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I have read that when the Spanish adventurers looked across the St. Lawrence and saw the unexplored land north of that river they thought it was of no account. And so they wrote Aca Naia (Canada), “Here is nothing,” upon their maps.{8} Our God does not write on the map of our lives, “Here is nothing.” He sees much. He sees that map set with snowfields, woods, waters, mountains, plains. There can be no difficulty of travel that He does not understand. We are never alone as we penetrate the unknown. We cannot be lost there. It does sometimes seem almost unbelievable that the soul of man can pass through so many devastating experiences and yet not be devastated. The explanation lies in such words as these: “He knoweth the way that I take.”
But strewn among the big and really shattering things there are often tiresome trifles that can seem quite important and draw attention to themselves. And yet, “They are gone! Why write their epitaph?” This saying (it is a kind of little laughing edelweiss) dates from an ancient Keswick convention. The meetings were over and the speakers were departing. The coach, piled up with luggage, was ready to start, when there was a cry for Theodore Monod of Paris, who was to leave by that coach and who had disappeared; so the youngest in the house was dispatched posthaste to call him. She raced upstairs and found him sitting at a round table, eyes screwed up, forehead wrinkled, left hand tugging distractedly at a lanky lock of hair, right hand flourishing a pencil. He was counting aloud in a great hurry, “Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq,” then, glancing at the messenger as she stood in the doorway, “Always one counts in one’s mother tongue.” So she knew that he was busy with his petty cash, and he had her sympathy, when, after a minute of desperate scribbling, he stopped. “It is gone! Why write its epitaph?” As a rule to be applied to accounts it may not be approved, but as a way of dealing with the little ills of life it is excellent; a bad night, a bad day, a worry, a small pain, a petty annoyance. It is gone. Why write its epitaph?
Why indeed? “A good thing from David today,” writes the father of five-year-old David Somervell. “Out of the mouth of babes: When climbing a little hill with me he said, puffing and blowing, but going very strong, ‘Nannie always says she wants to stop and get her breath when she’s climbing up a hill, but I don’t—I only think of getting to the top.’” It is when we stop to “get our breath” that we have time to write epitaphs of past troubles. The best way is little David’s as he climbs his infant Everests, “I only think of getting to the top.”
And if “the top” means for the reader peace in some long trial of patience and of faith, perhaps this from another letter will be an edelweiss: “Oda has just brought in the verse on her French calendar for today, Proverbs 24:14: ‘Know wisdom for thy soul; if thou hast found it, then there is a future, and thy waiting shall not be reduced to nothing, or be in vain.’” And a letter, quoting a recent Times, adds a flower to the cluster: “The grace of final perseverance is that quality of patience which is always equal to the pressure of the passing moment, because it is rooted in that eternal order over which the passing moment has no power.”
Those trifles which may not be worth an epitaph will either help or hinder as they pass and touch us with small casual fingers. We have an Indian fern whose frond changes as it grows. As the forces of life play upon it and work within it, each little pinna divides and subdivides till, in the end, the frond is a fan of delicate lace, a feathery fan.
“What has been the effect upon him of all the trouble?” we asked a guest who had been telling us of her father, and of how he had suffered from injustice. “It has left him unable to think an unkind thought of anyone,” she answered. The frond of that fern had been perfected.
If the wear and tear of life on a soul does not make for beauty, the process of the fern is reversed. The multitude of insignificant, trying things that are sure to come fret it into a ragged selfishness; and rough blows coarsen its texture. Or if it be otherwise fashioned it reacts to the touch like a jarred sea anemone, gathering itself within itself. Then (unlike the anemone, which, if left in peace, opens again) the jarred soul gradually closes completely, and hardens, till it acquires the power to jar others even as it was jarred. So there is loss. Fellow lovers, who were meant to meet, pass each other coldly. They do not even recognize each other as members of one family. Each is frozen in his own ice. But the love of God shed abroad in our hearts (not filtered through various screens) can melt us and love us out of fretfulness, and out of hardness. It was said of one who lived this life, “Love gladdened him. Love quickened him. Love set him free.” Love sets us free to love. And having been set free it is impossible to be bound any more.