Miracles and Human Agency

Miracles and Human Agency is the tension between waiting for divine intervention and taking practical steps to help others. In The Staircase, the unfinished chapel and the mysterious carpenter make that tension visible: a novena asks Saint Joseph for help, while Lizzy and Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy bring a hungry worker to the very problem the prayers concern. The novel lets the staircase become a miracle to some characters and the result of a person’s skill to another, without forcing the reader to settle the difference.

The Staircase as a Test of Faith

The new chapel has been completed after five years and at great cost to the Bishop, only for the community to discover that no staircase leads to its choir loft. Mother Magdalena presents the omission as an unresolved practical failure. The choir must sing at the back of the church until a way to reach the loft is found. Elinora, who had expected to sing above, voices the immediate disappointment; Mother Magdalena says that nobody knows how the staircase was left out and explains that the convent has begun a novena to Saint Joseph.

The prayers soon become part of the school’s routines, not simply a private response to the building problem. The girls attend the novena each evening, and Lizzy is told that she must take part along with regular classes and morning Mass. At first, the Latin and Catholic practice mark her difference as a Protestant newcomer. Yet the chapel prayers also become a rare interval in which she can find peace and think about Mama. Ritual therefore has more than one operation: it expresses the school’s shared hope, imposes religious expectations on Lizzy, and gives her a quiet space for grief.

The girls’ faith in the novena acquires a more contentious form when the Bishop hires the carpenter Lizzy has brought to his attention. Consuello and Winona worry that accepting a worker’s help will imply that the community no longer needs Saint Joseph. In their reasoning, asking for a miracle and then acting to solve the problem appear to contradict one another. Their objection reveals how expectation can turn faith into a test: the carpenter’s presence seems to threaten the very demonstration of trust the novena was meant to express.

Work, Need, and Practical Help

The carpenter is a beggar without work, but he has a trade. Lizzy explains the staircase problem to the Bishop and suggests that he employ the man. Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy acknowledges that the nuns have prayed and that people expect him to perform miracles, while admitting that he cannot perform them. Instead, he agrees to let the hungry carpenter examine the chapel. His decision does not end the religious question; it makes room for skilled work inside it.

When the carpenter studies the space where the stairs should be, he measures with his hands, moves in a circle, and looks upward. He says that he can build the staircase, but that it must spiral. The Bishop is surprised: other carpenters had been consulted, yet none had proposed that design. The scene gives the proposed miracle a material process. The solution begins with close attention to the space and an unconventional judgment about what can fit there; it also depends on a person being given food and employment rather than left to beg.

The novel places such practical care alongside religious and institutional rules elsewhere in Lizzy’s life. When Delvina gives birth, Lizzy has learned that midwives in Santa Fe must hold a municipal license and a certificate from a parish priest confirming that they know how to administer baptism. The rule intensifies her concern for the baby and her decision to get mother and child back to the convent for a proper midwife. In another crisis, Sister Roberta gives Mrs. Lacey medicine and coffee, explaining that God forgives disobedience when it helps someone in need. These episodes make agency concrete: people respond to danger through transport, nursing, work, and accommodation, even as religious practice and official rules shape what help is available.

The Finished Staircase and Competing Interpretations

The carpenter’s work is finished by the time Ramona brings him supper; he has completed the staircase and gone. The girls and nuns gather at the back of the church to look up at it. Its polished circular rise reaches the choir loft in thirty-three carefully trimmed steps. The staircase is not merely a promise of divine help but a built object, made from wood and judged by its workmanship.

Its lack of a banister immediately reopens the question of how to understand the result. Sister Roberta calls the omission a lesson in faith and demonstrates her own cautious way down, moving backward on her hands and knees before proposing that the others practise. Her response makes belief bodily and communal: faith is not only a claim about who the carpenter was, but also something the nuns enact while confronting an awkward, unsupported structure. Mother Magdalena then declares that Saint Joseph came after all and identifies the carpenter as the saint. The nuns kneel to pray, turning the finished work into a shared religious interpretation.

Lizzy does not accept that identification. She remembers the carpenter as a person she had spoken with: he listened to her troubles, held her kitten, advised her about her father, and told her he was sad to leave his own family. He had also been hurt when the girls rejected his presence. Those remembered acts make the saintly explanation harder for Lizzy, not easier. Her doubt rests on intimacy with the worker and attention to his ordinary human vulnerability, while the nuns’ conclusion grows from the staircase and their prayers.

Belief Left Open

The carpenter’s disappearance allows the religious interpretation to flourish, but it does not settle the narrative’s uncertainty. For Lizzy, a small possibility remains in the story of Cleo, the blind cat who is no longer blind after the carpenter held her. The cat’s recovery is presented as a narrow opening for belief, not as proof that the carpenter was Saint Joseph. The people who interpret events differently continue to share the same staircase and the same unexplained departure.

The author’s note identifies the novel as a fictional work built from the Santa Fe legend of a mysterious carpenter who made the staircase for the Chapel of Loretto. It distinguishes that legend from the novel’s invented episodes, including Lizzy’s bringing the carpenter to the Bishop and the girls’ rejection of him. The note explicitly leaves open whether the historical staircase builder was Saint Joseph, just as the story leaves Lizzy’s belief undecided. This framing makes uncertainty part of the concept’s meaning: a community may call skilled work a miracle, while the person closest to the worker sees human kindness and labor. Lizzy leaves the convent a better person, but not quite convinced that she has met a saint. The possibility of the miraculous survives without erasing the agency that made help possible.