Letting It Go Away

My father sat at the back of the college classroom.  He watched the professor at the front of the classroom.  The students were watching the professor, too, while he interpreted a poem called The Cancer Cells, which is a poem my father had written. Dad was prominent as a poet during the middle fifty years of the 20^th century.  On that day, Dad was a visitor at this college, brought to the college to read his verse and to participate in classes as an established poet. 

            The professor concluded his interpretation.  The Cancer Cells, the professor had opined, is about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  Then he called on Dad.

            Dad stood.  “Well,” he said, “I wrote The Cancer Cells.  I have to say that it has nothing whatever to do with the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  What the poem has to do with is what it says in the poem.  I saw vivid color photographs of cancer cells, in large scale in a magazine.  The images were intensely beautiful.  However, the images are also death.  It’s the contrast between their beauty and their power to cause death that moved me to write the poem. And it’s the aloof observation of the poem’s last line that makes it a good one.”

            Dad reported to me that the professor watched Dad for a moment after Dad stopped talking, and then the professor said to the class, “Well, notwithstanding what was just said, the poem is about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe, and now if you will please turn to page 182….”

            Dad was not called upon to speak during the remainder of that class. 

            “Dikkon,” Dad said to me later while he mused on this event, “the truth is that once you publish a poem, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.”

            I recall this conversation as I work now to draw attention to the approaching publication of my memoir—in June—a memoir that explores my relationship with my poet father and how his and my relationship affected my allegiance to our ultimate Father. 

            I am working in the background now.  Others are working in the foreground.  My literary agent—formerly prominent in the foreground—has moved into the background, for now.  My conceptual editor at the publishing house—she who acquired the book, and who then worked diligently to shape it so that it is readable—she has merged into the background, though her role still is to oversee. My cover has been designed by a genius—who has captured the atmosphere of this memoir both by color selection and by selection of images. My line editor—she who evaluates grammatical adventures of mine, checks my facts, and questions me closely when my sentences are obscure—my line editor is in the foreground as we finish our work together.  Stepping more prominently into the foreground, now, are the publisher’s marketing director and my publicist. Copyeditors will come next and, I am sure, other professionals of whom I am not yet aware.

            “Dikkon, once you publish a poem, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.” 

            This is true not only of those of us who write stuff and who desire other people to read it.   

            For example, my wife Channa and I have four children.  They run is age from thirty-six down to twenty-seven.  Over the years, we “published” them to the world, and now they do not belong to us anymore, as they did belong to us once when we were still “writing” them.  Even our son Sam, who has Down syndrome and lives at home, at age thirty, has been “published.”  It’s just that, as a “book,” Sam rests on our bookshelves at home between his excursions into the world to interact with his employers and colleagues at the convenience store where he works, with his fellow painters and other artists at the artists’ collective where he paints, and with his fellow athletes challenging themselves in Special Olympics swimming, skiing, basketball, and track-and-field.     

            My book today is immeasurably more mature than it was when I thought I had finished it.  Before, when the book just had me in its life, figuratively I could take it to bed with me as I took our children to bed with me.  My book was little then, and, like my children then, it didn’t question my judgment.  I could enjoy cuddling it then—I could enjoy that deep, trusting, boneless slumber of its warm little body on my chest.  Now my book is all grown up and it has other people whose judgment it has learned to trust.  It needs to make a living on its own.  It doesn’t really need to listen to me anymore.    

            Dad needed to learn to be content when he discovered that The Cancer Cells is about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  He didn’t particularly like that the poem was about the spread of communism across Eastern Europe.  But he needed to be content with that. 

Fortunately, my father was a literary philosopher as well as he was a father philosopher. As his son, I made decisions he didn’t particularly like. But, regarding The Cancer Cells and me too, he would puff a few puffs on his pipe, smile at me, pat me on the shoulder—a taller shoulder now than it had been when I was a boy—and he’d say, “Well, I still love you anyway.”  

