anything, if I actually said anything. Pretty nearly my whole life's work is in
those boxes, which is an amazing thing to reflect on. I could look through them, maybe find a few I would want you to have. I'm a little afraid of them. I believe I may have worked over them as I did just to keep myself occupied. If someone came to the house and found me writing, generally he or she would go away, unless it was something pretty important. I don't know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but 18
that is how it always was for me in those days, and people respected me for all those hours I was up here working away in
the study, and for the books that used to come in the mail for me—not so many, really, but more than I could afford. That's where some of the money went that I could have put aside. There was more to it, of course. For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn't writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone. I feel I am with you now, whatever that can mean, considering that you're only a little fellow now and when you're a man you might find these letters of no interest. Or they might never reach you, for any of a number of reasons. Well, but how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed. That is to say, I pray for
you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.
Your mother is respectful of my hours up here in the study. She's proud of my books. She was the one who actually called
my attention to the number of boxes I have filled with my sermons and my prayers. Say, fifty sermons a year for forty-five
years, not counting funerals and so on, of which there have been a great many. Two thousand two hundred and fifty. If
they average thirty pages, that's sixty-seven thousand five hundred pages. Can that be right? I guess it is. I write in a small
hand, too, as you know by now. Say three hundred pages make a volume. Then I've written two hundred twenty-five books, which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity. That's amazing. I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope
and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I'll tell you frankly, that was wonderful. I'm grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.
Your mother walked into church in the middle
of the prayer—-to get out of the weather, I thought at the time, 19
because it was pouring. And she watched me with eyes so serious I was embarrassed to be preaching to her. As Boughton
would say, I felt the poverty of my remarks.
Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it
needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it. And that was such a quiet day, rain on the roof, rain against the windows, and everyone grateful, since it seems we never do
have quite enough rain. At times like that I might not care particularly whether people are listening to whatever I have to say, because I know what their thoughts are. Then if some stranger comes in, that very same peace can seem like somnolence and like dull habit, because that is how you're afraid it
seems to her.
If Rebecca had lived, she'd be fifty-one, older than your mother is now by ten years. For a long time I used to think how it would be if she walked in that door, what I would not be ashamed, at least, to say in her hearing. Because I always imagined her coming back from a place where everything is known, and hearing my hopes and my speculations the way someone would who has seen the truth face-to-face and would know the full measure of my incomprehension. That was a sort of trick I played on myself, to keep from taking doctrines and controversies too much to heart. I read so many books in those days, and I was always disputing in my mind with one or another of them, but I think I usually knew better than to take too much of that sort of thing into the pulpit. I believe, though, that it was because I wrote those sermons as if Rebecca might sometime walk in the door that I was somewhat prepared when your mother walked in, younger than Rebecca would have been in fact, of course, but not very different from the way I saw her in my mind. It wasn't so much her appear20
ance as it was the way she seemed as if she didn't belong there, and at the same time as if she were the only one of us all who really did belong there.
I say this because there was a seriousness about her that seemed almost like a kind of anger. As though she might say,
'I came here from whatever unspeakable distance and from whatever unimaginable otherness just to oblige your prayers.
Now say something with a little meaning in it.' My sermon was like ashes on my tongue. And it wasn't that I hadn't worked on it, either. I worked on all my sermons. I remember I baptized two infants that day. I could feel how intensely she watched. Both the creatures wept when I touched the water to their heads the first time, and I looked up, and there was just the look of stern amazement in her face that I knew would be there even before I looked up, and I felt like saying quite sincerely, 'If you know a better way to do this, I'd appreciate your
telling me.' Then just six months later I baptized her. And I felt like asking her, 'What have I done? What does it mean?'
That was a question that came to me often, not because I felt less than certain I had done something that did mean something, but because no matter how much I thought and read and prayed, I felt outside the mystery of it. The tears ran down her face, dear woman. I'll never forget that. Unless I forget everything, as so many of the old people do. It appears I at least won't live long enough to forget much I haven't forgotten already, which is a good deal, I know. I have thought about baptism over the years. Boughton and I have discussed it often. Now, this might seem a trivial thing to mention, considering the gravity of the subject, but I truly don't feel it is. We were very pious children from pious households in a fairly pious town, and this affected our behavior considerably. Once, we 21
baptized a litter of cats. They were dusty little barn cats just steady on their legs, the kind of waifish creatures
