Welcome back, my friend.
Last time, we sat together in the company of Charles Williams --- that remarkable Englishman who found the sacred hiding in plain sight, tucked inside detective novels and supernatural thrillers and the ordinary streets of Oxford. He believed the spiritual world was not somewhere else. It was here, pressing up against everything, if you knew how to look.
Today we travel a long way from Oxford. We leave the grey skies and the old stone colleges behind, and we go south and west, across an ocean, deep into the mountains of Brazil. To a place called Minas Gerais --- the General Mines --- a land that gave up gold and diamonds for a century and left behind a people who learned to find other kinds of treasure.
We are going to sit with a woman who had no surname, no formal education, no institutional standing of any kind. A woman the world had decided, before she drew her first breath, did not particularly matter.
Her name was Francisca de Paula de Jesus. But everyone who loved her --- and there were many --- called her Nhá Chica. Aunt Chica.
I think you are going to love her too.
I want to tell you something I saw, before I tell you who she was.
It was late. The kind of late where even the dogs have given up and gone quiet. I was sitting in a small house on a narrow street in Baependi --- a mountain town in Minas Gerais, the kind of town where everyone knows which window belongs to which family, where the air smells of red earth and woodsmoke and something green I could never quite name.
The house was modest. That is a kind word for it. A few rooms. A swept floor. A candle burning in front of a small carved image of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception --- a little figure, worn smooth with years of handling, that had belonged to her grandmother before it belonged to her mother before it belonged to her.
She was old by then. Very old. She sat with her rosary, the beads moving slowly through her fingers, and she prayed the way people pray when they have been doing it for nearly eighty years --- not urgently, not desperately, but with the quiet certainty of someone talking to a friend they trust completely.
And then she said something that stayed with me.
She said: Don't deceive me. Let me finish the façade. Then you can take me. I will finish the church --- God's power is great.
I don't answer prayers. That has never been my role. I am a witness, not an agent. I have sat beside millions of prayers rising into the dark and I have learned to hold them gently, without grasping, without promising anything.
But I can tell you this.
She finished the façade. She finished the church. Thirty years of slow, faithful, stubborn building --- and she saw it done. And only then, at more than eighty years of age, did she let go.
I was glad. Not because I arranged it. I want to be clear about that. But because I was there, and I saw it, and some prayers are fulfilled in a way that feels like the universe leaning in just slightly, just enough, to let a good thing be completed.
Now. Let me tell you who this woman was, and how she came to be building a church at all.
Francisca de Paula de Jesus was born into a world that had already decided her value.
Her mother, Izabel Maria, was an enslaved woman in the interior of Brazil. Her father --- well. His name does not appear anywhere. It never did. That absence tells you something about the world she was born into, and who held power in it, and how that power was used.
She was baptized on the twenty-sixth of April, 1810, in a small settlement called Santo Antônio do Rio das Mortes Pequeno. The name of the place means Saint Anthony of the Little River of the Dead. Even the geography had a melancholy poetry to it.
Minas Gerais --- the General Mines --- had been the heart of Brazil's gold and diamond rush for most of the previous century. The Portuguese crown had pulled unimaginable wealth out of these red mountains, and the machinery that made that possible ran on enslaved labor. By the time Francisca was born, the gold rush was fading, but the society it had built remained --- stratified, rigid, organized around ownership. Some people owned things. Some people were things.
She was, from her first breath, in the second category.
And yet.
Her mother carried something with her that no system of ownership could touch. A small carved image of Nossa Senhora da Conceição --- Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception --- that had passed from grandmother to mother and would pass now to daughter. Along with the image came a practice, a devotion, a way of orienting oneself toward the divine that required nothing from the powerful and owed nothing to the institution. You could own a woman's labor. You could not own her prayers.
When Francisca was still a child, her mother was freed. It was 1820. Freedom, when it came, came hard and fast and cost everything --- within months of her liberation, Izabel Maria was dead. Francisca was ten years old. She had a half-brother, Teotônio, who was twelve. They had each other, a few belongings, the little carved image, and a new town: Baependi, further into the mountains, where they would make what life they could.
