All That Was Ever Ours
ALL THAT WAS EVER OURS
In his beautiful book For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann says that time is
the first “object” of our Christian faith and action. . . .Through time on the one hand we experience life as a possibility, growth, fulfillment, as a movement toward the future. Through time, on the other hand, all future is dissolved in death and annihilation. . . . By itself time is nothing but a line of telegraph poles strung out into the distance and at some point along the way is our death.
All my life I have been acutely conscious of time, having grown up in a family where six o’clock meant five fifty-five, and because my father was superintendent of the Sunday school we got there as much as an hour early. In the past ten or fifteen years I have become more conscious of it, not only for the obvious reason that when one reaches middle age he knows it’s running out, but also because as a speaker I’m used to being told how much time I’m allowed (ten minutes, thirty minutes) and I try to stick to it. (I am agonizingly aware of time when the speaker who precedes me is cheerfully unaware of it.) I marvel at the program planners who arrange to have, following an hour and a half of banqueting, a “short” business meeting, a “few” acknowledgments (getting the ladies out of the kitchen for a round of applause always takes a long time—one of them is still wiping her hands on an apron and won’t come, another only peeks around the door with the sheepish protest, “But I didn’t do anything!”), a couple of guitar numbers (is there a short guitar number?), a testimony or two, and one of those things we used to call movies which are now, for reasons beyond my understanding, called “multimedia presentations,” before the speaker or speakers take the platform. Time doesn’t seem to mean much of anything to those planners until the speaker stands up and then they wonder how in the world it got so late and hope most fervently that the speaker will make it short.
But if time is the first object of our faith and actions as Christians we need to learn to redeem it, to say with the psalmist, “My times are in Thy hands,” and to realize that it has been once for all transformed. God incarnate entered time. Jesus Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” a particular Roman procurator in a particular place at a particular point in history, redeeming us and the world we live in, transforming forever that bleak “line of telegraph poles strung out into the distance.” Nothing is meaningless. Nothing, for the Christian, is a dead end. All endings are beginnings.
I need to remember this just now, because the Cottage is about to go on the market. “The Cottage” is a summer place in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, built in 1889 by my great-great uncle and aunt, and the scene of gloriously happy family vacations ever since. It was to me as a child the very vestibule of heaven. We would leave Philadelphia on the night Pullman, the “Bar Harbor Express,” and I remember the delirium of joy with which I settled into the berth, my clothes safely stowed in the little hammock, and fell asleep, to be awakened in New Haven by the shifting of the cars as the train was divided into different sections. I would lift the blind and see the brakeman passing with his lantern, watch the baggage trucks rolling by, and try to read in the dim light the thrillingly romantic names on the freight cars in the yards—“Seaboard Airline,” “Lackawanna,” “Chicago and Northwestern,” “Route of the Phoebe Snow,” “Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe.” I remember the jerking of the uncoupling and the satisfying crunch of the coupling, the loud hissing of steam and then the gentle rolling out of the station, the giant engine building up speed until the clickety-click reached the rhythm that once again put me to sleep.
In the morning I woke to see the Connecticut River valley, and it was not long before we pulled into Littleton, where we were met by my grandfather’s Buick and driven the eight miles to the Cottage. My stomach tightened with the joy of that first glimpse of the two brick chimneys, visible as we crossed the Gale River Bridge, and then, as we turned up the driveway, I could see the beloved house, the breakfast table set in the sun on the front quarter of the porch. (The porch ran all the way around the house, which was rectangular, built stockade-style, with six-inch spruce blocks for walls in the lower portion, shingles above.)
The sound of footsteps hurrying from the kitchen on the old boards. The creak of the hinges on the massive door which had a key eight inches long. (It was said that Uncle Will had the big iron lock and key before he built the house, and had to construct a door on a comparable scale.) A race around the porch to see if the little cart we played with was still in its place, to look into the separate cabin which was the kitchen at the back of the porch, a pause to look at the mountains—Lafayette, Artists’ Bluff, Bald, Cannon, Kinsman—blue against the sky, always dependably the same, strong, comforting (“So the Lord is round about them that fear Him”), waiting for us to climb them once more. In the living room, the huge fireplace with its three-foot andirons; the green china clock on the mantel, the guns in their niche; the fishing rods cradled in bentwood hooks suspended from the ceiling; the Texas Longhorns, the deer head; the portrait of Uncle Will on the wall; the rocking chairs where Grandpa and Grandma Howard always sat by the heavy writing table which Uncle Will had made with his own hands; the converted kerosene lamps; the little melodion which we used for accompaniment at our Sunday-evening hymn sings (the “natives” came to these, including a little old lady who claimed she couldn’t sing “half’s good’s a crow”); the cushioned settee with a lid which lifted to reveal a furry mechanical bear, a black lace parasol, a music box, and a mummified human child’s foot, brought from some ancient tomb in Egypt by Uncle Will back when he was scrounging the world for things to put in the then new Metropolitan Museum in New York.
