheld from me the Mystic Union, gave it to you! You! A woman, a sinner, a disobedient troublemaker. A woman of such great vanity that she has to hire a clerk to write her miserable memoirs!” He flung the pen down.

  “Dearest Brother Gregory,” said Margaret, placing a hand consolingly on his shoulder, only to draw it rapidly away when she saw him flinch. “Have you not heard it said that God grants His Grace where He will? I never claimed to be worthy. And besides, I would think that you would know by now that the hair shirt gives nothing but the itch.”

  “So I found,” said Brother Gregory glumly. “And fasting a headache, and flagellation leaves stains on the undershirt.”

  “Cold water works best on those.”

  “Not if you wish to show them off,” said Brother Gregory ruefully.

  “How, then, can you call a woman vain, when you wished to show off such decorations?” asked Margaret, smiling when Brother Gregory’s apologetic shake of the head showed that the tension had suddenly dissolved.

  “I was younger then,” said Brother Gregory, “ever so young. It seems a thousand years ago.” He looked sadly out of the window. He enjoyed feeling sorry for himself. And even now he was beginning to recover, although he would never admit it. He had decided that Margaret had been deceived by some sort of temporary lunacy, or worse, by a false Visitation, although he would be forbearing enough not to suggest it to her. It happens all the time to women. It’s because they are naturally weak-minded and overemotional. They just crack under the slightest pressure and think it all has a supernatural origin. He continued to look tragic. It felt good. By this time Margaret began to think that he was enjoying the drama of his tragedy a bit too much. Perhaps, she thought, this would be the time to change the subject.

  “Tell me, Brother Gregory, in your opinion can a woman think as well as a man?”

  “Properly speaking,” he said in a learned voice, “a woman cannot think at all, or at least, think as we men know it. But the imitative ability is very greatly developed in women, so that by copying men, some may attain the appearance of thought.”

  “This imitative ability,” said Margaret in a careful tone of voice, so as not to seem leading, “—how far does it carry women in the most extreme cases?”

  “Well, as far as true rationality, it cannot lead. In invention, mathematics, and the higher philosophy, these being products of original thought and therefore pertaining to men, a woman cannot hope to enter. But in simpler things they have occasionally been trained. And it is, in my mind, entirely just to do so. For is not a falcon made useful to man by being trained in hunting? Is not a dog capable of being changed from a wild, dangerous creature to a gentle companion, capable of retrieving objects and protecting his lord’s house, if trained to the height of his capacities? Thus it is with women—they, too, should be trained as well as they are able, for the sake of their service to man.”

  “Indeed you are very enlightened,” responded Margaret dryly.

  “Yes, it is difficult to hold such views. I have often faced sharpest opposition! For, as both ancient and modern Authorities tell us, women are incapable of incorporating higher moral concepts into their actions. And so there is a significant school of thought that holds it extremely dangerous to impart any knowledge to women, for then one enlarges the scope of their actions! But I believe that if a woman is sufficiently trained in humility, such small knowledge of which they are capable will not harm them.”

  “You seem a great expert on these matters,” said Margaret with delicate irony.

  “That is quite so, for some years ago I prepared a polemic, ‘On the Understanding of Women and Other Creatures,’ which enjoyed a certain controversy before it was suppressed.”

  “You enjoyed writing?” Margaret asked carefully. Or was it the controversy part you enjoyed, rather than the writing, she thought to herself. She had had adequate time to observe Brother Gregory’s contentious nature well.

  “Yes, writing is a source of great pleasure to me,” answered Brother Gregory loftily. “Except, of course, when one has to recant, as I did when ‘On the Understanding’ was burned.” Suddenly the conversation was not taking such a pleasant direction for him. He was still smarting from the recantation and didn’t like to think about it. How like Margaret to surprise it out of him. He had been convinced that the arguments in his book were too clever for suppression, but it was exactly that excessive and dangerous cleverness that had drawn the notice of the authorities. And the public book burning was such a disgrace that he’d not only had to leave the university, but leave town as well. He hadn’t taught since. It was another matter he intended to take up with God when he saw Him.

  “That is so sad,” Margaret agreed, seeing the stormy look cross his face and not wanting any of the thunder and lightning in her own vicinity.

  “Yes, indeed, I’m glad you can see that. A book is like a child! The burden of losing it is great! And the penance my confessor imposed I found obnoxious as well.” Margaret couldn’t see that at all. What man on earth understands what it’s like for a woman to lose a child? But she was discreet enough not to pry more.

  “It is a very great pity, I think.” She nodded in agreement. Sensing her sympathy had left him unguarded, Margaret added slyly, seemingly as an afterthought, “Would this possible training for women include reading and writing?”

  “Oh, of course, that,” replied Brother Gregory, with an airy wave of his hand. His face unclouded. His mind was off in a new direction. “Many high ladies read with much benefit to their souls. And there are some abbesses, I believe, who can write in both French and Latin.”

  “If I could write, I would write in English,” said Margaret.

  “That is, of course, self-evident, for you don’t know a word of any civilized tongue.”

  “I meant, that if I knew Latin, I would still write in English, for that is the best-understood language of the people.”

  “That is a simple idea, to be forgiven only because you are a woman,” smiled Brother Gregory, softening. “For, first of all, the greatness of writing is this: to address other high and learned minds, and persons in important places, thus attaining fame and honor for
ever. Secondly, while the people who understand only English, being lowly, are more numerous, they cannot read, nor are they interested in lofty thinking. Therefore writing in English is a waste.”

  “With such reasoning, then, it must be so,” murmured Margaret soothingly. “But tell me, do you think a woman such as I, if I were to find a teacher, might be able to read and write?”

  “Why certainly, it would seem so.”

  “Possibly a person well versed in the weaknesses of women’s minds, such as yourself, might be able to give instruction such as I was capable of understanding?”

  “Aha! You have caught me fair, there!”

  “I could double your fee.”

  “Certainly, madame, your husband is most indulgent in the money he allows you. But I would ask his permission first for any such venture, were I you.”

  “Then it is as good as done!” exclaimed Margaret, clapping her hands. “My husband has promised already that I should have reading lessons if I do not flag on the French lessons, which he says are more important.”

  “Nonetheless, I will have his permission from his own mouth, before this undertaking.” Looking at the new radiance on Margaret’s face, Brother Gregory smiled inwardly, for he, too, was in love with books. Love of learning, even that of which a woman was capable, spoke directly to his heart.