 

Copyright - Dikkon Eberhart - 2015           

           

Buried Treasure

In my mind, I’ve been writing a new novel, but very slowly.  I haven’t published a novel for years.  Considering the slowness with which I am writing this new novel, it won’t be published for years, either.  My working title is The Pirate Book. 

The protagonist of The Pirate Book is a present-day archivist who works at a 200-year-old seminary in Connecticut.  The novel is structured as a story-within-a-story.  Much of the action occurs among pirates in the late 17^th century.  The story is kicked into action when the archivist finds an uncatalogued document hidden inside the binding of an antique, family memoir.  The family memoir is an item in the seminary’s archives.  It recounts the history of a clan of 18^th and 19^th century missionaries, some of whom were graduates of the seminary.  The hidden document is electrifying because it casts a different light—and not a welcome light—on the clan’s history.  It fundamentally re-characterizes the clan’s founding father. 

As I said, I have not published a novel for years.  On the other hand, a new book of mine—which is a memoir—is about to be published this year, in June.  In this new book of mine, I look backward, first to recount what happened during the first sixty years of my life, and then to put what happened into a context by which to understand my life’s remaining years.  So my new book is about me and how I got that way.

It does not surprise me that I began writing the memoir at approximately the same time as I set down the first sentences of The Pirate Book.  Though it is fiction, The Pirate Book is powered by the same urgencies which underlie my memoir. 

My slowness at writing The Pirate Book is due to the fact that, as I wrote during recent years, I needed to choose between a fictional voice and my personal voice.  My memoir is written in my personal voice.  That was the voice I wanted to use. Of course, the novel requires another voice than mine, the voice of the contemporary archivist, while it also toys with the 17^th century voices of several of its principle characters. 

Some pirates buried their treasure.  One reason they sustain our interest, now, three hundred fifty years after their heyday, is that very treasure.  It’s out there, even now.  What beachcomber wandering across Caribbean sand has not imagined the finding of a doubloon, where it glints in the sun, exposed after all these years by the wearing away of the wind on the sand?   In another iteration of the same wonder, what archivist has not imagined the corner of a lost letter appearing from behind the illustrated plate in an old book, rarely taken from the shelf?  And then here is the novelist’s imagination—what would the letter say?  Why had it been saved, by hiding it away?  Who had hidden it?  It must have been precious, but was it alarming as well?  How might it affect its discoverer, the archivist—now, reading it in our latter days?  An archivist is a person who likes to read other people’s mail…but only at a comfortable distance in time. 

I said my memoir is about me and how I got that way.  One of the ways that I got to, and a way that I explore in my memoir, is the way of a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian.  Looking backwards in my memoir, I am studying the family line which led to me. 

My memoir characterizes my father, who was a poet of lyric fire when it came to nature, God, mankind, death, and beauty.  Dad is one generation back.  Dad was one of three children in a Minnesota family whose father was a successful businessman in the meat packing industry at the beginning of the 20^th century.  That man, my grandfather, was two generations back.  The third generation back was my great grandfather, who was a circuit-riding Methodist minister on the Great Plains during the late years of the 19^th century.    

As a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian writing about my family line, among other themes, I desired to trace my family’s theological roots and its profession of Christian belief.    

I know my father’s theological roots—one generation back—both from his talks with me and from his poetry.  I know about my great-grandfather’s theological roots—three generations back—partly by inference based on his profession, partly by my father’s stories about him. 

But what about my grandfather—two generations back?  His name was A.L. Eberhart.   

One responsibility I have to the publisher of my memoir is to supply it with photographs, so, rather like an archivist, recently I have pulled storage canisters from my barn in which my wife and I have placed family pictures away, always with the thought that—soon enough—we should get to the task of arranging them properly.  Alas, if I really were my fictional archivist character, instead of just me, I should already have arranged the pictures properly—catalogued them, ordered them, preserved them, and made them available at a moment’s notice.

In one of the canisters, I came across a familiar item.  I was familiar with this three-fold, leather, wallet-like holder of three lovely antique photographs.  The wallet is about four inches wide and six inches tall.  When opened out flat, the three photographs are displayed, each of them mounted on heavy cream-colored stock as was done in the early 20^th century. 

