The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life

ADVENTURES IN GRACE

ADVENTURES IN GRACE 1 And Raïssa? How could she possibly adjust to being transplanted to the New World, a stranger among strangers, after having established a modus vivendi at Meudon that enabled her to pursue in relative solitude the life of prayer? “Raïssa had lost the one place—Meudon, with the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in our home—where she felt some shelter on the earth and where, running the risk of dying of pain, she found conditions exceptionally favorable in spite of everything for recollection.” Thus wrote Jacques, introducing that portion of her journal that runs from  until . But isn’t it normal, he asks, that anyone who sets out on the road to God must one day be deprived of all the facilities for prayer that for so long a time had been granted her? Here is a description of Raïssa by their friend Julie Kernan. “At this time as Jacques was submerged in work, Raïssa was particularly unhappy. Distressed by the news that seeped through to her from France, missing the peace and quiet of Meudon, she shrank from the bustle and noise of the big city around her and spent much time at her desk, leaving the apartment as rarely as possible. Even so, she graciously received visitors, and coped as best she could with the domestic problems that arose.” By contrast,Vera is described as wading into the shops and markets,  babbling away in the best English she could muster, the practical one of the trio who kept their ménage going, as she always had. Julie Kernan thought Raïssa had more knowledge of English, but she spoke it reluctantly, dreading to make mistakes—a fear familiar to many a monoglot. And yet she accompanied Jacques on his trips, for example, to Chicago in March where they stayed with John and Eleanor Nef and Jacques lectured at the university . As if contrasting his experience with her own, she wrote in her journal on March , “Jacques’s lectures at the university. For me this exile is a terrible trial.” On April , she vowed to die but then took it back when she considered how lonely that would leave Jacques andVera. On January , , she wrote, “Bergson died yesterday (January ). Great pain for us. I think of all that we owe him, and that many others do as well.We heard in a letter from France that he had been baptized and did not want to declare it publicly out of consideration for the Jews subject to persecution in recent years. Our master, lost and found.” Judith Suther writes of this time. “It would nonetheless be inaccurate, as well as insensitive, to say that Raïssa ceased to contribute to the balance of love and mutual support that bound the ‘small flock of three’ together, or that she wailed in private while Jacques andVera dealt with the world.What took place, to a greater degree than had occurred before, was a shifting of the balance and a sharpening of everyone’s roles. Raïssa became more withdrawn , Jacques more politically and intellectually engaged, Vera more serviceable and nurturing. Under the pressure of war and expatriation, their natural tendencies became more clearly defined.” 2 However badly Raïssa took life in America, at least at first, nonetheless she solidered on. And what was she doing at her desk, as Julie Kernan describes her? She was writing her masterpiece in two installments, the first called in English We Have Been FriendsTogether, and its sequel, Adventures in Grace. Memoirs . Somehow the term seemed inadequate to what Raïssa put down on these pages. She evoked her childhood, meeting Jacques, the encounter with Léon Bloy, conversion, and then the quest for holiness. For generations of American Catholics, she made the French Catholic world vibrant with life. One felt that he had known Ernest Psichari and Charles Péguy; Bloy seemed a presence in the room as one read Raïssa. The artists and writers, the philosophers and theologians, a whole world, peopled it seemed by converts Adventures in Grace  or reverts to the faith, for whom Catholicism was the central fact of their lives and the key to making sense of the world and oneself. And she is the keeper of the flame. She launched the explanation of Jacques’s long connection with Action Française—he was too responsive to the urging...