Beautiful Places, Holy Places

Sunday I wrote about my disappointment over the guards blocking me from showing Ginny one of the happiest places of my boyhood.

I’ve continued to think about the dynamics of that situation.

What made me want to return to that place so desperately? What had I done there? Who was I with? What made the place magical?

Surely it was not dirt and dead men’s bones, mosquitoes and sawgrass.

What was it?

I am not the only man ever to try to recapture some enchantment from my past.

Back in the 1960s I worked as a minion at the Library Of Congress in Washington, D.C. Once as I researched something entirely different, I blundered across a poem written in 1846, long before he became President, by Abraham Lincoln.

I’d never before known that Lincoln wrote poetry, but his thoughts touched me deeply. My own feelings now reflect his musings about going back to his childhood home as an adult 20 years after he left. Here are a few verses:

My child-hood home I see again,
And gladden with the view;
And still as mem'ries crowd my brain,
There's sadness in it too--

O memory! thou mid-way world
'Twixt Earth and Paradise;
Where things decayed, and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise--

And freed from all that's gross or vile,
Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle,
All bathed in liquid light--

Now twenty years have passed away,
Since here I bid farewell
To woods, and fields, and scenes of play
And school-mates loved so well--

Where many were, how few remain
Of old familiar things!
But seeing these to mind again
The lost and absent brings--

The friends I left that parting day --
How changed as time has sped!
Young child hood grown, strong manhood grey,
And half of all are dead--

I hear the lone survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell
And every spot a grave—

I range the fields with pensive tread,
I pace the hollow rooms;
And feel (companion of the dead)
I'm living in the tombs--

And here's an object more of dread,
Than ought the grave contains--
A human-form, with reason fled
While wretched life remains--

And now away to seek some scene
Less painful than the last --
With less of horror mingled in
The present and the past--

The very spot where grew the bread,
That formed my bones, I see
How strange, old field, on thee to tread
And feel I'm part of thee!

Yes, Lincoln went back — and found a madman. You can read the entire poem at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mal:@field(DOCID%2B@lit(d4334400))

I recall once taking Ginny to visit my Grandfather’s long- abandoned farm in Graham, Florida. When I was about 8 years old, I hunted crawdaddies there in a brook which I called Wonder River where the water was crystal clear and where I saw my first painted bunting, one of the world’s most beautiful birds.

We located the old wooden farmhouse which had fallen in, victim of decades of termite attacks. From there we walked down the overgrown dirt lane to the enchanted spot — only to find that what my eight-year-old eyes saw as Wonder River was only a drainage ditch, the magic cave, only a culvert under the lane.

What had charmed me about that spot?

I felt as you would when you go back to visit the house where you grew up. Even if the building still stands, the luster is gone. What you remember as Beauty, no longer lives in that spot.

I think that it is not the places we remember and long for; it is the feeling we had while in those places that draws us back.

I think we caught a glimpse of Something that we did not recognize when we were on the spot, but which we now yearn to recapture.

The Bible’s Book of Hebrews teaches that earthly places, at least some of them, are but dim copies of real places in Heaven, the beauty we seek there is reflected in shadows we sometimes see here.

I believe that when we want to go back, to show someone we love that place where we glimpsed Beauty, that what we really want is to recapture that glimpse of the Heavenly.

I believe that our yearning is not for a place but for a Person.

The place is just where we briefly felt His unseen presence.

We weren’t aware that He was there.

But we have never forgotten.

We never will.

We have a hunger that can not feed on this land’s bread.

That’s why Jesus bemoans those sad, sad people who have left their first Love.

That’s why one ancient prophet said,

In quietness and confidence shall be your strength;
In returning and rest, ye shall be saved.