Her mother had asked something of her before she died. She asked Francisca to dedicate herself to God and to the care of those in need. To live simply. To stay close to faith.
Francisca said yes. And then she spent the next seventy-five years keeping that promise.
She never married, though proposals came. She lived alone --- not in isolation, but in chosen simplicity. She received everyone who came to her door. The poor came for food, and she fed them. The sick came for prayer, and she prayed. The wealthy came for counsel --- merchants, landowners, even officials of the empire --- and she received them the same way she received everyone else. With patience. With a word of comfort. With the promise of her intercession.
When someone asked her once how she did it --- how she always seemed to know the right thing to say, how her prayers seemed to carry such weight --- she answered without hesitation.
It is because I pray with faith, she said. That is all.
Her brother Teotônio prospered in Baependi. He became a man of some means, and when he died in 1862, he left everything to his sister. Francisca sold it. She gave most of it away. And with what remained, she went to the Municipal Council of Baependi, paid two thousand réis for a building permit, and began to build a chapel for Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception --- the same Our Lady who had traveled in that small carved image from her grandmother's hands to her mother's hands to hers.
She was in her fifties. The chapel would take thirty years to finish.
She had already decided that was fine.
I want you to think for a moment about what it meant --- in 1865, in Baependi, in the mountains of Minas Gerais --- for this particular woman to build this particular thing.
Brazil was still an empire. It would remain one until 1889. The Catholic Church was the official church of that empire, woven into its legal and social fabric in ways that are difficult to imagine now. Bishops answered to the crown as much as to Rome. Parishes kept the birth records. The Church baptized you, married you, buried you. It was not a private matter of personal faith. It was the architecture of society itself.
And within that architecture, everything had its place. The clergy built churches. Religious orders built churches. Wealthy patrons funded churches, and had their names inscribed in stone to prove it. The institution moved, and things were built, and the powerful were remembered.
Francisca de Paula de Jesus had no place in that architecture. She was a freed Black woman with no surname, no formal education, no religious vows, no wealthy patron, no title of any kind. The parish priest of Baependi described her, with a kind of baffled affection, as simply a poor illiterate woman, a faithful servant of God full of faith. He meant it as praise. It was also, without his quite intending it, a precise description of everything she was not supposed to be able to do.
And yet she called herself a servant of Our Lady. Not of the Church, not of the diocese, not of any hierarchy. Of Mary. Directly, personally, intimately.
She called her Minha Sinhá. My Lady. My Mistress.
That word --- Sinhá --- is worth sitting with for a moment. It was the word used for the mistress of an estate, the woman of the house, the one who held authority over the household. A woman who had grown up in a world where that word named the people who owned her family now used it as her most intimate name for the divine. She had not rejected the language of power. She had redirected it entirely --- pointing it upward, toward a relationship that no earthly hierarchy could grant or revoke.
This was not theology. She would not have called it that. She couldn't read the theological texts, and she didn't need to. What she had was something older and more immediate than theology --- a direct, practiced, daily relationship with the sacred, conducted through prayer, through service, through the beads of a rosary worn smooth by decades of use.
Every Friday she received no one. Friday was the day she washed her own clothes and gave herself entirely to prayer and reflection --- honoring the Passion, the suffering, the cost of love. Every other day the door was open. The poor came for bread and she gave it. The troubled came for counsel and she gave it. The powerful came, hats in hand, and she received them with the same unhurried attention she gave to everyone else.
There was something in this that the people of Baependi recognized immediately and completely, even if they could not have articulated it in formal terms. She was not performing charity. She was not fulfilling an assigned role. She was living from the inside out --- her faith so thoroughly inhabiting her that every action, however small, was continuous with her prayer. The bread she handed to a hungry man on Monday and the rosary she prayed on Friday were the same gesture. The same orientation. The same Minha Sinhá at the center of everything.
They called her the Mother of the Poor. They called her the Saint of Baependi. They called her Nhá Chica --- Aunt Chica --- which is perhaps the most telling name of all. Not a title of reverence. A title of kinship. She was family to them. She belonged to them. And they, in naming her that way, were doing something the institutional Church would take another hundred and fifty years to formalize.
