Tension between miracle and doubt

The tension between miracles and doubt is the novel’s governing uncertainty: the carpenter who builds the convent chapel’s staircase is acclaimed as Saint Joseph by the community, while Lizzy Enders remains unconvinced and cannot entirely dismiss the possibility. The question is not settled by a final proof. Instead, the story places practical acts of help beside events that resist explanation, allowing faith to become at once a communal conviction, a personal need, and an unresolved possibility.

A Need Before a Miracle

The staircase begins as a material problem, not a supernatural visitation. The chapel needs access to its choir loft, and the nuns have been praying a novena to Saint Joseph while Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy also prays for a solution. He admits that the nuns look to him to perform miracles, though he cannot do so. Lizzy proposes employing a hungry carpenter who has no work and was brought to the convent after spending the night in its barn. The bishop accepts the suggestion, observing that hunger can give a person a special vision. In this first account of the possible miracle, prayer and practical intervention are not opposites: the carpenter’s arrival may be interpreted as an answer to prayer, but Lizzy’s decision to find him work is what makes his labor possible.

The bishop later gives that connection a spiritual formulation. After Lizzy has survived danger by grabbing an image of the Virgin, he tells her that God helps those who help themselves, and suggests that Saint Joseph may have sent José so that the community need only let him help. His view makes human agency part of providence rather than evidence against it. Lizzy, however, knows the girls will not accept that explanation. The disagreement is already present before the staircase is finished: the same carpenter can be welcomed as a worker, understood as an answer to prayer, or rejected as an outsider.

The Staircase and Its Interpretations

When Ramona goes to take the carpenter supper, she finds the staircase completed and its builder gone. The girls and nuns gather in the church to look at a polished, graceful circular structure rising to the choir loft. Its thirty-three steps are trimmed with precision. The sudden completion and the carpenter’s disappearance give the work the shape of a wonder, but the story reports the result without supplying an explanation for how he accomplished it so quickly.

Mother Magdalena turns the striking workmanship into a definite religious claim: Saint Joseph came after all, and the carpenter was Saint Joseph. The nuns kneel and pray; Lizzy leaves the chapel rather than joining them. Their certainty and her resistance arise from the same scene, but they do not see the same kind of evidence. For the nuns, the completed staircase answers their prayers. For Lizzy, the carpenter was a particular man she had spoken with: he listened to her troubles, held her kitten, advised her about her father, and told her how sad he was to leave his own family. He had also been hurt when the girls did not want him around. These human details make it difficult for her simply to replace the person she knew with a saintly identity.

The story later widens the dispute beyond the convent. People arrive in droves to see the staircase, and experts in wood say they know no wood like it within hundreds of miles. The girls and nuns keep their miracle; Lizzy cannot explain the carpenter’s speed. She offers a possible practical account—that he might have secretly brought helpers into the church at night—but presents it as speculation, not discovery. Her insistence that he was not Saint Joseph coexists with the fact that she has no demonstrated alternative explanation. The staircase’s visible workmanship draws visitors; its hidden circumstances preserve the doubt.

The Cat as a Small Opening

The staircase is not Lizzy’s only encounter with a possible miracle. In the final part of the story, she remembers Cleo being returned to her by Sister Roberta, who said the cat was blind. Lizzy accepts that Cleo really had been blind. In the barn, José picked the kitten up and told Lizzy, “She might see again. You must love her and care for her well.” This moment does not establish what happened afterward or prove that José healed Cleo. It gives Lizzy an intimate, concrete reason to reconsider the carpenter, one that cannot be reduced to the public argument over the staircase.

The memory also echoes the story’s emphasis on care as action. José’s words do not promise a supernatural cure; they direct Lizzy to love and look after the animal. Yet when Elinora later recalls that she had pricked Cleo’s eyes, she connects the cat’s possible recovery to the carpenter’s touch. Lizzy is left with a troubling conjunction: a deliberate injury, a blind kitten, and José holding her. The episode becomes a small window onto belief, not a conclusive answer. The author’s note explicitly identifies Cleo as the opening through which Lizzy might believe, while leaving the question of the carpenter’s identity unsettled.

Miracles as People

Lizzy’s skepticism has a history. Having lost her mother and been left by her father, she comes to Santa Fe wary of extraordinary claims and distrustful of what she regards as Catholic mysteries. She hopes one day to find Jesse James, but does not arrive with an expectation that faith will reorder her life. The author describes her as close to becoming a lifelong cynic, yet still capable of change. Her doubt is therefore more than an intellectual objection: it is a form of self-protection shaped by bereavement and abandonment.

The novel gives that guarded outlook an alternative vocabulary for miracles. Lizzy recognizes them in people: Mrs. Lacey, Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy, Sister Roberta, perhaps even Elinora, and, most of all, the eventual fact that her father wants her. These examples do not depend on confirming a supernatural intervention. They are changes in human relation and conduct, apprehended by someone who has learned to expect loss. The contrast does not make the staircase irrelevant; it shows why Lizzy can accept goodness in people more readily than an explanation in terms of uncommon powers.

An Unresolved Ending

During a peaceful moment beside a fire, with snow falling outside, Lizzy feels an unseen presence close to her. She thinks of Mama or Mrs. Lacey, or perhaps someone or something else, and for once does not scoff or doubt the feeling. Cleo lifts her head and hisses. The scene allows Lizzy a moment of assurance without naming its source or turning it into proof. Soon afterward, Elinora announces that the staircase is finished, and the convent’s public interpretation takes over: the carpenter was Saint Joseph.

The final movement refuses to make Lizzy’s position simple. As she leaves, she recalls the carpenter’s tenderness toward Cleo and asks herself whether he could have been Saint Joseph. She still says she did not believe it, yet now admits she may never have an answer. The author’s note makes that openness deliberate: the novel takes the famous Loretto staircase legend as its springboard, but leaves readers to decide whether the fictional carpenter was Saint Joseph, just as Lizzy leaves the convent without a settled belief. The miracle survives not because doubt disappears, but because neither the communal certainty nor Lizzy’s skepticism can account for everything the story has shown.