No Horses | Excerpt from a letter to a poet

Angels on a Pinhead

...And with that, Young Heart, I think I’ve told you everything. But the urge to scribble persists. Should I elaborate excessively on why a lack of hierarchy (not discipline) is to blame for the popular malaise of our moment? Or shall I tell you about the time that the Patron Saint of Vicarious Experience, the one and only empathic mind of the Common Era, and my unofficial girlfriend in a coma, Simone Weil, visited Thomas Merton’s hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani in the summer of 1942?

Option B, obviously.

Well, buckle up, Heart, because it was an affair of the utmost seriousness.

“Thomas, I need your help immediately. I must parachute over Vichy to deliver medical care to the wounded French at the front. It is necessary.”

“Apologies, Madame, who are you?”

Simone pushed past him, through the entry of his cinderblock den. She was a stick figure in corduroys. Thomas’ cabin (or “dwelling,” as one could only dwell there) was decorated (by a monk) sparsely with a crucifix fixed at the center of an accidental horizon on the wall. “Yes, we will need this,” Simone noted, as she took it down. “Is there nowhere to sit?

“Please Madame, by all means, sit in the chair.” Eyes: rolling.

She held the cross like a kitten and instructed, “No, Thomas, you sit. You must convince your president to convince Churchill. You are French, no?” She lurched over him like a weeping willow. “Is there a telephone?

“Yes, in the abbot’s office—Madame, we have strict observance of our rules here, and of our schedule. I must be on my way to—”

With a sigh, she handed him the cross and marched to the kitchen. “You will need convincing,” she said as she filled a copper kettle for tea.

The Abbey of Gethsemani was a solitary place and did, indeed, require strict observance of the schedule. Ora et labora, pray and work. But the performance of discipline is among the ordinary vices we must resist in order to enjoy a visit from an angel.

Oh heavens, Thomas thought, must I really be on my way? How delightful to be hosted in my own home. For once, my neighbors love me! “Yes, Madame, I will call him immediately, but first you must give me the details, down to the very minutia, no matter how trivial. Your name?”

“Simone Weil.”

“And your medical experience?”

“None, I will assemble a team.”

“Of course, and when will your team be ready?”

“Time is of the essence.”

“Very well,” Thomas agreed. “Will you stay for lunch?”

”Yes.”

It took Simone two (2) hours to make sandwiches, but it was enough time to bring Thomas up to speed on their mission. Dates. Times. Coordinates. No weapons. “They will have to shoot pacifists...Thomas, I’m impressed that you can remember all this without taking notes.”

Thomas glowed. The old boy had developed what can only be described as a crush! “Well, you know, Madame,” he yammered, “the contemplative life allows for certain... ummm.... freedoms to cultivate the... ahhhh ...mind—wait! Shoot who!? Are you the pacifist?”

“No, I’m not a pacifist, but they don’t know that.”

“SIMONE NO!! Slow down; let’s just hold our horses for a minute.”

“I know, it’s serious,” she said (patronizing him penetratingly with her prickly, pithy parlance) and handed him a cabbage and onion sandwich on a dish towel. “No horses. Thomas, I came to you because you are precisely who you believe you are. You do not make sentimental compromises.

Thomas stood there silently, holding the cross to his chest, like a boy weeping under a weeping weeping willow. Everyone was crying it seemed. Sobbing uncontrollably. Shrieking in terror. Worldwide. So why not he? “No horses,” he mumbled.

Simone thanked him on behalf of the Free French Resistance. “You have a call to make. Eat first.” She took the cross from his grasp and bid him adieu.

Thomas followed the angel out of his cabin, into the yard, but she was gone. He kneeled to lay the sandwich in the grass for the robins to pick at. “Au revoir,” he whispered, as he drew the sign of the cross, forehead to chest, shoulder to shoulder, and with a deep breath in the nostrils and out the mouth, he sprinted, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, to the abbot’s office. He had a call to make.