Edith Wharton looked the very essence of a high society grande dame of 1900. Willa Cather for all her western and midwestern novels dressed fashionably and spent her last years in New York City. Both wrote books that are still companions revealing to me with empathy and deep insight the place of suffering, the cruelty of mistaken choices, the desolation that any hospital chaplain sees every day and must confront with honesty and hope.
Wharton had great homes and was a great writer but never found the love of her life. When she died her friends saw that inside a gold ring she wore were the words “Ave crux, spes unica.” This is from the Catholic liturgy. Hail cross, our only hope.
Willa Cather’s book called Death Comes for the Archbishop is one of the best things on the interior life, the motivation, the obscure life of self sacrifice, of a priest. Both Cather and Wharton were writing about figures they had access to through empathy and imagination. They knew more with less experience than those who brush against suffering all the time but who have no imagination and no empathy.
I write about all this because September 14 is the feast of the Holy Cross. It is a huge day shared by the great Christian traditions East and West.
I found this from John Henry Newman. He proposes that resignation rather than sanquine hope best suits the human condition.
I call resignation a more blessed frame of mind than sanguine hope of present success, because it is the truer, and the more consistent with our fallen state of being, and the more improving to our hearts; and because it is that for which the most eminent servants of God have been conspicuous. To expect great effects from our exertions for religious objects is natural indeed, and innocent, but it arises from inexperience of the kind of work we have to do,—to change the heart and will of man. It is a far nobler frame of mind, to labour, not with the hope of seeing the fruit of our labour, but for conscience’ sake, as a matter of duty; and again, in faith, trusting good will be done, though we see it not. Look through the Bible, and you will find God’s servants, even though they began with success, end with disappointment; not that God’s purposes or His instruments fail, but that the time for reaping what we have sown is hereafter, not here; that here there is no great visible fruit in any one man’s lifetime. Moses, for instance, began with leading the Israelites out of Egypt in triumph; he ended at the age of an hundred and twenty years, before his journey was finished and Canaan gained, one among the offending multitudes who were overthrown in the wilderness [1 Cor. x. 5.]. Samuel’s reformations ended in the people’s wilfully choosing a king like the nations around them. Elijah, after his successes, fled from Jezebel into the wilderness to mourn over his disappointments. Isaiah, after Hezekiah’s religious reign, and the miraculous destruction of Sennacherib’s army, fell upon the evil days of his son Manasseh. Even in the successes of the first Christian teachers, the Apostles, the same rule is observed. After all the great works God enabled them to accomplish, they confessed before their death that what they experienced, and what they saw before them, was reverse and calamity, and that the fruit of their labour would not be seen, till Christ came to open the books and collect His saints from the four corners of the earth. “Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived,” [2 Tim. iii. 13.] is the testimony of St. Peter, St. Paul, St. John, and St. Jude.

Tags: Cather, cross, Newman, Wharton