I have always liked the three photographs stored inside, which are skillfully done.  On the right panel is a photograph of my father’s brother at about age two.  On the left panel is a photograph of my father, also at about age two (though he is two years younger than his older brother).  The middle panel has the largest of the photographs.  This is a profile picture of my father’s mother, my grandmother, who is revealed as a beautiful woman of about thirty.  It was in memory of her that my wife and I gave her name to our oldest daughter—Lena.    

After I had admired the photographs one more time, I was about to put the wallet aside when I felt something odd.  The panel which displayed my uncle’s photograph was slightly thicker than the other two panels.  Something was stuck behind the picture of my uncle.  I prodded a bit, and out slid an envelope with a folded piece of paper inside. 

Eerily amazed to be in precisely the same circumstance as my fictional archivist, I examined the address on the envelope.  I recognized the handwriting.  It is the handwriting of my father’s father, of my grandfather, whose handwriting I had often seen in other documents.  The letter was sent from Austin, Minnesota, to my grandfather’s mother, who was at that time staying at Rosslyn Hotel in Los Angeles, on April 7, 1906…postmarked at 4:30 pm.  On the back of the envelope, a note is written in ink, also in my grandfather’s hand.  The note says, “For Clara, September 13, 1929, A.L. Eberhart.” 

Not knowing that the financial world would be rocked sixteen days later, I surmise my grandfather was just filled with love and with commitment when he gave his 1906 letter to Clara.  Clara was the woman A.L. loved after he recovered from the sad death of his wife Lena in 1921.  I do not know how A.L. came to re-possess the letter he had sent to his mother in 1906, twenty-three years after he sent it, but he must have perceived the letter as precious, and perhaps Clara did so as well.  Years ago, important family documents were tucked for safe keeping in the family Bible. This important family document was similarly tucked away—inside the icon of A.L.’s wife and his first two children. 

A.L. must have considered it precious, else why should he have tucked it so carefully away, to be preserved until it was found, by chance, by me, his memoir-writing Christian grandson, in 2015, eighty-six years later?  

With tender fingers, I extracted the letter.  It is written in pencil on heavy, cream-colored stock, seven inches by twelve inches, folded in half and then folded in four, in order to allow it to fit into the small envelope.  Here is what my grandfather wrote, when my father was two years old, and here is what he later gave to Clara, when my father was twenty-five.   

 

Austin Minn.

April 15 – 1906

Dear Father & Mother:

This is Easter Sunday and this letter will relieve my conscience of one of its heaviest loads and I trust be the means of bringing much joy and happiness to you both.  Ever since I backslid after my conversion in Chicago, I have feared that the death of one or both of you would deprive you of the joy of knowing before death that I again decided to serve Almighty God.

At a men’s meeting this afternoon Mr. Hormel and I went forward and publicly declared thereby to live a Christian life to the best of our ability in a meeting of [illegible] Sunday.  There were 3000 men there and a number followed our example.  I have attended almost every meeting for the past four weeks and have heard more sermons in that time than for the last fifteen years.  It was either 1889 or 1890 that I was converted and since the termination of my short religious life of about a year I have never opened a bible or offered a prayer but on account of the early training you gave me, eternally branding on my conscience the difference between right and wrong and because of the simple, fearless presentation of God’s messages to man by Billy Sunday the Evangelist I will read from the bible tonight and pray to God to take me as I am.  You have waited long and patiently for me but now our family is a unit.  I am going to begin at the bottom just as I did in business.  I have been successful in business so I want you to give me some verses of scripture to read that will help me.

Lena has asked me to go forward with her and she is going tomorrow.  Don’t expect too much of me at once for I have a big battle on for a while I am sure, but I have health and an iron will and will try and hold fast this time.  Where is that verse “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ?”  You have always prayed for me to keep on don’t quit I need them now.  With love from your son

Alpha

The children are well—

 

Praise the Lord for this most excellent of buried treasures!

