And then, from wherever it is that they come from, there came another moment. Not long after A Long Day's Dying was published, a man I scarcely knew asked me to have lunch with him. He was one of the ministers who came regularly to preach at the Lawrenceville chapel and whose sermons had a sort of witty, sardonic liveliness to them. All through lunch I remember wondering why it was that he had sought me out. He was some twenty years older than I was, and we had nothing in common as far as I knew, had never exchanged more than a few words before. I have long since forgotten what we talked about, but it seems to me that he told me a good deal about himself and his work, and I mainly just listened, drawing lines on the white tablecloth with my fork as I wondered when he would get to the point if indeed there was any point. Then at some moment during the conversation, I became aware that the subject had switched from him to me. I was highly thought of as a writer, he said. There were a lot of people who took my words seriously and were influenced by them. Had I ever considered, he said— and though I cannot remember his words, I remember his tone of voice which was dry and slightly mocking in a way that left you uncertain whether it was you he was mocking or himself. He was a complicated sort of man with a little black mustache who spoke in a way that struck me as concealing more about him than it revealed. Had I ever considered, he said, putting my gift with words to work for — God, did he say? Or the Church? Or Christ? I no longer remember how he put it exactly, and he made no great thing of it but passed on soon to other matters so that I do not to this day know whether this was what he had asked me to lunch to say or not. I no longer remember what I answered him either or what impression his words made on me except that they took me entirely by surprise. No, I must have told him. I had never considered such a thing. And that was the end of it except that out of all the events that took place during those five years of teaching at Lawrenceville, it is one of the few that I remember distinctly, like an old photograph preserved by accident between the pages of a book.
~ originally published in The Sacred Journey and Listening to Your Life
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There was the day I signed the contract for that first novel that I had started in college, for instance. It was a major event for me, needless to say— the fulfillment of my wildest dreams of literary glory. But of the actual signing itself in the offices of Alfred Knopf— who was there and what was said and how I felt— I remember nothing. What I remember instead is leaving the publisher's office afterwards and running into somebody in the building whom I had known slightly at college. He was working as a messenger boy, he told me. I was, as I thought, on the brink of fame and fortune. But instead of feeling any pride or sense of superior accomplishment by the comparison, I remember a great and unheralded rush of something like sadness, almost like shame. I had been very lucky, and he had not been very lucky, and the pleasure that I might have taken in what had happened to me was all but lost in the realization that nothing comparable, as far as I could see, had happened to him. I wanted to say something or do something to make it up to him, but I had no idea how or what and ended up saying nothing of any consequence at all, least of all anything about the contract that I had just signed. We simply said goodbye in the lobby, he going his way and I mine, and that was that. All I can say now is that something small but unforgettable happened inside me as the result of that chance meeting — some small flickering out of the truth that, in the long run, there can be no real joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all and I can take no credit for it. It was nothing I piously thought my way to. It was no conscious attempt to work out my own salvation. What I felt was something better and truer than I was, or than I am, and it happened, as perhaps all such things do, as a gift.
~ originally published in The Sacred Journey and Listening to Your Life
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Beyond time is the phrase that I have used to describe this leg of my journey because it was then that I think I first began to have a pale version of the experience that Saint Paul describes in his letter to the Philippians. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," he writes, "for God is at work in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure." I was a long way from thinking in terms of my own salvation or anybody else's, but through the people I met like the drunken boy at the Nass and the black man at the head of the line, through the courses I happened to take and the books I happened to read, through such events as eating that muddy turnip in Alabama, through my revulsion at my own weaknesses as well as through such satisfaction as I had in my own strengths, it seems to me now that a power from beyond time was working to achieve its own aim through my aimless life in time as it works through the lives of all of us and all our times.
~ originally published in The Sacred Journey and Listening to Your Life
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The ghost of St. Cuthbert is talking with Godric; Glythwin is a rabbit:
"The night I died, they waved lit torches to and fro from that high ledge behind you there to tell my monks on Lindisfarne the news. Would you believe it, though? There was not one of them awake. So Glythwin sank his teeth into the abbot's toe. You should have seen the jig he did with one foot tucked beneath him like a stork!"
"You say that you were dead, and yet you saw?" I said.
"Not only saw but laughed," he said, " till tears ran down."
"Would I be right that you're a ghost then, Father, and you haunt this place?"
"Ah well, and if it comes to that," he said, "your shadow fell here long before your foot, and that's a kind of haunting too. Farne had long been calling you, I mean, before you heard at last and came."
" I heard no call, Father," I said. " I came here as a stranger, and I came by chance."
"Was it as a stranger and by chance you wept?" he said, then let me wonder at his words a while before he spoke again. "When a man leaves home, he leaves behind some scrap of his heart. Is it not so, Godric ? . . . It's the same with a place a man is going to. Only then he sends a scrap of his heart ahead."
~ originally published in Godric and later in Listening to Your Life
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The next winter I sat in Army fatigues somewhere near Anniston, Alabama, eating my supper out of a mess kit. The infantry training battalion that I had been assigned to was on bivouac. There was a cold drizzle of rain, and everything was mud. The sun had gone down. I was still hungry when I finished and noticed that a man nearby had something left over that he was not going to eat. It was a turnip, and when I asked him if I could have it, he tossed it over to me. I missed the catch, the turnip fell to the ground, but I wanted it so badly that I picked it up and started eating it anyway, mud and all. And then, as I ate it, time deepened and slowed down again. With a lurch of the heart that is real to me still, I saw suddenly, almost as if from beyond time altogether, that not only was the turnip good, but the mud was good too, even the drizzle and cold were good, even the Army that I had dreaded for months. Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.
~ originally published in The Sacred Journey and Listening to Your Life
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