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Dear God, maker of leaves and stones:
Once I wrote you about a rock I found, and about a leaf I threw away.
Lord, on a hazy fall day some years ago, I climbed a gentle hill not far from Madonna House, that I might be alone with the asters and the wind and the sun and the dying leaves.
I went slowly, for I had long been ill, and I was not yet fully well. I sat on a rock when I reached the top, and spent a long time looking at the slope below me, and at the crests of hills around me.
I watched the white sisterhood of the clouds. They moved in a procession, like so many nuns and novices walking to some distant Vespers. I watched their shadows smudging the piney hillsides with splotches of black and gray and royal indigo and purple.
At times it seemed to me that the hills were mocking the clouds, holding up cartoon silhouettes that moved with the same majestic pace as the splendid shapes so high above them. And at other times it seemed they were merely trying to show their skill, copying your masterpieces with crude shadows.
I watched until I could absorb no more of your grandeur, God.
After a time, I rose and filled my pockets with the brightest leaves in the woods. Leaves of the poplar, gold and scarlet. Leaves of the maple, pink and mauve and orange and lemon and black and glowing red.
Leaves of the oak, red and brown and russet and burnt sienna. Leaves of the strawberry plants, and the bright red berries of the wintergreen. Leaves you had touched with love.
I brought them home with me. And I spilled them in a heap before the statue of Our Lady of Sorrows, that she, through this symbol, might enjoy the colors, the tracery of veins, the textures, and the shapes that you had made.
A queer birthday present, that little pile of worthless bright dead leaves; but it was gathered with love, and with love placed at her statue’s feet.
A staunch non-Catholic might say this was proof positive that we worship idols. Let him say it. A statue cannot enjoy anything, of course, but the Queen of Heaven, by the power you have given her, hovers about her symbol, and certainly could enjoy that tribute of my love.
As the days passed—and as the years passed in their slow yet too-swift way—I brought more autumn leaves to her. Whenever I saw a leaf with many colors, or with unusual color combinations, or with rare beauty in its structure or its lines, I brought it home for her.
I was a miser guarding a private autumn, all his own, warming his heart over a mess of dead and fading leaves.
I sometimes tried to think of them as a heap of rainbow fragments, or a rare collection of sovereigns and doubloons and topazes and rubies and amethysts and turquoises. Their colors dimmed, but slowly, and slightly. Beauty retires reluctantly from our Lady’s statue.
The leaves accumulated with the years. I heaped one year’s collection on top of another. There was dust in the pile, dust that grew and grew. You can’t dust leaves.
But until the day I picked a stone out of the dust, and saw the red stain on it, I held my portable autumn inviolate.
The stone changed everything. A stone is a permanent love token. A stone may gather as much dust as a leaf, but it can be cleaned. A leaf is impossible to dust.
Stones could be picked up every day—save when the deep snows hid them. Autumn leaves are available only in the autumn. There were stones that held more color than a forest full of leaves. There were stones with crystals in them that shone like precious gems.
Now, Lord, in the autumn of my life, I have the splendor and the glory and the warmth of autumn in these stones; and the warmth and the love of your mother in my heart and in my bones.
I have, unknowingly, been laying up treasures for myself, bringing them home to Mary. In making love to her, I have enriched my life, and I have had a great adventure.
There are other men with other heaps of treasure—securities, annuities, factories, fleets, oil wells, vineyards, farms, ranches, skyscrapers, mines, hotels, and blocks of high-priced apartments.
None is so rich as I was with my pile of wrinkling autumn leaves. None is so rich as I am now with my heap of shining rocks and bits of petrified wood.
Love is a two-way bridge. I bring little rags of leaves to the Virgin Queen, or grimy handfuls of shining stones. She, in return, clothes me with the grandeur of her royal court, and puts a diadem around my old fat head.
I am in the autumn of my life. Winter will pounce savagely upon me. I shall, perhaps, be old and gaunt and thin and bony, like the maples and the elms, when winter grinds me with his cold white teeth. But I shall be warm with love.
Let the chill winds blow. Let the skies drop tons of snow. Let the river freeze deep, from bank to bank. Let the trees split with the cold in the middle of the night. And let the Northern Lights caper as madly as they will. It will still be autumn in my breast!
With love,
Your aging pebble
—Excerpted from I Cover God (1962), Bruce Publishing Co., pp. 59-64, out-of-print