 

 

Copyright Dikkon Eberhart, 2015

The Second Jump

“It’s a religion that couldn’t be thought of, Christianity,” said the salesman.  To the waitress, he said, “Massaman curry with chicken; brown rice.”  The clink of silver wear on plates and the buzz of lunch conversation filled the background.  “That’s a line from C.S. Lewis, but it’s apropos.” 
 

            The salesman and the lawyer lunched together now and then.  Usually the salesman kept the conversational ball on the other side of the table.  He asked leading questions to draw out his customer, to keep up with the details of the lawyer's practice.  

 

            But today was a different day.  He had not asked for this lunch in order to sell; today, he had something to tell.  The lawyer was a Jew.  The salesman had been one too, until recently.  At one time, he had been so serious about Judaism, he had converted to it.   

            “Well, it doesn’t apply to me,” said the lawyer. 

            “The Prophets are riddled with anticipation.  That’s the whole point.  Think of Isaiah.  Everything’s leading somewhere, in one particular direction. That’s what the Messiah is all about.”

            The lawyer grinned.  “But not yet.”

            The waitress brought drinks and small, complimentary spring rolls. 

            “Not everything is the natural.  That’s what I’ve come to believe.  We humans so very much want all the answers to be within the natural.  But they aren’t.” The salesman took one of the rolls and passed the plate across.  “There’s a war on, and the real solution, the real victory, comes through the supernatural.” 

“A war?”

“Yeah, a war.  A war between God and Satan.”

“You have gone round the bend, haven’t you?”

            The restaurant was located at the edge of a river which enjoyed a two hundred year history of vigorous ship building.  Almost within view of the men was a ship yard where Aegis missile cruisers were crafted for the navy.  Two of these lethal greyhounds were visible from where they sat, secured against a pier, just downstream. 

 

            The salesman—being a salesman—was fond of a battle.  His battles were in service of his product.  He had a hunter’s instinct: Go out and find a pain, then offer a solution which eases that pain. 

            Two new diners came and settled at the next table, men, in their forties, trim, upright.  Probably navy.    

            The salesman glanced at them and looked back at the lawyer.  “A war.”  He thought for second, and then he said, “I feel like I’m taking the second jump.”

             “What do you mean?”

             The salesman watched his customer across the table.  The man was a litigator, a battler in his own right.  One of the characteristics of the lawyer that interested the salesman, though, applied to the lawyer’s private world: he had good art in his office, idiosyncratic stuff, showing an educated and an eclectic taste.  Two of his three children were in the arts.  The other was a lawyer, like her father. 

            “A close friend of mine is a former Master Sergeant in the 82^nd Airborne Division.   Fourteen years in.  We see a lot of one another.  Once, he told me something startling about jumping out of airplanes.  He said people who aren’t paratroopers think stepping out of the airplane at 3,000 feet must be very hard.  They think it must be hard to make yourself jump.  Especially the first time.  But they’re wrong, he says.  That first jump, you’re so pumped after all the training, you just bail right out without even a thought.  Boom!  And you’re out there in the wind, counting to four.   

            “But it’s the second jump, he said.  That’s the hard one.”

            The lunches arrived; pad Thai for the lawyer. 

            The salesman held the lawyer’s gaze, so the other would not eat yet.  “It’s taking that step out the airplane door when you’re actually thinking about it.  That’s the hard thing.  That’s the second jump.  That’s what I’m doing.  When I became a Jew—really became one—that was the first jump.  I was so ready to convert, I just jumped right into it.  I was pumped.  This is my second jump, and it’s harder.”

            “Why harder?”

             “Well, human things for one: what to tell friends, what to tell the children.  They’re grownups, but will they be horrified?”

             “So you’re trying this out on me?”

             The salesman grinned.  “Yeah.  You horrified?”

             “No.  Mystified.  Maybe it’s like you’ve caught a disease, and it’s changed your thinking, and I wonder when you’ll come out of it.”

             Both men ate.  The sailors at the next table had their spring rolls now.  “Good curry,” said the salesman to break the silence. 

             The lawyer put down his cutlery.  “You mean this?”

             “Yes.  I’m probably going to maybe be baptized.  It’s not a disease.” 

