The gates ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps |
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 | XIII. The gates ajar |  |
13. XIII.
August 3.
The summer is sliding quietly away, — my
desolate summer which I dreaded; with the
dreams gone from its wild flowers, the crown
from its sunsets, the thrill from its winds and
its singing.
But I have found out a thing. One can live
without dreams and crowns and thrills.
I have not lost them. They lie under the
ivied cross with Roy for a little while. They
will come back to me with him. “Nothing is
lost,” she teaches me. And until they come
back, I see — for she shows me — fields groaning
under their white harvest, with laborers
very few. Ruth followed the sturdy reapers,
gleaning a little. I, perhaps, can do as much.
The ways in which I must work seem so small
and insignificant, so pitifully trivial sometimes,
that I do not even like to write them down
here. In fact, they are so small that, six
months ago, I did not see them at all. Only
to be pleasant to old Phœbe, and charitable to
little scholars, and a bit watchful of
worn-out Mrs. Bland, and — But dear me, I
won't! They are so little!
But one's self becomes of less importance,
which seems to be the point.
It seems very strange to me sometimes,
looking back to those desperate winter days,
what a change has come over my thoughts of
Roy. Not that he is any less — O, never any
less to me. But it is almost as if she had
raised him from the grave. Why seek ye the
living among the dead? Her soft, compassionate
eyes shine with the question every hour.
And every hour he is helping me, — ah, Roy,
we understand one another now.
How he must love Aunt Winifred! How
pleasant the days will be when we can talk
her over, and thank her together!
“To be happy because Roy is happy.” I
remember how those first words of hers
struck me. It does not seem to me impossible,
now.
Aunt Winifred and I laugh at each other
for talking so much about heaven. I see that
the green book is filled with my questions and
talk as much about mundane affairs as other
people, but that this one thing interests us
more.
If, instead, it had been flounces, or babies,
or German philosophy, the green book would
have filled itself just as unconsciously with
flounces, or babies, or German philosophy.
This interest in heaven is of course no sign of
especial piety in me, nor could people with
young, warm, uncrushed hopes throbbing
through their days be expected to feel the
same. It is only the old principle of, where
the treasure is — the heart.
“How spiritual-minded Mary has grown!”
Mrs. Bland observes, regarding me respectfully.
I try in vain to laugh her out of the
conviction. If Roy had not gone before, I
should think no more, probably, about the
coming life, than does the minister's wife herself.
But now — I cannot help it — that is the
reality, this the dream; that the substance,
this the shadow.
The other day Aunt Winifred and I had a
talk which has been of more value to me than
all the rest.
Faith was in bed; it was a cold, rainy evening;
we were secure from callers; we lighted
a few kindlers in the parlor grate; she rolled
up the easy-chair, and I took my cricket at
her feet.
“Paul at the feet of Gamaliel! This is
what I call comfort. Now, Auntie, let us go
to heaven awhile.”
“Very well. What do you want there
now?”
I paused a moment, sobered by a thought
that has been growing steadily upon me of
late.
“Something more, Aunt Winifred. All
these other things are beautiful and dear; but
I believe I want — God.
“You have not said much about Him. The
Bible says a great deal about Him. You have
given me the filling-up of heaven in all its
pleasant promise, but — I don't know — there
seems to be an outline wanting.”
She drew my hand up into hers, smiling.
“I have not done my painting by artistic
methods, I know; but it was not exactly accidental.
“Tell me, honestly, — is God more to you or
less, a more distinct Being or a more vague
is He not, dearer to you now than then?”
I thought about it a minute, and then turned
my face up to her.
“Mary, what a light in your eyes! How
is it?”
It came over me slowly, but it came with
such a passion of gratitude and unworthiness,
that I scarcely knew how to tell her — that He
never has been to me, in all my life, what he is
now at the end of these six months. He was
once an abstract Grandeur which I struggled
more in fear than love to please. He has become
a living Presence, dear and real.
Of the oblivious years;
But warm, sweet, tender, even yet
A present help.”....
