***
When I say that my reputation for piety and probity and so on may be a bit exaggerated, I would not wish you to believe therefore that I have taken my vocation lightly. It has been my whole life. I even kept up my Greek and Hebrew pretty well. Boughton and I used to go through the texts we were going to preach on, word by word. He’d come here, to my house, because his house was full of children. He’d bring a nice warm supper in a basket that his wife or his daughters would fix for us. I used to dread walking into his house, because it made mine seem so empty. And Boughton could tell that, he knew it.
Four girls and four boys he had, robustious little heathens, every one of them, as he said himself. But good fortune is not only good fortune, and over the years things happened in that family that caused some terrible regret. Still, for years it all seemed to me to be blindingly beautiful. And it was.
We had some very pleasant evenings here in my kitchen. Boughton is a staunch Presbyterian — as if there were another kind. So we have had our disagreements, though never grave enough to do any harm.
I don’t think it was resentment I felt then. It was some sort of loyalty to my own life, as if I wanted to say, I have a wife, too, I have a child, too. It was as if the price of having them was losing them, and I couldn’t bear the implication that even that price could be too high. They say an infant can’t see when it is as young as your sister was, but she opened her eyes, and she looked at me. She was such a little bit of a thing. But while I was holding her, she opened her eyes. I know she didn’t really study my face. Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something. And I’m glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face. Boughton and I have talked about that, too. It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any. Boughton agrees.
I was so frightened of you when you were a little baby. I would sit in the rocking chair and your mother would put you in my arms and I would just rock and pray until she finished whatever it was she had to do. I used to sing, too, “Go to Dark Gethsemane,” until she asked me if I didn’t know a happier song. I wasn’t even aware of what I was singing.
***
This morning I have been trying to think about heaven, but without much success. I don’t know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven. I could never have imagined this world if I hadn’t spent almost eight decades walking around in it. People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that’s true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That’s clearer to me every day. Each morning I’m like Adam waking, up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes — old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable. What of me will I still have? Well, this old body has been a pretty good companion. Like Balaam’s ass, it’s seen the angel I haven’t seen yet, and it’s lying down in the path. And I must say, too, that my mind, with all its deficiencies, has certainly kept me interested. There’s quite a bit of poetry in it that I learned over the years, and a pretty decent vocabulary, much of it unused. And Scripture. I never knew it the way my father did, or his father. But I know it pretty well. I certainly should. When I was younger than you are now, my father would give me a penny every time I learned five verses so that I could repeat them without a mistake. And then he’d make a game of saying a verse, and I had to say the next one. We could go on and on like that, sometimes till we came to a genealogy, or we just got tired. Sometimes we’d take roles: he’d be Moses and I’d be Pharaoh, he’d be the Pharisees and I’d be the Lord. That’s how he was brought up, too, and it was a great help to me when I went to seminary. And through the whole of my life.
You know the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm and Psalm 100. And I heard your mother teaching you the Beatitudes
