I promised young Boughton that I would say goodbye to his father for him, so I strolled over there after dinner when I knew the old fellow would be asleep, and when the room was empty I whispered a few words. My good friend is so nearly gone from the world that the clouds have settled over his mortal understanding. And his hearing has been doubtful for years. I knew if I spoke that name to him while he was awake he would struggle to gather himself, he would be avid to understand, and I’d have created an eagerness in him that I could not then, could never in my life, by any means placate. As if anything I could say could resolve any part of his great mystery for him. He would be alone in the confusions of his grief, and I just did not have the strength to witness that.
I thought how good it would be if he could be like ancient Jacob, the cherished son who had been lost to him bringing for his blessing the splendid young Robert Boughton Miles—”I had not thought to see thy face, and, lo, God hath let me see thy seed also!” There was a joy in the thought of how beautiful that would have been, beautiful as any vision of angels. It seems to me that when something really ought to be true then it has a very powerful truth, which starts me thinking again about heaven. Well, I do that much of the time, as you know. Poor Glory put a chair for me beside Boughton’s bed and I sat with him a good while. I used to crawl in through the window of that room in the dark of the morning to wake him up so we could go fishing. His mother would get cross if we woke her, too, so we were very stealthy. Sometimes he would just not want to quit sleeping, and I’d pull on his hair and tug on his ear and whisper to him, and if I thought of something ridiculous to say sometimes he’d wake up laughing. That was so long ago. There he was yesterday evening, sleeping on his right side as he always did, in the embrace of the Lord, I have no doubt, though I knew if I woke him up he’d be back in Gethsemane. So I said to him in his sleep, I blessed that boy of yours for you.
I still feel the weight of his brow on my hand. I said, I love him as much as you meant me to. So certain of your prayers are finally answered, old fellow. And mine too, mine too. We had to wait a long time, didn’t we?
When I left I saw Glory standing in the hallway, looking in on all the quiet talk there was in the parlor, her brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands and their children, grown and half grown. Trading news and talking politics and playing hearts. There were more of them in the kitchen and more upstairs. As I was leaving I met five or six who had been out for a walk. It shames me that I had not thought till then how hard it must have been for her to have Jack gone, and to have been left alone in that orderly turbulence of fruitfulness and contentment, left alone to tolerate all that tactful and heartfelt kindness, with no one there even to smile with her at the sheer endlessness of it. And no one there for her to defend — which is the worst kind of abandonment. Only the Lord Himself can comfort that.
***
It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance — for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. That is what I said in the Pentecost sermon. I have reflected on that sermon, and there is some truth in it. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
I’ll just ask your mother to have those old sermons of mine burned. The deacons could arrange it. There are enough to
