Giant Hours With Poet Preachers | Page 4

have no shoes!'"
The Shoes of Happiness.
THE HAPPINESS OF LOWLINESS
And just as this opening poem teaches the happiness of poverty, so the
next, "The Juggler of Touraine," teaches the happiness of lowliness.
Poor Barnabas, just a common juggler, when winter came, because he
had been spending the summer amusing people, had no place to go, and
a sympathetic monk took him into the monastery to live. Barnabas was
happy for a time; but after a while, as he saw everybody else
worshiping the Beautiful Mother with lute and brush, viol, drum, talent,
and prayer, he began to feel that his talents were worthless:
"But I, poor Barnabas, nothing can I, But drone in the sun as a drowsy
fly."
The Shoes of Happiness.
Then came a thought that leaped like flame over his being, and an hour
later the monks found him, kneeling in the sacred altar place. What he

was doing chagrined them. They were shocked just as many people of
this day, to see a man worshiping with a different bend of the knee than
that to which they had been accustomed. How prone we are to judge
those who do not worship just as we have worshiped! This seems such
a common human weakness that Alfred Noyes, with a touch of kindly
indignation, speaks a word in "The Forest of Wild Thyme" that may be
interjected just here in this study of Barnabas the juggler, whom the
monks indignantly found worshiping the Virgin by juggling his colored
balls in the air, and speaking thus as he juggled:
"'Lady,' he cried again, 'look, I entreat: I worship with fingers, and body,
and feet!"
"And they heard him cry at Our Lady's shrine: 'All that I am, Madame,
all is thine! Again I come with spangle and ball To lay at your altar my
little, my all!'"
The Shoes of Happiness.
But the poor old monks were indignant. They, and some others of more
modern days, had never caught the real gist of the "Judge not" of the
New Testament; nor had they read Noyes:
"How foolish, then, you will agree, Are those who think that all must
see The world alike, or those who scorn Another, who perchance, was
born Where--in a different dream from theirs-- What they called sins to
him are prayers! We cannot judge; we cannot know; All things mingle,
all things flow; There's only one thing constant here-- Love--that
untranscended sphere: Love, that while all ages run Holds the wheeling
worlds in one; Love, that, as your sages tell, Soars to heaven and sinks
to hell."
The Shoes of Happiness.
No, we have no right to judge one another. The monks condemned poor
Barnabas because he was not worshiping as they had always worshiped.
They too forgot the real spirit of worship as they condemned him:
"'Nothing like this do the rules provide! This is scandal, this is a shame,
This madcap prank in Our Lady's name. Out of the doors with him;
back to the street: He has no place at Our Lady's feet!'"
The Shoes of Happiness.
However, then, as now, men are not the final judges:
"But why do the elders suddenly quake, Their eyes a-stare and their
knees a-shake? Down from the rafters arching high, Her blowing

mantle blue with the sky-- Lightly down from the dark descends The
Lady of Beauty and lightly bends Over Barnabas stretched in the altar
place, And wipes the dew from his shining face; Then touching his hair
with a look of light, Passes again from the mortal sight. An odor of
lilies hallows the air, And sounds as of harpings are everywhere.
"'Ah,' cry the elders, beating the breast, 'So the lowly deed is the lofty
test! And whatever is done from the heart to Him Is done from the
height of the Seraphim!'"
The Shoes of Happiness.
"HOW THE GREAT GUEST CAME"
A STUDY OF COMPLETE HAPPINESS IN SERVICE
I have never found a poem which more truly pictures the Christ and
how he comes to human beings than this one of Markham's. Conrad the
cobbler had a dream, when he had grown old, that the Master would
come "His guest to be." He arose at dawn on that day of great
expectations, decorated his simple shop with boughs of green and
waited:
"His friends went home; and his face grew still As he watched for the
shadow across the sill; He lived all the moments o'er and o'er, When the
Lord should enter the lowly door-- The knock, the call, the latch pulled
up, The lighted face, the offered cup. He would wash the feet where the
spikes had been; He would kiss the hands where the nails went in; And
then at last he would sit with him And break