They were recognizing a saint.
I have watched a great many people build things in the name of faith.
I have seen cathedrals rise over centuries, stone by stone, generation after generation, funded by kings and designed by architects whose names were recorded in chronicles and celebrated across continents. I have seen monasteries carved into cliffsides and temples assembled from materials carried up mountains on human backs. I have seen the enormous, organized, institutional force of religion move through history like a river --- powerful, shaping everything it touches, leaving a changed landscape behind.
And I have seen something else. Smaller, quieter, harder to see from a distance. The individual thread, pulled from faith and woven directly into the world by a single pair of hands.
Nhá Chica was not outside the Catholic Church. I want to be clear about that, because it would be easy --- and wrong --- to read her story as a story about someone who found God despite the institution, or around it, or in spite of it. That is not what happened. She was formed by her faith. She was held by it. The prayers her mother taught her, the devotion to Our Lady that came down through three generations of women who had nothing else to pass on, the sacraments she received, the chapel she built to honor the Immaculate Conception --- all of it was Catholic, thoroughly and completely. The institution was the water she swam in.
What she did --- and this is the thing I want you to hold --- was act from within that faith entirely on her own initiative.
No bishop commissioned the chapel. No parish council approved the project. No religious order assigned her to the care of the poor. She looked at the world around her, she looked at what her faith asked of her, and she moved. The two thousand réis for the building permit. The inheritance sold and distributed. The thirty years of slow construction, community donation by community donation, stone by stone, until the façade was finished and she could finally rest.
This is what individual initiative looks like when it is rooted in faith rather than mere impulse. It is not rebellion. It is not independence for its own sake. It is the natural outward motion of an interior life so thoroughly oriented toward the sacred that action becomes inevitable. She didn't build the chapel because someone told her to. She built it because her faith made the need visible to her, and having seen it, she could not look away.
And here is what that contributed to the world's spiritual imagination --- not just to Catholicism, not just to Brazil, but to the long human conversation about what faith is actually for.
It is a demonstration. A living, stone-and-mortar, thirty-year demonstration that the ordinary believer, fully inhabiting their faith, carries within them the capacity to contribute to that faith in ways the institution alone could never generate. The Church did not produce Nhá Chica. Nhá Chica contributed to the Church. She enlarged it from the inside, from the bottom, from the most improbable corner of its vast human membership --- a freed Black woman with no surname in a small mountain town, who saw what needed doing and did it.
The people of Baependi understood this immediately. They named her, claimed her, venerated her while she was still alive and walking among them. The institutional Church arrived at the same conclusion in 2013, when Pope Francis beatified her --- the first Afro-Brazilian woman ever to receive that recognition. She became, in that moment, officially part of the Church's treasury of holy lives.
But she had been part of it all along. The institution was simply, finally, catching up to what the people already knew.
I have seen this pattern more times than I can count. The recognition flows upward eventually. But the initiative --- the irreducible, faith-filled, self-directed act of service --- that always moves first. It has to. That is its nature.
It cannot wait for permission. It has already seen the need.
Something is missing for a great many people. I notice it. I have been watching long enough to recognize the shape of it.
It is not always the absence of belief. That is what makes it hard to name. People still feel the pull of something larger than themselves. They still stand at the edge of the ocean, or hold a newborn, or sit beside someone they love who is dying, and they know --- they simply know --- that there is more to this than what they can see and measure and explain. The belief is often still there.
What is missing is something else. A sense that the belief asks something of them. Personally. Specifically. With their particular hands and their particular life.
Faith, for many people, has become something received and held. A comfort. A consolation. A set of convictions carried quietly through the week until Sunday, or Friday, or whatever day the community gathers --- and then carried quietly home again. It is not nothing. But it is not quite alive in the way that a thing is alive when it is in motion.
I think about Nhá Chica, and I cannot find a single day in her life that looked like that.
Not because her life was full of dramatic gestures. It wasn't. It was extraordinarily ordinary, in its way --- a swept floor, a candle, a rosary, an open door, bread distributed to the poor on a particular morning of the week, counsel given to whoever came. The same things, day after day, for decade after decade. But none of it passive. All of it chosen. All of it flowing from a faith that never stopped asking something of her, and from a self that never stopped answering.
