Communion

Essayists, old and young, are invited to compete for membership in the Club. A prize of $250 will be awarded each month for the most distinguished essay of a thousand words. The award for February goes to Henri Roser, a French Protestant pastor who has just been imprisoned for refusal to serve in the French Army. A conscientious objector, he is the General Secretary of La Reconciliation, the French branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.

THE night was nearly over, one of those long nights passed in a railway train, when the hardness of the seats and the passing to and fro of fellow travelers make it impossible to sleep; we had left Cracow during the evening, and about one o’clock in the morning we had had to go through customs formalities and have our passports inspected. These unpleasant memories were now fading, but they left behind them a feeling of loneliness such as one often experiences abroad at the end of long and tedious hours of wakefulness in the midst of strangers.

In the sky the last clouds of night were stealing away before the rising sun. The hills were being crested with light. The valley through which our train was passing showed signs of awakening. It was the hour of the Angelus. I opened my New Testament.

But I had counted too much on my powers of resistance. Scarcely had I begun to read — I am ashamed to admit it! —when I dozed off. And the New Testament fell to the floor.

Immediately I started up. But, quicker than I, a woman dressed in the great coat and silk scarf of a Russian peasant, who was sitting opposite me, stooped down and picked up the little book. To my surprise, she did not hand it back to me, but started to examine it closely, then to turn its leaves. Obviously she was trying to discover what it might be.

Suddenly she stood up. Out of her hamper, carefully wedged on the rack above her seat, she took from between a loaf and some cheese a thick book, bound in red leather, and old with use: a Bible.

The other four travelers were watching her, their curiosity aroused. She opened her Bible and searched for a passage. Then I saw her take my New Testament in her hands.

Comparing the proper names and the numbers, she found the French text corresponding to her Russian text. Then, without letting go of the little book, she held it out to me, pointing out a word with her finger and questioning me with her eyes. I read ‘disciples,’at the beginning of the conversation of Jesus with the Samaritan woman (St. John Iv. 8). I nodded. And her face became bright.

She took the New Testament again, and as before, first in the Russian Bible, then in the French text, she sought another word. And she showed me in verse 42 of the same chapter, ‘Saviour.’ Anxiously she asked me — her expression was easy to read — whether Jesus was my Saviour. Again I nodded. And her whole face became illumined.

Then I took the two books in my hands, and in the same way looked out in the Bible the salutation of an epistle: ‘Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ.’ When at length she comprehended these words, her features became more radiant than the morning which was breaking in all its glory.

She drew from her great coat a large woolen pocketbook, opened it, and took from it a paper which she held out to me: it was clearly a certificate of baptism, duly initialed, and bearing the seal of some Ukrainian Church. Another paper: it was a work contract issued by the French Ministry, authorizing her to come to the North of France as a servant — in the house of a pastor friend of mine!

At this moment a man who had been standing in the corridor came back and sat down. He was a Ukrainian miner who had already worked in France and could thus serve as interpreter to some extent. But it was scarcely necessary now. We had said all that really mattered.

And the others who were traveling with us had felt it — the German lady, the Czech noncommissioned officer, the young Polish married couple. They had followed all this pantomime, and had gradually understood what was happening, The compartment was full of the invisible Presence.

Thanks to a common faith, — which, I think you will agree, is not so much consent to one and the same doctrine as communion of each soul with Jesus Christ and of all in Jesus Christ, — I experienced that morning, as never before, the absolute and magnificent reality of the ‘communion of saints,’ which it is quite impossible to think of breaking by responding to any call whatever to war. Beyond the earthly barriers of nationality, of race, of language, of culture, in spite of the shortness of time and the tumult of a journey, He who is our life and the head of the Church had united us in the higher life and as members of His body.

HENRI ROSER