He was an inexorable Mystery who took
Roy from me to lose him in the glare of a
more inexorable heaven. He is a Father who
knew better than we that we should be parted
for a while; but He only means it to be a little
while. He is keeping him for me to find in
the flush of some summer morning, on which I
shall open my eyes no less naturally than I
open them on June sunrises now. I always
have that fancy of going in the morning.
She understood what I could not tell her,
and said, “I thought it would be so.”
“You, His interpreter, have done it,” I answered
her. “His heaven shows what He is, —
don't you see? — like a friend's letter. I could
no more go back to my old groping relations to
Him, than I could make of you the dim and
somewhat apocryphal Western Auntie that you
were before I saw you.”
“Which was precisely why I have dealt with
this subject as I have,” she said. “You had all
your life been directed to an indefinite heaven,
where the glory of God was to crowd out all
individuality and all human joy from His most
individual and human creatures, till the “Glory
of God” had become nothing but a name and
a dread to you. So I let those three words
slide by, and tried to bring you to them, as
Christ brought the Twelve to believe in him,
`for the works' sake.'
“Yes, my child; clinging human loves,
stifled longings, cries for rest, forgotten hopes,
shall have their answer. Whatever the bewilderment
of beauties folded away for us in
heavenly nature and art, they shall strive with
each other to make us glad. These things
have their pleasant place. But, through eternity,
and dearer than the dearest of them. God
himself will be first, — naturally and of necessity,
without strain or struggle, first.”
When I sat here last winter with my dead
in my house, those words would have roused
in me an agony of wild questionings. I should
have beaten about them and beaten against
them, and cried in my honest heart that they
were false. I knew that I loved Roy more
than I loved such a Being as God seemed to
me then to be. Now, they strike me as simply
and pleasantly true. The more I love
Roy, the more I love Him. He loves us both.
“You see it could not be otherwise,” she
went on, speaking low. “Where would you be,
or I, or they who seem to us so much dearer
and better than ourselves, if it were not for
Jesus Christ? What can heaven be to us, but
a song of the love that is the same to us yesterday,
to-day, and forever, — that, in the mystery
of an intensity which we shall perhaps
never understand, could choose death and be
glad in the choosing, and, what is more than
that, could live life for us for three-and-thirty
years?
“I cannot strain my faith — or rather my
many people fill heaven. But it seems to me
like this: A friend goes away from us, and it
may be seas or worlds that lie between us, and
we love him. He leaves behind him his little
keepsakes; a lock of hair to curl about our
fingers; a picture that has caught the trick of
his eyes or smile; a book, a flower, a letter.
What we do with the curling hair, what we
say to the picture, what we dream over the
flower and the letter, nobody knows but ourselves.
People have risked life for such mementoes.
Yet who loves the senseless gift
more than the giver, — the curl more than the
young forehead on which it fell, — the letter
more than the hand which traced it?
“So it seems to me that we shall learn to
see in God the centre of all possibilities of joy.
The greatest of these lesser delights is but the
greater measure of His friendship. They will
not mean less of pleasure, but more of Him.
They will not “pale,” as Dr. Bland would
say. Human dearness will wax, not wane, in
heaven; but human friends will be loved for
love of Him.”
“I see; that helps me; like a torch in a dark
room. But there will be shadows in the corners.
feel it in the body?”
“In the body, probably not. We see through
a glass so darkly that the temptation to idolatry
is always our greatest. Golden images
did not die with Paganism. At times I fancy
that, somewhere between this world and
another, a revelation will come upon us like
a flash, of what sin really is, — such a revelation,
lighting up the lurid background of our
past in such colors, that the consciousness of
what Christ has done for us will be for a time
as much as heart can bear. After that, the
mystery will be, not how to love Him most, but
that we ever could have loved any creature or
thing as much.”
“We serve God quite as much by active
work as by special prayer, here,” I said after
some thought; “how will it be there?”
“We must be busily at work certainly; but
I think there must naturally be more communion
with Him then. Now, this phrase
“communion with God” has been worn, and
not always well worn.
“Prayer means to us, in this life, more often
penitent confession than happy interchange of
thought with Him. It is associated, too, with
the lamp goes out. Obstacles, moral and
physical, stand in the way of our knowing exactly
what it may mean in the ideal of it.
