“The Kingdom of God,” says Jesus, “may be compared to a merchant seeking fine pearls. And when he found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had to obtain it.” Why a pearl, and not a diamond, a ruby, an emerald, or a sapphire? Let’s think about this. The diamond is the hardest substance known to man; that’s why industrial diamonds are used in special saw-blades, such as my brother-in-law’s father used when he worked in a quarry. But a pearl is made up almost entirely of calcium carbonate. Don’t put your pearls in vinegar, not if you don’t want them to dissolve! Rubies and emeralds and sapphires have bold and beautiful colors, but the pearl is pale, and you have to consider it at your ease, to notice the iridescence, or the soft gleam of light that shades with every slightest movement. Those other gems can be cut — even diamonds can be cut; but if you break the pearl, you get debris. You have to have the pearl as a whole, or nothing at all. And pearls of great price are not only large; they are subtle, their beauty depending on how many layers of mother-of-pearl the oyster or clam secretes, and how thin the layers are, and who knows what else — what’s irritating the creature to secrete the pearl-making substance, or how old it is, or what it’s long had for dinner.
Our Word of the Week names an object that men underwent great toil and risk to find. Jesus wasn’t thinking of freshwater pearls, but those that pearl-fishers would find far below the sea’s surface in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Pearls aren’t a common thing, after all. You might dive for pearls for weeks and not come up with more than one or two of low quality. That’s also why they commanded a great price.
When that wonderful medieval fellow we call the Pearl-poet or the Gawain-poet (after his two most brilliant poems) thought of the pearl, it was as a sign of perfection, milky white and perfectly round, just like the earth, just like the sun and the stars, just like the whole universe as they conceived it. Thus a pearl, small, delicate, gentle, white but also admitting color, was as the “heaven in a grain of sand” that the poet Blake saw. It’s fitting that the main character in Pearl isn’t a king or a general, but the soul of a little girl who dwells in that kingdom of God, and who wears a white robe lined with pearls, and on her breast, a single “pearl of price.”
I tell my students that the Pearl-maiden’s name may be Margaret, because that’s what that name means, from French Marguerite, from Latin margarita, borrowed from Greek margarites, which itself may have been borrowed from a Persian word for the same. Marjorie is just a form of the same name. Everybody in Scotland and most everybody in England would have known of Saint Margaret, too. She was the Queen of Scotland during the reign of the great King Malcolm “Canmore,” meaning “Big Chief” — a devoted wife and an energetic and pious Christian, tireless in works of charity, and, it seems, a tempering influence on the warlike Malcolm. But to give him credit, he was willing to be influenced. You may know him as the same young Malcolm who assumes the throne of Scotland after the fall of “this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen,” that is, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.
Saint Margaret is a favorite among the Scots in the part of New Scotland — Nova Scotia — where we live in the summer, and we’ve attended a church called Saint Margaret of Scotland. The people who emigrated to Cape Breton from Scotland tended to be from the Catholic clans like MacDonald and Campbell, and they brought with them their Gaelic language. Saint Margaret herself probably spoke quite a few languages: Gaelic, English (she was a cousin of Edward the Confessor, king of England and also a canonized saint), Norse, possibly Hungarian, and even Russian. But let’s just say that her life conformed to her name: she was a true pearl.
I’ve heard people snort at the supposedly unrealistic family comedies of the 1950’s, with housewives wearing a pearl necklace while they did the chores. But that’s not far from the truth. In those years, natural pearls came into stiff competition with cultured pearls, and that drove the price way down. But what’s wrong with dressing well? Sure, I know that pearls around the neck don’t mean there’s a pearl in the heart. Yet the pearls are lovely. And I think we’d do well to have a few more pearls in our daily life. It isn’t a diamond of wisdom or an emerald of wisdom or even a gold ingot of wisdom. We can’t well imagine those, can we? It’s a pearl of wisdom, because wisdom too is like the pearl: subtle, winsome, complete.
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