33 They Brought Their Sick to Hi would go near, for women in childbirth, and for people nearly starved with the famine. Imagine hospices for travelers, and chapels for all of us wayfarers on the road to the last things. Imagine schools—especially shops where a young man with no money and no prospects might learn a gainful trade, to be a mason, a tanner, a potter, a carpenter. Imagine monks, hundreds of them, for whom this entire city is their monastery. One monk washes the purulent sores of a dying man. Another is showing a boy how not to gouge the wood with the plane. Another plies his hoe in a large field of vegetables. Another brings the Body of Christ to a child too sick to move. Another digs a grave. All of them are working and praying. In his eulogy for Basil’s requiem Mass, Saint Gregory Nazianzen praised this wonder of love, greater in real glory than “seven-gatedThebes…and the pyramids, and the immeasurable bronze of the Colossus,” and all those other wonders of the world, which gained their founders nothing but a little brief fame. “Go forth a little way from Caesarea,” he said, “and behold the new city, the storehouse of piety, the common treasury of the wealthy, in which the superfluities of their wealth, yes, and even their necessaries, are stored, in consequence of [Basil’s] exhortations, freed from the power of the moth, no longer gladdening the eyes of the thief, and escaping both the emulation of envy, and the
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzMzNzY=