Often enough when someone saw the light burning in my study long into the night, it only meant I had fallen asleep in
39
my chair. My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms. Well, my life was known to them all, every significant aspect of it, and they were tactful. I’ve spent a good share of my life comforting the afflicted, but I could never endure the thought that anyone should try to comfort me, except old Boughton, who always knew better than to talk much. He was such an excellent friend to me in those days, such a help to me. I do wish you could have some idea of what a fine man he was in his prime. His sermons were remarkable, but he never wrote them out. He didn’t even keep his notes. So that is all gone. I remember a phrase here and there. I think every day about going through those old sermons of mine to see if there are one or two I might want you to read sometime, but there are so many, and I’m afraid, first of all, that most of them might seem foolish or
dull to me. It might be best to burn them, but that would upset your mother, who thinks a great deal more of them than I do—for their sheer mass, I suppose, since she hasn’t read them. You will probably remember that the stairs to the attic are a sort of ladder, and that it is terribly hot up there when it is not terribly cold.
It would be worth my life to try to get those big boxes down
on my own. It’s humiliating to have written as much as Augustine, and then to have to find a way to dispose of it. There is
not a word in any of those sermons I didn’t mean when I wrote it. If I had the time, I could read my way through fifty years of my innermost life. What a terrible thought. If I don’t burn
them someone else will sometime, and that’s another humiliation. This habit of writing is so deep in me, as you will know
well enough if this endless letter is in your hands, if it has not been lost or burned also.
40
I suppose it’s natural to think about those old boxes of sermons upstairs. They are a record of my life, after all, a sort of
foretaste of the Last Judgment, really, so how can I not be curious? Here I was a pastor of souls, hundreds and hundreds of
them over all those years, and I hope I was speaking to them, not only to myself, as it seems to me sometimes when I look back. I still wake up at night, thinking, That’s what I should have said! or That’s what he meant! remembering conversations I had with people years ago, some of them long gone
from the world, past any thought of my putting things right with them. And then I do wonder where my attention was. If that is even the question.
One sermon is not up there, one I actually burned the night before I had meant to preach it. People don’t talk much now about the Spanish influenza, but that was a terrible thing, and it struck just at the time of the Great War, just when we were getting involved in it. It killed the soldiers by the thousands, healthy men in the prime of life, and then it spread into the
rest of the population. It was like a war, it really was. One funeral after another, right here in Iowa. We lost so many of the
young people. And we got off pretty lightly. People came to church wearing masks, if they came at all. They’d sit as far from each other as they could. There was talk that the Germans had caused it with some sort of secret weapon, and I
think people wanted to believe that, because it saved them from reflecting on what other meaning it might have.
The parents of these young soldiers would come to me and
ask me how the Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking them what the Lord would have to do to tell us He didn’t
allow something. But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never know what their young men had been spared. 41
Most of them took me to mean they were spared the trenches and the. mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing. It was just like a biblical plague, just exactly. I thought of Sennacherib.
It was a strange sickness—I saw it over at Fort Riley. Those boys were drowning in their own blood. They couldn’t even speak for the blood in their throats, in their mouths. So many of them died so fast there was no place to put them, and they just stacked the bodies in the yard. I went over there to help out, and I saw it myself. They drafted all the boys at the college, and influenza swept through there so bad the place had to be closed down and the buildings filled with cots like hospital wards, and there was terrible death, right here in Iowa. Now, if these
things were not signs, I don’t know what a sign would look like. So I wrote a sermon about it. I said, or I meant to say, that these deaths were rescuing foolish young men from the consequences of their own ignorance and courage, that the Lord was gathering them in before they could go off and commit murder
against their brothers. And I said that their deaths were a sign
and a warning to the rest of us that the desire for war would
bring the consequences of war, because there is no ocean big enough to protect us from the Lord’s judgment when we decide
to hammer our plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks
into spears, in contempt of the will and the grace of God.
It was quite a sermon, I believe. I thought as I wrote it how pleased my father would have been. But my courage failed, because I knew the only people at church would be a few old
women who were already about as sad and apprehensive as they could stand to be and no more approving of the war than I was. And they were there even though I might have been contagious. I seemed ridiculous to myself for imagining I could thunder from the pulpit in those circumstances, and I dropped that sermon in the stove and preached on the Parable 42
of the Lost Sheep. I wish I had kept it, because I meant every
word. It might have been the only sermon I wouldn’t mind answering for in the next world. And I burned it. But Mirabelle
Mercer was not Pontius Pilate, and she was not Woodrow Wilson, either.
Now I think how courageous you might have thought I was if you had come across it among my papers and read it. It is
hard to understand another time. You would never have imagined that almost empty sanctuary, just a few women there with
heavy veils on to try to hide the masks they were wearing, and two or three men. I preached with a scarf around my mouth for more than a year. Everyone smelled like onions, because word went around that flu germs were killed by onions. People rubbed themselves down with tobacco leaves.
In those days there were barrels on the street corners so we could contribute peach pits to the war effort. The army made them into charcoal, they said, for the filters in gas masks. It took hundreds of pits to make just one of them. So we all ate peaches on grounds of patriotism, which actually made them taste a little different. The magazines were full of soldiers
wearing gas masks, looking stranger than we did. It was a remarkable time.
Most of the young men seemed to feel that the war was a courageous thing, and maybe new wars have come along since I wrote this that have seemed brave to you. That there have been wars I have no doubt. I believe that plague was a great sign to us, and we refused to see it and take its meaning, and since then we have had war continuously.
I’m not entirely sure I do believe that. Boughton would say, “That’s the pulpit speaking.” True enough, but what that means I don’t know.
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My own dark time, as I call it, the time of my loneliness, was most of my life, as I have said, and I can’t make any real account of myself without speaking of it. The time passed so
strangely, as if every winter were the same winter, and every spring the same spring. And there was baseball. I listened to thousands of baseball games, I suppose. Sometimes I could just make out half a play, and then static, and then a crowd roaring, a flat little sound, almost static its
elf, like that empty sound in a seashell. It felt good to me to imagine it, like working out
some intricate riddle in my mind, planetary motion. If the ball is drifting toward left field and there are runners on first and third, then—moving the runners and the catcher and the shortstop in my mind. I loved to do that, I can’t explain why. And I would think back on conversations I had had in a similar way, really. A great part of my work has been listening to people, in that particular intense privacy of confession, or at least unburdening, and it has been very interesting to me. Not that I thought of these conversations as if they were a contest,
I don’t mean that. But as you might look at a game more abstractlywhere is the strength, what is the strategy? As if you
had no interest in it except in seeing how well the two sides bring each other along, how much they can require of each other, how the life that is the real subject of it all is manifest in it. By “life” I mean something like “energy” (as the scientists use the word) or “vitality,” and also something very different. When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want,” and whose object
can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around ” I”
like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and 44
joy and whatever else. But quick, and avid, and resourceful. To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.
A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought—the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in
some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.
I am trying to describe what I have never before attempted to put into words. I have made myself a little weary in the struggle.
It was one day as I listened to baseball that it occurred to
me how the moon actually moves, in a spiral, because while it orbits the earth it also follows the orbit of the earth around the sun. This is obvious, but the realization pleased me. There was a full moon outside my window, icy white in a blue sky, and the Cubs were playing Cincinnati.
That mention of the sound of a seashell reminds me of a couple of lines of a poem I wrote once:
Open the scroll of conch and find the text That lies behind the priestly susurrus.
There wasn’t anything else in it worth remembering. One of Boughton’s boys traveled to the Mediterranean for some reason, and he sent back that big shell I have always kept on my
desk. I have loved the word “susurrus” for a long time, and I had never found another use for it. Besides, what else did I know in those days but texts and priestliness and static? And what else did I love? There was a book many people read at 4 5
that time, The Diary ofaJDountry Priest. It was by; a French writer, Bernanos. I felt a .lot’Vof sympathy for the fellow, but Boughton said, “It was the drink.” He said, “The Lord simply needed someone more suitable to fill that position.” I remember reading that book all night by the radio till every station
went off, and still reading when the daylight came.
Once my grandfather took me to Des Moines on the train to see Bud Fowler play. He was with Keokuk for a season or two. The old man fixed me with that eye of his and he told me
there was not a man on this round earth who could outrun or outthrow Bud Fowler. I was pretty excited. But nothing happened in that game, or so I thought then. No runs, no hits, no
errors. In the fifth inning a thunderstorm that had been lying along the horizon the whole afternoon just sort of sauntered over and put a stop to it all. I remember the groan that went up from the crowd when the heavy rain began. I was only about ten years old, and I was relieved, but it was a terrible frustration to my grandfather. One more terrible frustration
for the poor old devil. I say this with all respect. Even my father called him that, and my mother did, too. He had lost that
eye in the war, and he was pretty wild-looking generally. But
he was a fine preacher in the style of his generation, so my father said.