             “Well.”  The lawyer gave the salesman a friendly smile.  “Good, I guess.  I don’t quite know what to say.  Now you’re going to tell me that I can’t get into heaven because I haven’t been baptized.”

             “What difference could that possibly make to you, since you don’t believe in heaven in the first place?”

             The lawyer laughed.  “But you know what I mean.  You’ll try to covert me.”

             The salesman shook his head. “No, I won’t.  If you’re going to be converted, you’ll convert yourself.”

           “Yeah, right.”

            “It’s a still, small voice.  An invitation, that’s all.  Maybe you’ll hear an invitation.”

            The two men returned to their meals.  After a bit, the lawyer asked, “What did you mean about the supernatural?”

            “This was a turning point for me.”  The salesman finished a bite and then spooned more curry onto his plate.  He didn’t eat it yet.   He prodded at it, mixing it with rice.  “There have been a number of turning points really.  But this was one of the recent ones.”  He looked up and held the lawyer’s eye.  “I watched a Billy Graham thing on TV." He saw the lawyer flinch.  "I know; I know.   I used to shudder at those things too—all those people like robots coming down into the center place, like mind-numbed robots.  It was creepy.” 

             “Yeah.”

             “Well, that was before my wife and I spent the last year attending the Baptist church across the road.”  Suddenly, he laughed.  “And we’re not robots.”

             The lawyer smiled.  “Certain of that?”      

             “Ninety-five percent.  Anyway, you know how the camera pans across the faces of the people in the stands?  All these faces.  I was watching them and thinking about what was going on in their heads.  Probably some were attending simply to support a friend, and nothing very much was going on inside.  But as Graham was speaking about how everything else has been tried, and nothing else has worked—and, here, he’s holding up a Bible—I had this sense—as I watched their faces—that every single one of them, way down deep inside, every single one of them knew that what Graham was saying is absolutely true.” 

             The salesman watched the lawyer, who was listening, but with a deponent’s caution.  The salesman said, “Not everyone in the stands was convinced enough to do something about it—that is, to come down to the central floor—but every single one of them knew what Graham said is true.”

             Before the lawyer could respond, the salesman continued.  “You know me.  I’ve read history for forty years.  And you—you know statutes, cases, regulations from all fifty states…and the fed.  We’re the same generation, you and me.  We did all those sixties things—sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, baby.   And not just us…narcissistic us.  Everyone else did it all too—all of it—in the 19^th century, and the 18^th century, and the 17^th  …all the way back.   Everything natural that can be tried, has been tried.  That’s what I saw on those people’s faces. 

            “There’s a war going on, and we have tried as hard as we possibly can, we skeptics.  We have tried as hard as we can to get the answer right and to make human life right.  I take my hat off to us—we have tried so hard and with such a good will.  Magna Carta, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights…everything!  We’ve tried every possible natural thing that we can think of, and even over and over again when one didn’t work before.  And in the faces of that crowd listening to Billy Graham there was—palpably!—the knowledge that the natural solution, the skeptic’s solution, the agnostic’s solution, the atheist’s solution, every single one of those solutions has failed to do the job.”

            The salesman put down his fork.  “And why?  Because it can’t.  We think it’s the job of the natural, of what we can control, but it’s not.  It’s God’s job, not ours.  Oh, how we do wish it weren’t so!  But deep down, deep down were all of us face the very core of ourselves, we know that the natural doesn’t work. 

             “The answer comes from the supernatural.” 

             The salesman drank and then said, “You know how you tell me that your clients come to you wanting justice?  And you tell them the legal system isn’t about justice?  It’s about apportioning blame and dividing money?  Well…same thing.  Only God can provide justice because only God knows all the facts.  We humans try, oh, we do try.  But even you admit our system is not designed to provide what the clients need, deep down.”

             There was a pause, then: “I believe in God.”  This was an odd statement from the lawyer, defensive, and the salesman took it as a crack in his lawyerly armor.    