“My best conception of it lies in the friendship
of the man Christ Jesus. I suppose he
will bear with him, eternally, the humanity
which he took up with him from the Judean
hills. I imagine that we shall see him in visible
form like ourselves, among us, yet not of
us; that he, himself, is “Gott mit inhen”;
that we shall talk with him as a man talketh
with his friend. Perhaps, bowed and hushed
at his dear feet, we shall hear from his own
lips the story of Nazareth, of Bethany, of Golgotha,
of the chilly mountains where he used
to pray all night long for us; of the desert
places where he hungered; of his cry for help
— think, Mary — His! — when there was not
one in all the world to hear it, and there was
silence in heaven, while angels strengthened
him and man forsook him. Perhaps his voice
— the very voice which has sounded whispering
through our troubled life — “Could ye not
watch one hour?” — shall unfold its perplexed
meanings; shall make its rough places plain;
shall show us step by step the merciful way
out to us, joy by joy, the surprises that he has
been planning for us, just as the old father in
the story planned to surprise his wayward boy
come home.
“And such a `communion,' — which is not
too much, nor yet enough, to dare to expect of
a God who was the `friend' of Abraham,
who `walked' with Enoch, who did not call
fishermen his servants, — such will be that
`presence of God,' that `adoration,' on which
we have looked from afar off with despairing
eyes that wept, they were so dazzled, and
turned themselves away as from the thing they
greatly feared.”
I think we neither of us cared to talk for a
while after this. Something made me forget
even that I was going to see Roy in heaven.
“Three-and-thirty years. Three-and-thirty
years.” The words rang themselves over.
“It is on the humanity of Christ,” she said
after some musing, “that all my other reasons
for hoping for such a heaven as I hope for, rest
for foundation. He knows exactly what we
are, for he has been one of us; exactly what
we hope and fear and crave, for he has hoped
and feared and craved, not the less humanly,
but only more intensely.
“`If it were not so,' — do you take in the
thoughtful tenderness of that? A mother, stilling
her frightened child in the dark, might
speak just so, — `if it were not so, I would have
told you.' That brooding love makes room for
all that we can want. He has sounded every
deep of a troubled and tempted life. Who so
sure as he to understand how to prepare a
place where troubled and tempted lives may
grow serene? Further than this; since he
stands as our great Type, no less in death and
after than before it, he answers for us many
of these lesser questions on the event of which
so much of our happiness depends.
“Shall we lose our personality in a vague
ocean of ether, — you one puff of gas, I another?
—
“He, with his own wounded body, rose and
ate and walked and talked.
“Is all memory of this life to be swept
away? —
“He, arisen, has forgotten nothing. He
waits to meet his disciples at the old, familiar
places; as naturally as if he had never been
parted from them, he falls in with the current
of their thoughts.
“Has any one troubled us with fears that in
face dearer than all the world to us? —
“He made himself known to his friends;
Mary, and the two at Emmaus, and the bewildered
group praying and perplexed in their
bolted room.
“Do we weary ourselves with speculations
whether human loves can outlive the shock of
death? —
“Mary knew how He loved her, when, turning,
she heard him call her by her name.
They knew, whose hearts `burned within
them while he talked with them by the way,
and when he tarried with them, the day being
far spent.'”
“And for the rest?”
“For the rest, about which He was silent, we
can trust him, and if, trusting, we please ourselves
with fancies, he would be the last to
think it blame to us. There is one promise
which grows upon me the more I study it, `He
that spared not his own Son, how shall he not
also with him freely give us all things?'
Sometimes I wonder if that does not infold a
beautiful double entendre, a hint of much that
you and I have conjectured, — as one throws
down a hint of a surprise to a child.
“Then there is that pledge to those who
seek first His kingdom: `All these things shall
be added unto you.' `These things,' were food
and clothing, were varieties of material delight,
and the words were spoken to men who lived
hungry, beggared, and died the death of out-casts.
If this passage could be taken literally,
it would be very significant in its bearing on
the future life; for Christ must keep his promise
to the letter, in one world or another. It
may be wrenching the verse, not as a verse,
but from the grain of the argument, to insist
on the literal interpretation, — though I am
not sure.”
| XIII. The gates ajar | |