The initiative was the meaning. They were not separate things.
And here is what I want you to hold, because I think it matters enormously. What she did was not self-invention. It was not restless energy looking for an outlet, or personal ambition dressed in religious language. The framework of her Faith --- the prayers her mother taught her, the devotion to Our Lady, the sacraments, the community of believers around her --- that framework was the very thing that made her initiative legible. That gave it direction. That connected her particular action to something vast and ancient and larger than herself.
Initiative without that container is just activity. It exhausts itself. It loses its way. But initiative within Faith --- real Faith, lived Faith, Faith that has been inhabited so completely that it begins to make demands --- that becomes contribution. That builds something that outlasts the builder.
Your tradition is already asking something of you. I say that not as a challenge but as a simple observation, from someone who has been watching for a very long time. Whatever framework of Faith you live within, it already contains a call that has your name on it. Not someone more qualified. Not someone with more resources or more time or more obvious gifts. You. With your specific eyes that can see what others around you may not be seeing. With your specific hands that are available for what needs doing.
The need is already visible, if you are willing to look with the kind of attention that Faith teaches.
And I will tell you something else. This is already happening. Quietly, without announcement, in every tradition and every community, there are people doing exactly what Nhá Chica did --- not waiting for assignment, not seeking recognition, simply seeing a need and moving toward it because their faith made looking away impossible. They are building their chapels. Some in stone. Most in something less visible but no less real.
You are already part of that fabric.
The only question is whether you know it yet.
I have a question for you. And I want you to sit with it rather than answer it quickly, because the quick answer is probably not the real one.
What has your faith made visible to you that you have not yet moved toward?
Not in general. Not abstractly. Specifically. The thing you already know about. The need you have already seen, more than once, that keeps coming back into your field of vision no matter how many times you look away. The thing that, if you are honest, you already suspect has something to do with you.
Nhá Chica was not a complicated person in the way we sometimes imagine saints to be complicated --- full of visions and interior struggles and dramatic moments of divine encounter. She was, by her own account, simply a woman who prayed with faith. And the praying made things visible. And the visible things asked to be responded to. And she responded.
That is the whole of it, really. That is the complete circuit.
I have watched people spend years waiting to feel ready. Waiting for the right moment, the right resources, the right level of certainty. Waiting, sometimes, for someone in authority to tell them that what they are already feeling called to do is in fact what they should do. And I understand the impulse. It comes from humility, often. From not wanting to presume.
But Nhá Chica did not wait for permission. She waited for enough money to pay the building permit. That is a different kind of waiting --- practical, patient, faithful. She knew what she was building. She just needed the two thousand réis.
What do you need? And is the waiting you are doing the practical kind, or the other kind?
I am not asking you to build a chapel. Though perhaps you are. I am asking you to consider that the meaning you may be looking for --- the sense that your faith is alive and asking something and worth the living of it --- may be on the other side of a step you have already been shown but not yet taken.
She finished the façade. Then she rested.
There is a whole life available in that sequence.
Next time, we travel to fifteenth-century India. To a man named Pipa --- a Rajput king, wealthy and powerful, with a kingdom and an army and every reason to stay exactly where he was. And yet something found him. Something he couldn't name, couldn't argue with, couldn't ignore. And one day he walked away from all of it --- the throne, the court, the life that had been arranged for him --- and followed it.
I was there when he left. I remember the look on his face.
I think you are going to find him remarkable.
But for now --- stay with Nhá Chica a little longer, if you can. Stay with the small house on Rua da Conceição, and the candle, and the little carved image worn smooth by three generations of women's hands. Stay with the chapel that took thirty years to finish and still stands. Stay with the open door, and the bread, and the unhurried attention she gave to everyone who came.
She had no surname. The world she was born into had decided, before she arrived, that she did not particularly matter.
And she spent eighty-seven years proving, quietly and without argument, that faith has never needed the world's permission to do its work.
Neither do you.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.