• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2664 0

other houses and buildings, and that seemed very gallant to me. Then I read some history, and I realized after a while that not every church was on the ragged edge of the Great Plains, and not every pulpit had my father in it. The history of the church is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it is not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against the churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe. That biscuit ashy from my father's charred hand. It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for. If I could only give you what my father gave me. No, what the Lord has given me and must also give you. But I hope you will put yourself in the way of the gift. I am not speaking here of the ministry as such, as I have said.

I did a strange thing this morning. They were playing a waltz on the radio, and I decided I wanted to dance to it. I don't mean that in the usual sense. I have a general notion of waltzing but no instruction in the steps, and so on. It was mostly a matter of waving my arms a little and spinning around a little, pretty carefully. Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it. Whenever I think of Edward, I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world!

So I decided a little waltzing would be very good, and it was. I plan to do all my waltzing here in the study. I have thought I might have a book ready at hand to clutch if I began to experience unusual pain, so that it would have an especial recommendation from being found in my hands. That seemed theatrical, on consideration, and it might have the perverse effect of burdening the book with unpleasant associations. The ones I considered, by the way, were Donne and Herbert and Barth's Epistle to the Romans and Volume II of Calvin's Institutes. Which is by no means to slight Volume I.

There's a mystery in the thought of the re-creation of an old man as an old man, with all the defects and injuries of what is called long life faithfully preserved in him, and all their claims and all their tendencies honored, too, as in the steady progress of arthritis in my left knee. I have thought sometimes that the Lord must hold the whole of our lives in memory, so to speak:. Of course He does. And "memory" is the wrong word, no doubt. But the finger I broke sliding into second base when I was twenty-two years old is crookeder than ever, and I can interpret that fact as an intimate attention, taking Herbert's view.

This morning I strolled over to Boughton's. He was sitting in the screened porch behind the trumpet vines, dozing. He and his wife were fond of those vines because they attract hummingbirds. They've pretty well taken over now, so the house looks sort of like a huge duck blind. Boughton corrected me when I told' him that. "A hummingbird blind," he said. "There are times when a little bird shot would bring down a thousand of them." But, he says, since that's not enough yet to season a cup of broth, he's going to bide his time.

All his gardens have more or less gone to brush, but as I came up the road I saw young Boughton and the daughter Glory clearing out the iris beds. Boughton owns his house. I used to think that was an enviable thing, but there's been no one but him to see to it, and things have gotten a little