“I want to be privileged to help build that First Church of the World
Unified under God. It is a dreadful thing to says but, you see, I am
very rich; this dreadful war has made me ever so much richer--steel and
shipping and things--it is my trustees have done it. I am ashamed to be
so rich. I want to give. I want to give and help this great beginning of
yours. I want you to let me help on the temporal side, to make it
easy for you to stand forth and deliver your message, amidst suitable
surroundings and without any horrid worries on account of the sacrifices
you have made. Please do not turn my offering aside. I have never wanted
anything so much in all my life as I want to make this gift. Unless I
can make it I feel that for me there is no salvation! I shall stick with
my loads and loads of stocks and shares and horrid possessions outside
the Needle's Eye. But if I could build a temple for God, and just live
somewhere near it so as to be the poor woman who sweeps out the chapels,
and die perhaps and be buried under its floor! Don't smile at me. I
mean every word of it. Years ago I thought of such a thing. After I had
visited the Certosa di Pavia--do you know it? So beautiful, and those
two still alabaster figures--recumbent. But until now I could never see
my way to any such service. Now I do. I am all afire to do it. Help me!
Tell me! Let me stand behind you and make your mission possible. I feel
I have come to the most wonderful phase in my life. I feel my call has
come....
“I have written this letter over three times, and torn each of them up.
I do so want to say all this, and it is so desperately hard to say. I am
full of fears that you despise me. I know there is a sort of high colour
about me. My passion for brightness. I am absurd. But inside of me is
a soul, a real, living, breathing soul. Crying out to you: 'Oh, let me
help! Let me help!' I will do anything, I will endure anything if only I
can keep hold of the vision splendid you gave me in the cathedral. I see
it now day and night, the dream of the place I can make for you--and you
preaching! My fingers itch to begin. The day before yesterday I said
to myself, 'I am quite unworthy, I am a worldly woman, a rich, smart,
decorated woman. He will never accept me as I am.' I took off all
my jewels, every one, I looked through all my clothes, and at last I
decided I would have made for me a very simple straight grey dress, just
simple and straight and grey. Perhaps you will think that too is absurd
of me, too self-conscious. I would not tell of it to you if I did not
want you to understand how alive I am to my utter impossibilities, how
resolved I am to do anything so that I may be able to serve. But never
mind about silly me; let me tell you how I see the new church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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