             “Sure you do.  You’re a Jew.  You’re one of God’s tribe; his covenant people.  But, you know, it turned out the Sinai covenant wasn’t enough.  The Jews disobeyed…they were skeptics, just like we are today.  They knew better.  They argued with God.  That used to be one of the great attractions for me in Judaism, years ago, when I converted.  Direct experience with God—fighting it out in the well of the cosmic court.  Wrestling with His angels in the desert; sweat to sweat.  And we waited for the Messiah, and we whined, and we argued, and we complained.”  The salesman took one more bite of curry.  He laughed.  “I hate this manna!  Yuck!  That’s what we said.”  He shook his fork at the lawyer, who laughed.  “I want something else.  That’s what we yelled: you’re not pleasing us, Yahweh.  Come on, please me!” 

             The salesman put down his fork and said quietly, “So God gave us something else.  He gave us Christ.  And Christ made us free.”

             There was silence at the table.  The sailors paid for their lunch and went away, perhaps back to their ship.  The noise of the restaurant was less loud than before. 

             After a time, the lawyer said, “I’ll give you this much.  I believe in Pentecost.  I think Christ doesn’t apply to me.  But how could anyone have made up Pentecost?”

             “So we’re back at the beginning.  Christianity itself couldn’t have been made up.  It happened.  That’s what I believe.  And the fact that it happened compels action on our part.  It compels action; there is no other choice.  Judaism is a waiting game, though I think most modern, liberal Jews don’t really think the Messiah is still on His way.  They’ve—we’ve—become complacent in our posture as observers from the outside, dependent on the 613 mitvot.  We’re a covenant people, yes, symbols of God’s direct action in the world, to be honored and supported therefore.  But we’re standers-off; we’re disdainers of a new covenant.  Intellectual.” 

             The waitress brought the check.  It was the lawyer’s turn.  “See?” said the lawyer, “You’re becoming a Christian, and now I have to pay for your sermons.”

 They laughed. 

 “But there’s nothing wrong with intellectualism,” said the lawyer, scrawling his name on a charge card slip. 

 “There is when it doesn’t allow for the experience of holy dread.”

 The lawyer looked up, startled.  “Oh, man, you do sound like one of them.”

 “Dread in the sense of reverence.  Like dreadful beauty.”

 The lawyer grimaced.  “Nobody talks that way nowadays.  Supposing I said that to a jury?”

 The men collected their things and stood up.  The salesman said, “Keep this in mind.  Everything else has been tried.  That’s the thing.  If the supernatural actually and truly did intrude into the natural—and there’s 2,000 years of evidence that it did (and I’ll lecture you about the righteousness of that evidence next time—on my dime), then we humans do have the answer.  Sure, we wish we didn’t need to pay attention to it.  We wish we could do this on our own.  But we can’t.”

 The men looked into the distance, out the window of the restaurant at the river and the warships.  “We’ve struggled for so long a time now,” the salesman prodded, “and we feel burdened down with it all. We’re so heavy we have a hard time lifting our heads sometimes.”

“I know lots of people who have been crushed by life.”

“Yes, I agree.  It’s in your profession to gather those anecdotes.  But Paul said, though we will all be tested, we won’t be tested beyond our endurance.”

“I’ve seen too many who are crushed by life to believe what you say.”

“Those ones, they didn’t know Christ.”

“Lots of people don’t know Christ.”

“But Christ is there.”

             Outside, before parting, the two men shook hands. 

             It was the lawyer who had the last word, ironically using the final hurrah from the Passover Seder: “Next year in Jerusalem!”  The laughter of the two men was meant differently, but for each of them the metaphor was strong.   

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015

On the Eve of Christmas Eve, 2014

 

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Don’t skim your eye down the words.  Go back and say the words.  Say them with measured solemnity, four syllables to each word.  Sixteen syllables all together. 

You are praising the Lord.  This is the Gloria in excelsis Deo that you are pronouncing. 

In late morning on the eve of Christmas Eve, I called my wife at the church.  She is our pastor’s secretary.  I was checking in, concerned about errands I needed to finish while I was out on the road.  We spoke briefly about the errands. 

