'They Are Running as the Shameful Years Have Run'

Though I haven’t visited in more than five months, I’m told my office on campus remains conspicuously stark, as I left it. My decor of choice is Moderne Monastic. I don’t like clutter in my life or my prose. I have a desk, two chairs and a file cabinet. The only thing hanging on the walls is a cork bulletin board on which I have pinned photos of my sons and Louis Armstrong. My monochromatic desk – gray – holds two objects – the telephone and a Saint Barbara candle, which I have never lit. The latter is a gift from my former boss. She gave it to me in 2008, shortly before we made a misguided detour to Seattle, and returned it to me in 2011, when I came back to Houston and my old job.

   

Saint Barbara is the patron saint of tunnelers, miners, armorers, artillerymen, military engineers, gunsmiths and others who work with explosives. She is invoked against thunder and lightning and accidents involving gunpowder. On campus today, one can’t be too careful. Every sane person acknowledges a few superstitions – call them acts of faith -- albeit secretly. I had a cousin named Barbara who was born with Downs syndrome and died very young.

The lives of the saints always make interesting reading. Barbara was a third-century martyr, probably from Lebanon. Her feast day is December 4, observed as the date her father, Dioscorus, beheaded her. She is said to have died during the reign of the Roman Emperor Maximianus (or Maximian), perhaps in 267. I think of her again because I happened on a poem by G.K. Chesterton, “The Ballad of Saint Barbara.” It takes place in 1914, during the first Battle of the Marne. At the start of the poem, the Germans are advancing on Paris and their victory seems almost certain. A Breton gunner invokes the saint:

“Be at the bursting doors of doom, and in the dark deliver us,

Who loosen the last window on the sun of sudden death.”

And then the Allied guns drive back the Germans:

“The touch and the tornado; all our guns give tongue together,

St. Barbara for the gunnery and God defend the right –

They are stopped and gapped and battered as we blast away the weather,

Building window upon window to our lady of the light;

For the light is come on Liberty, her foes are falling, falling,

They are reeling, they are running as the shameful years have run.”