That day he had brought a little bag of licorice, which really did surprise me. Whenever he put his fingers into it, it rattled with the trembling of his hand, and the sound was just
like the sound of fire. I noticed this at the time, and it seemed natural to me. I also more or less assumed that the thunder and the lightning that day were Creation tipping its hat to him, as if to say, Glad to see you here in the stands, Reverend. Or maybe it said, Why, Reverend, what in this grieving world are 46
you doing here at a sporting event? My mother said once that he attracted terrible friendship—using “terrible” in the old sense, of course, and meaning only respect. When he was young, he was an acquaintance of John Brown, and of Jim Lane, too. I wish I could tell you more about that. There was a kind of truce in our household that discouraged talk about the old times in Kansas, and about the war. It was not long after the trip to Des Moines that we lost him, or he lost himself. In any case, a few weeks later he took off for Kansas.
I read somewhere that a thing that does not exist in relation
to anything else cannot itself be said to exist. I can’t quite
see the meaning of a statement so purely hypothetical as this, though I may simply lack understanding. But it does remind me of that afternoon when nothing flew through the air, no one slid or drifted or tagged, when there was no waltz at all, so to speak. It seems to me that the storm had to put an end to it, as if it were a fire to be put out, an eruption into this world of an alarming kind of nullity. “There was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” It seems a little like that as I remember it, though it went on a good deal longer than half an hour. Null. That word has real power. My grandfather had nowhere to spend his courage, no way to feel it in himself. That was a great pity.
As I write I am aware that my memory has made much of
very little. There was that old man my grandfather sitting beside me in his ashy coat, trembling just because he did, sharing
out the frugal pleasures of his licorice, maybe with Kansas somehow transforming itself from memory to intention in his mind that very afternoon. (It was Kansas he went back to, not the town where his church used to be. That’s why we were so long finding him.) Bud Fowler stood at second base with his glove on his hip and watched the catcher. I know he liked to play bare-handed, but that is what I remember, and it’s all I 47
ever could remember about him, so there is no point trying to put the memory right. I followed his career in the newspaper for years, until they started up the Negro Leagues, and then I sort of lost track of him.
I was a fairly decent pitcher in high school and college, and
we had a couple of teams up at the seminary. We’d go out on a Saturday to toss the ball around. The diamond was just worn in the grass, so it was anybody’s guess where the baselines were. We had some good times. There were remarkable young men studying for the ministry in those days. There are now, too, I’m sure.
When my father and I were walking along the road in the quiet and the moonlight, away from the graveyard where we’d found the old man, my father said, “You know, everybody in Kansas saw the same thing we saw.” At the time (remember I was twelve) I took him to mean the entire state was a witness to our miracle. I thought that whole state could vouch for the particular blessing my father had brought down by praying there at his father’s grave, or the glory that my grandfather
had somehow emanated out of his parched repose. Later I realized my father would have meant that the sun and moon
aligned themselves as they did with no special reference to the two of us. He never encouraged any talk about visions or miracles, except the ones in
the Bible.
I can’t tell you, though, how I felt, walking along beside
him that night, along that rutted road, through that empty world—what a sweet strength I felt, in him, and in myself, and all around us. I am glad I didn’t understand, because I have rarely felt joy like that, and assurance. It was like one of those dreams where you’re filled with some extravagant feeling you might never have in life, it doesn’t matter what it is, even guilt 48
or dread, and you learn from it what an amazing instrument
you are, so to speak, what a power you have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need. Who would have
thought that the moon could dazzle and flame like that? Despite what he said, I could see that my father was a little
shaken. He had to stop and wipe his eyes.
My grandfather told me once about a vision he’d had when he was still living in Maine, not yet sixteen. He had fallen asleep by the fire, worn out from a day helping his father pull stumps. Someone touched him on the shoulder, and when he looked
up, there was the Lord, holding out His arms to him, which were bound in chains. My grandfather said, “Those irons had rankled right down to His bones.” He told me that as the saddest fact, and eyed me with the one seraph eye he had, the old
grief fresh in it. He said he knew then that he had to come to Kansas and make himself useful to the cause of abolition. To
be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear. I have a lot of respect
for that view. When I spoke to my father about the vision
he had described to me, my father just nodded and said, “It was the times.” He himself never claimed any such experience, and he seemed to want to assure me I need not fear that
the Lord would come to me with His sorrows. And I took comfort in the assurance. That is a remarkable thing to consider.
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