In the back parlor were crumbling leather-bound books, a set of bells, a stereopticon with magic pictures of ice caves and frozen waterfalls, astonishing in the perfection and depth of each gleaming crystal, the glass cases of moths and butterflies which Aunt Annie had lured by stretching a bedsheet in the light of a lantern on the porch at night. And upstairs were books and more books, brightly colored stuffed birds from foreign lands, Aunt Annie’s flower press, a vial of attar of roses from a forgotten tomb, and life-sized paintings of improbably large brook trout that Uncle Will had caught, painted, and pasted to the door panels. There was the little room with the bird’s-eye maple-and-bamboo furniture where I slept, snuggling down under a feather quilt and listening to the wind in the white pines, the sound of the river flowing over the stones, and there was a poem tacked to the wall: “Sleep sweetly in this quiet room, O thou, whoe’er thou art. . . .”
And oh, the smell of the place! Year after year it was the same. Year after year we rushed in and breathed that sweetness—old wood, old leather, old books, the perfume of pine and balsam and wood smoke. There is no accounting for that fragrance, but it is still there, still the same, intoxicating to us who know it, still redolent of all the years of happiness, and now someone else will breathe it, someone who doesn’t know its meaning at all.
How shall we say good-bye to the glory of that house, how accept the sadness that it is no longer ours? By making it, as Schmemann says, of time, the object of our Christian faith and action. By recognizing that time has two dimensions—it brings things to an end, and it gives us always new beginnings. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, and we bring to him all of our beginnings and endings, all the hope and sadness that they cause us, all of the work done and the pleasures enjoyed as well as all our plans for work to be done and pleasures to be enjoyed.
So, through life, death, through sorrow, and through sinning,
He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed.
Christ is the End, for Christ was the Beginning,
Christ the Beginning, for the End is Christ.
F. W. H. Meyer
“St. Paul”
We give thanks, then, as we bring these things to him, and in the giving of thanks we signal our total acceptance of his will for us.
* * *
We are also granted temporary reprieves. Aunt Clara called the other night to say that it’s not going on the market after all. Not exactly, anyway. She has figured out some kind of plan which may make the place available to family members for a little while longer.
There is a storybook sort of attic in the Cottage, with two bedrooms built into it originally as servants’ rooms. As our family expanded I slept in one of these instead of in the bedroom on the second floor with the bird’s-eye maple-and-bamboo furniture. This room had an old-fashioned bed, bureau, and wooden washstand on which stood a great brown-and-white china basin, a soap dish to match, and two pitchers, large and small. Inside the little door that opened at the bottom of the washstand was a matching chamber pot. The most interesting feature of this room, however, was what my aunt called her rogues’ gallery, a long row of black-and-white photographs of her female college classmates, all with demure waves dipping low over the forehead, all with the peculiarly ill-fitting blouses of the thirties, all with the same bland and trustful expression, gazing mildly down at me as I lay in the bed. My aunt called them girls. To me they were most certainly not girls. They had been to college, they were old, they were unknown and unapproachable, and the unrelieved sameness of hairdo, expression, and costume created in my mind a distant strange world of which I would never be a part.
Under the attic eaves were other things which had the same effect. There was a small trunk of the variety made to fit nicely on the top of a stagecoach. This had belonged to great-great Aunt Annie of (I knew from her photographs) rigid posture, black silk dresses, and only the faintest hint of a smile. There were also woodcuts depicting Adam and Eve confronting Satan, or angels and cherubim and stallions and obese ladies in impossible positions. These had been relegated to the attic, probably by my mother, “because they gave the children nightmares,” but I suspected it was because every one of them portrayed one or more beings, celestial or terrestrial, who in her opinion were not adequately clothed. These my brothers and I crawled into the dusty recesses to study at our leisure. To this day Satan appears in my imagination with the same fierce and wicked face of those woodcuts, although I have managed to improve on the images of Adam and Eve.
