LITMIR.BIZ

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      During the summer months, the three boys often came to the secluded area of the lake front, rocky and beachless. Tan and naked, they gleefully ran across the water to the float they had built and anchored in the middle of the lake. There they leapt off the diving board, played water tag, and sprawled on the weathered boards. After drying in the sun, they sauntered back on the small waves to the shore. One day, their physics teacher, dressed in a dark suit, unexpectedly came upon them. He patiently explained the behavior appropriate to the medium. In particular, he admonished them that one walks on land and swims in water. Like levitation, aquambulation is unseemly and to be discouraged. Therefore, in the summers that followed, the three boys dutifully swam to the float and back, barely recalling the joy of racing on the sparkling buoyant surface of the lake.

      My Spiritual Journey

      Until the summer of 1979 and until my middle age I upheld my parents’ disdain for all things religious. My father had found the Lutheran Church sterile and irrelevant, as had my mother the Episcopalian Church. I do not recall seeing a copy of the Bible in our home. Indeed, the word “God” was used only as an expletive in our household. Small wonder that the interior of a church remained a mystery to me.

      In devising a personal code of conduct, I could count upon no one in my intellectual environment. I therefore fell back upon myself and, not surprisingly, fashioned a code based upon the individual pitted against a hostile and absurd universe. It was called existentialism, which was very much in vogue after World War II.

      Existentialism assumes that the only reality is what our senses perceive within the brief span of our mortal being. It preaches a grim self-reliance and affords little refuge from the horrors of contemporary life.

      In the spring of 1979, I adopted the practice of dropping in at local churches at different hours. I would engage in an informal kind of meditation, with no particular substance or direction. Something was at work within me, although my conscious being was puzzled.

      Then came June 23, 1979, a sparkling summer morning in Manhattan. I was walking up Fifth Avenue to have lunch with my mother near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I came to 52nd Street and found myself spontaneously entering St. Thomas Church. I sat down in one of the pews. There were only a few other people in the church.

      The following events then took place in an extraordinarily rapid succession. I became aware of a Baroque air being rehearsed by an organist. The first line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Windhover: To Christ our Lord” leaped to mind: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon. . . . ” It was then blindingly clear that Christ had caught me, and His presence flooded every part of my being. He leveled the massive stone wall I had amassed against Him over the years. For a timeless duration, I sobbed uncontrollably in a paroxysm of joy. I left the church a new man and Christ’s own.

      Later that year I was baptized into the Episcopal church. Two of my dearest friends served as godfather and godmother. Over the next ten years, I attended Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington D.C. and obtained the degree of Master of Theological Studies. In those studies I was particularly drawn to the Christian mystics, such as Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. Their teachings lie at the heart of this book.

      In my continuing spiritual journey I have become increasingly convinced of two truths: first, that each individual has the capacity to be touched by the Divine and thereby to be made whole; second, that the combination of reason and materialism are literally destroying the world and its creatures, human and otherwise. This little book is implicitly a plea for the reinstitution of love and peace—as opposed to hatred and war—as the animating principles of life. Perhaps you will find your own search for the Divine reflected in it.

      Fly

      From its superior vantage, the polyoptic fly looked up at its grotesque foe. The fly discerned a suspended head, joined to a shoulder, from which projected a flailing arm. The foe shuffled its cumbersome feet across the ceiling, vainly attempting to follow the fly’s path. The nimble fly, secure on its ground, derided its foe’s unfortunate position. To try to swat a lively fly upside down seemed a double disadvantage. It caused the fly to wonder why the world’s creatures should be divided between those who stand upright and those who hang head down. Should not the heavy weight of its foe cause it to plummet from the ceiling and strike its head— perhaps fatally—on the fly’s firm ground? If their spatial positions were reversed, would this foe have the upper—or lower—hand? Not given to speculations on relativism, the fly was content to continue to evade the ineffectual swatting of its disoriented foe.

      Door

      The young woman came up the long walk to the weathered house atop the hill. The house was shadowed in the late afternoon, and its interior dark. She seized the worn knob of the front door, turned it firmly, and pushed to open it, as she had done so often in the past. To her surprise, the door resisted. She turned the knob harder and pressed the jamb with her other hand. The door stubbornly refused to open. She stepped back, as though to assure herself that this was the right house. Shaking her head, she walked around the house, looking at the lawn, the withered flowers, the gray clapboard siding. Returning to the door, she turned the knob and gently, hesitantly pushed. Whereupon the door swung open to the warm kitchen.

      Blades of Grass

      He had been in prison for a number of months, and he still had received no explanation for his incarceration. His arrest, trial, and conviction were a confused recollection, but for the dominant sense of their inexorability. From the time of his involuntary trip to the precinct station, dressed only in his pajamas, he felt embroiled in a sinister process he could not affect, much less control. It was tacitly understood that he was to answer all of their questions but expect no response to his own.

      In prison, they gave him few dispensations, but one came to afford vital pleasure. Once a day, he was allowed to walk about a walled courtyard. There grew patches of grass, together with random flowers and several fruit trees. These otherwise humble signs of life became precious amidst the blocks of concrete and steel.

      Over time, he realized that he was allowed to stroll in a steadily decreasing part of the courtyard. He first thought that this constituted punishment for his continuing efforts to ascertain why he was in prison at all. Even after he abandoned such efforts, however, the area of dispensation dwindled even more. If he strayed outside the established bounds, they beat him. He had to be content with only patches of grass and a flower or two.

      Finally, they restricted him to a narrow pavement of the courtyard. In a crack of the pavement grew a few blades of grass. They absorbed all of his attention when he was let out from his cell. His concentration was so intense that he took back in his mind a vivid image of their details. That image required, however, daily refreshment by immediate contact with the blades of grass. He sometimes wondered how he would hold onto his sanity if they should disappear.

      A drought came to afflict the region where the prison was located. During his confined stroll each day, he felt the withering heat and saw the green turn to brown. The condition of his blades of grass grew particularly alarming. He was not allowed to water them, and he saw them begin to die from the drought. Their imminent death seemed to presage his own.

      After the blades of grass had shriveled and crumbled to the pavement, he fell into a deep depression and would not go out into the courtyard. His vitality, long sustained by the green plants of the courtyard, had dried up with them. His hours became a series of mechanical actions without purpose or joy. Vacant days and restless nights merged into an absurd continuum.

      One day, he was stirred to go outdoors, although the drought had not abated. He mindlessly went to the pavement he had known so well and was astonished to see his blades of grass. They stood fresh and green, still covered with morning dew. When he reached out to touch them, however, he felt nothing. Yet their presence was too potent to deny. Suddenly he understood. It mattered not whether the blades of grass were there, so long as he and they were together here. From that time on, their union was indestructible, and joy flowed back into his life.

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