I mention this because it seems to me transformations just that abrupt do occur in this life, and they occur unsought and unawaited, and they beggar your hopes and your deserving. This came to my mind as I was reflecting on the day I first saw your mother, that blessed, rainy Pentecost.
That morning something began that felt to me as if my soul were being teased out of my body, and that’s a fact. I have never told you how all that came about, how we came to be married. And I learned a great deal from the experience, believe me. It enlarged my understanding of hope, just to know that such a transformation can occur. And it has greatly sweetened my imagination of death, odd as that may sound.
Even though I told myself I had hardly noticed her that first morning, I spent the whole next week hoping she would come back. I rebuked myself considerably for forgetting to ask her name as she went out the door, thinking about it in terms of my obligations to “strayed sheep” and “lost souls,” which are expressions I never do use, even in my thoughts, and which I would certainly never have applied to her. One interesting aspect of the whole experience was that I simply could not be honest with myself, and I couldn’t deceive myself, either. It was terrible. I felt like such a fool. But you see, I was mindful of her youth and of my age, and I knew nothing about her, whether she might be married or not. So I couldn’t admit to myself that I simply wanted to see her, to hear her voice again. She said, “Good morning, Reverend,” that was all. But I remember trying to retain the sound of it, trying to hear it again in my mind.
I’ll tell you, if my grandfather did throw his mantle over me, so to speak, he did it long before I came into this world. The holiness of his life imputed a holiness to mine, or to my vocation, that I have tried to diminish as little as I could. I have tried to be careful of my reputation and also of my character. I have tried to keep the Gospel before me as a standard for my life and my preaching. And yet there I was trying to write a sermon, when all I really wanted to do was try to remember a young woman’s face.
If I had had this experience earlier in life, I would have been much wiser, much more compassionate. I really didn’t understand what it was that made people who came to me so indifferent to good judgment, to common sense, or why they would say “I know, I know” when I urged a little reasonableness on them, and why it meant “It doesn’t matter, I just don’t care.” That’s what the saints and the martyrs say. And I know now that it is passion that moves them to their prodigal renunciations. I might seem to be comparing something great and holy with a minor and ordinary thing, that is, love of God with mortal love. But I just don’t see them as separate things at all. If we can be divinely fed with a morsel and divinely blessed with a touch, then the terrible pleasure we find in a particular face can certainly instruct us in the nature of the very grandest love. I devoutly believe this to be true. I remember in those days loving God for the existence of love and being grateful to God for the existence of gratitude, right down in the depths of my misery. I realized many things I am at a loss to express. And of course those feelings become milder with time, which is a mercy.
Louisa and I were expected to marry almost from childhood. So nothing had prepared me to find myself thinking day and night about a complete stranger, a woman much too young, probably a married woman — that was the first time in my life I ever felt I could be snatched out of my character, my calling, my reputation, as if they could just fall away like a dry husk. I had never felt before that everything I thought I was amounted to the clothes on my back and the books on my shelves and the calendar I kept full of obligations waiting and obligations fulfilled. As I have said, it was a foretaste of death, at least of dying. And why should that seem strange? “Passion” is the word we use, after all.
Well, it got much worse. She was there every Sunday but one, and I wrote all those sermons, I confess, with the thought of pleasing her, impressing her. I struggled not to look at her too often or too long, but I would convince myself nevertheless that I saw disappointment of some kind in her face, and then I would spend the next week praying, right down on my knees, that she would give me another chance. I felt so ridiculous. But I would speak to the Lord about it just the same, asking Him to strengthen me in exercising my pastoral responsibilities, and not a word I said was true, because I was really just a foolish old man asking the Almighty to indulge his foolishness and I knew it at the time. And my prayers were answered, beyond
