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Whoever Is at the Door
On a porter's bell, a tent in the heat of the day and the fires gathered before Samhain
Morning
For forty-six years a lay brother named Alphonsus Rodriguez kept the door of a Jesuit college on the island of Majorca, and every time the bell rang he went to it as though the Holy itself were standing on the step. He had not set out for a life like that. He had been a wool merchant in Segovia, a husband and a father, and by the time he was near forty he had buried his wife and all three of his children. The order hesitated over him, a grieving widower with little Latin, and when they finally took him in they gave him the work nobody asks for, which was answering the door. The Jesuits keep his memory today. The story they tell is that he pictured God outside each time the bell sounded, asking to be let in, and so he went to the merchant and the beggar and the boy with a message the same way, as if any one of them might be the one.
I think about that man most mornings in the week before the old year turns, when the light comes so late that the coffee is half gone before the sun clears the trees. A door is the plainest thing in a house. We pass through ours a dozen times a day and never once look at it. But a porter lives at the hinge of things, and it may be that he saw more of the world from that one doorway than the scholars upstairs saw from their books.
If your eastern sky runs out over water or a flat field, you might step outside this morning a little before sunrise and look low in the east, just ahead of where the sun will come. Venus, the star that gives Friday its name in the Romance tongues, slipped between us and the sun last week and went out of sight, and now she is coming back into the dawn on the other side. She went in at the evening door and is returning through the morning one. It is a hard catch this early in her return, low and brief in the brightening, and worth a second morning if you miss it.