The tiny brown field mice with delicate pink feet which ran up and down the electric wires and scattered seeds among the picture frames and mattresses of the attic were my friends. I would lie on my stomach holding my breath, not moving an eyelash, waiting for them to appear at their holes in the floorboards. I felt with them a special kinship in that we were the living denizens of this attic—intruders, perhaps, but here and alive, in spite of Satan and the cherubs, the great-great aunt, and the college “girls” who were here long before we came.
There was a lovely pine grove behind the Cottage with a path that ran through it to what Aunt Annie had named “The Meeting of the Waters,” junction of two clear mountain streams, Gale River and Pond Brook. Wooden seats had been constructed encircling several of the larger pine trees, and when I was very small my grandfather took me to sit on one of them while he showed me how to build a house of twigs on the floor of the forest.
My aunt taught me the wild flowers that grew near the Cottage, and I pressed them in a brown dime-store notebook—cinquefoil, Quaker lady, and twin flower from the pine woods, wild orchid and lady’s slipper from the low, grassy place at the river’s level, devil’s paintbrush, butter-and-eggs, goldenrod, and Queen Anne’s lace from the meadow in front of the Cottage. Years later I learned the bracken, ferns, and mosses, and showed other small children the wonders of the hairy cap moss—how you take off its hairy cap, lift the lid of the tiny “salt shaker,” and pour out its pale green powder into the palm of your hand.
There were our fields, our own woods, our swimming place down at the Meeting of the Waters. The very rocks belonged, we felt, to us. In the field were three large granite rocks, too heavy to move when the rest were cleared for planting long before. My brothers and I each claimed one of these as our own. We would go out and “ride” them, imagining ourselves mounted on an elephant, a camel, and a tortoise. There was “The Big Rock,” a gigantic boulder in the middle of Gale River with a deep pool beside it to swim in. Occasionally there was a trout and often we caught the bigger fish we always called suckers. The rock had a beautiful flat top where you could toast yourself after coming out of the frigid water, feeling the warmth of the sun on one side of you and the warmth of the rock on the other.
All of this, then, was ours—even the intoxicating smell of the cold brooks running over the clean stones between the sun-warmed pine and spruce-covered banks. The land on the far side of Pond Brook belonged, in my mind, to God. It was wilderness. There were no trails but animal trails there, and we felt that there were deer and maybe now and then a bear.
We grew up in the Depression, and although we had no idea we were poor, we had little idea how rich we were in things other than money. That Cottage was one of the great riches, with its treasures inside and its priceless scenery outside, its inexhaustible supply of things to do, things to look at and smell and revel in, the mountains to climb and the woods to explore, the streams to bathe in, the rocks to own.
When I go back there now there is, mingled with the smell of spruce, the smell of char-broiled steaks floating across meadow and stream. There’s a campground now in God’s own wilderness. If ever the deer and the bear were really there as we hoped, they are gone, replaced by campers, tents, trailers, and displaced people on that inevitably fruitless quest for what isn’t there. They don’t listen to the wind in the trees or the brooks flowing over rocks. They’ve got the transistor radio on full volume while they set up the outdoor grill. They don’t lie in the dark and look at the moon over Lafayette—they’ve just pumped up the pressure lantern or switched on the lights that have by this time, for all I know, been wired in across the brook. They wade into our stream and climb over the Big Rock and toss their beer cans down where the suckers used to be.
I have to get a firm grip on myself and remember that none of this deprives me of what I had. “All that was ever ours,” wrote Amy Carmichael of India, “is ours forever.” That wonderful place was one of the stations of my life. It helped to shape my tastes and loves and imagination and vision of God, and I remember his command to the people of Israel: “Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee. . . .”
They were to remember all of it. Most of it, I suppose, was more boring than memorable on that desert journey, and they had to go from Point A to Point B to Point C and all the way to Point Z in obedience, whether or not anything interesting happened along the way. But there were special places where God met them in special ways, and thus he helped them to review his leading. He knew how their memory would need jogging. The Cottage is one of the stations I go back to in my memory with joy. There are, of course, other kinds of places as well, places not at all like the Cottage which I would as soon forget. But, as Phillips Brooks prayed, I pray, “O Lord, by all Thy dealings with us, whether of light or darkness, of joy or pain, let us be brought to Thee.” It is he to whom and with whom we travel, and while he is the End of our journey, he is also at every stopping place.