Then I asked her when she planned to be home from the church.  Uncharacteristically, she did not know.  Usually, she knows.  Usually, she knows because she knows what tasks she must finish, and she responds with a time—an hour, two hours.  This time, she was vague.  It was odd of her—my wife is not a vague person, about time or about anything else.  “I don’t know,” is what she said, and she said it with a puzzled intonation, as though she wondered why she did not know but said it anyway.  I was puzzled, too, when I hung up. 

I thought that perhaps I should call her back, to ask if she were all right.  I thought that perhaps I should question her tone of puzzlement, which suggested she did not feel in charge of her time that afternoon.  But I did not call her back.  I had errands to do. 

Here’s what I learned later.  After I hung up, an hour or two passed at the church.  My wife was alone.  She finished tasks.  There is always a task to finish on a secretary’s desk.  But, puzzlingly, she did not formulate a plan for the finishing of her tasks and for her getting home.  Then the church’s door opened and a man entered whom my wife had never seen.  The man introduced himself and asked if the pastor were in.  The pastor was not in.  

The man seemed puzzled by the circumstance that the pastor was not in at the church.  “But God told me I must come to see him now.”  

“Well, would you like me to make an appointment for you, for later?”

“But God told me I must come to see him now.” 

After all—this is how my wife reported the conversation to me—after all, the man was puzzled himself.  He had done what God had told him to do.  Now, it was the pastor’s turn. 

The pastor had left the church not long before, with several plans in his mind.  He had not been certain which of the plans he would undertake.  He would let my wife know which plan he would undertake, he said, when he knew himself. 

My wife dialed the phone.  The pastor answered.   

“There’s a man here,” she said, and she gave his name.  “He says he needs to see you.”

“Oh.” 

“I wasn’t certain about your plan.” 

“Well, I haven’t selected the plan yet.  I don’t know why.  Right now, I’m eating lunch.”  The pastor thought for a moment.  “Can he wait ten minutes?”

My wife looked at the man.  “Can you wait ten minutes?”

“Yes.”

She turned back to the phone.  “He can wait.”

“See you in ten.”

Two hours after the man sat down with our pastor, he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord, and his name was written in Glory. 

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Late that same night, on the eve of Christmas Eve, my wife and I relaxed on our couch.  The house was aromatic with baking gift breads.  The Christmas tree was lit with white bulbs, wax candles burned among our mantel display of spruce boughs and red balls, and twinkling candles were alight in our windows so that, as my mother told me when I was a child, if the Christ Child should be in need a place to lie down, He would see by our candles that He would be welcome here. 

My wife had explained to me the odd events of that afternoon—the man puzzled why the pastor should not be at his office when God had indicated that he would be, my wife puzzled about her inability to manage a time to return to our house so that she was available just at the right moment to make a telephone call , our pastor puzzled that he had not selected among his plans for the afternoon so that he was, at the necessary time, just eating lunch. 

My wife lay back on the couch and put her feet in my lap.  In silence, I stroked her feet.  The wine was red in my glass, and white in my wife’s.  We listened to Susan Boyle sing Hallelujah. The words of poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen filled the room.   

We are busy people, she and I, with several jobs between us—retirees who still work hard, and I have a new book coming out, a memoir recounting my life as the son of a poet father—a father whose poetry molded my relationship with our Father. 

Relaxing on our couch, weary after days and days of heavy work for both of us, nearing the completion of our Advent anticipation of a miracle—humbly trying to experience our anticipation with patience—the beauty of the season and of the Christ lights overthrew me.  I wept. 

My wife looked her question, but gently: this was her emotional husband. 

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

I wept for Cohen’s spare, elegiac poetry.  I wept for Boyle’s easy voice.  I wept for the still, calm beauty of our decorated home.  I wept for giving gift bread to our friends, bread which my wife had created.  But mostly I wept that, on the eve of Christmas Eve, the Lord Himself had used my wife and our pastor for His own purpose, which was to bring another soul to salvation—the godly using, which had puzzled each of them, as their planning of their days was set aside.     

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah.

 

 

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015