Hope Chest

continued

My hope chest holds childhood memories, too. Like the Christmas when I was six and our family went to Florida by train. The view from the window was bleak as the Silver Meteor crossed New Jersey that mid-Depression year. Miles of rusting freight cars, grimy snow, rubbish-strewn tracks.

I woke in the morning puzzled for a sleepy moment by the jiggling of the berth. Then I was wide awake and staring openmouthed. In the night we'd entered another world. Pastel buildings, huge, slow-flapping pelicans, pinwheeling palms ...

The dazzlement of that moment has never left me, and suggests what the astonishment at heaven will be, waking after sleep to find ourselves in a different land.

You were not created
for Pleasure, you were
created for Joy.
     Thomas Merton

Among such "everyday" memories, my hope chest holds one exceptional treasure. Why it should have been given me I've never understood, nor how to describe it.

It was a Friday afternoon in September 1967. For six days John and I and other staffers had been holding a workshop for the winners of Guideposts' first writers' contest. Seventeen men and women from all around the country had joined us at a conference center in Rye, New York. Modeled after the French chateau where its owner was headquartered during World War I, Wainwright House has a book-lined library and green lawns sloping down to Long Island Sound. It had been the perfect setting for a week of interaction with some very talented people.

A few minutes earlier we'd waved our good-byes as the workshoppers departed. Now John and I too were going home, heading down the chateau's broad gravel drive, John at the wheel of the car. I leaned my head back against the seat, gazing at the first hint of fall in the poplars lining the road at the end of the driveway.

And then, in the most vivid visual instant of my life, the scene in front of me broke apart. I no longer saw trees and a gravel drive. For an astonishing moment I seemed to be looking at the underlying substance of the universe.

The autumn light splintered into a billion shimmering fragments whirling in a kind of primordial dance. Even as I watched, I knew I could not be seeing motion that fast - or particles that small. Atoms are immense. It wasn't a thought but an observation. Even parts of atoms - protons, electrons... They're all too big to know about this.

I was not only witnessing a scale unimaginably small and motion impossibly rapid, I was seeing a state of being unlike anything I knew. I was looking at laughter itself. I was seeing the fundamental structure of creation, and that structure was joy.

John turned down Stuyvesant Avenue, the vision ceased. A mile, two miles ... "Tired?" he broke the silence as he pulled onto Interstate 287.

No! Simply speechless, groping for a way to tell him what I could not possibly know and yet did know.

"Nothing exists," I said finally, "but joy."

John turned to stare at me, then wrenched his attention back to the highway.

I described as best I could that momentary sighting of a reality beyond sight. It was knowledge, not emotion - to feel the joy I'd seen would have blown the human frame to bits. And the knowledge has stood unshaken, in all the ups and downs of all the years since, a kind of bedrock of certainty beneath all passing sensations. The base of everything, now and forever, is good beyond imagining.