It is a curious thing that authors like Mark Twain and Evelyn Waugh would find the most satisfaction and pride in writing about the saints. The former, in his Joan of Arc, and the latter, in his Helena, reached what they believed was the height of their literary accomplishment—regardless of what the most cynical of critics might have said. Perhaps it is because there is something so true, so bright, and so attractive about the lives of the saints that one cannot help but to love them the more he gets to know them. And so it is with St. Helena, the subject of Waugh’s novel. Waugh writes elsewhere, in an essay on the sainted empress, that what we learn from her is that God “wants a different thing from each of us, laborious or easy, conspicuous or quite private, but something which only we can do and for which we were each created.” And, indeed, it was a daunting task to recover the True Cross centuries after the crucifixion of Our Lord—one that could only have fallen to Helena, the mother of Constantine and dowager empress of the Holy Roman Empire. It was Helena who brought together in her person the theological virtues and the material resources that made possible the retrieval of the Cross. We see in her, too, the mystery of God’s timing, for many, many years passed while the Cross lay hidden and waiting for her. God waits for each of us in turn, and although the glorious lot of retrieving the most precious relic of Our Lord’s life cannot fall to us all, He waits for us still, and gives us each a task that cannot fall to anyone else. 

To this point, there is a striking passage in the novel in which Waugh describes the Rome of Helena’s day:

Rome was not beautiful. Beauty would come later. For centuries the spoils of the world had flowed into the City, piled up and lost themselves there. For centuries to come they would be dispersed and disfigured. The City would be burned and pillaged and deserted, and the marble stripped for the kiln. The streets would silt up, gypsies would bivouac under her broken arches, and goats pick their path between thorn and fallen statuary. Beauty would come. She was on the way, far distant still, saddling under the piling stars for the huge journey of more than a thousand years. Beauty would come in her own time, capricious, adorable wander, and briefly make her home on the seven hills.

It was in this age, an age lying in wait for the coming of Beauty, that Our Lord saw fit to unearth the mechanism of His glory. We can be tempted to believe that we do not live in an age of miracles; in any case, it can be easy to believe that if Beauty did come once, she has since left. But God, Who willed that He should be born and die all those centuries ago, Who willed that His Cross lay lost and hidden until His empress—who was approaching the end of her life—would seek and find it, willed you into existence, too. Whatever your task might be, whether large or small, He created you for an age such as this. He is waiting for you to take up your cross.