What the reading yields is the idea of father and mother as the Universal Father and Mother, the Lord’s dear Adam and His beloved Eve; that is, essential humankind as it came from His hand. There’s a pattern in these Commandments of setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father, who usually labor and are heavy-laden, and may be cranky or stingy or ignorant or overbearing. Believe me, I know this can be a hard Commandment to keep. But I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object. In the particular instance of your mother, I know that if you are attentive to her in this way, you will find a very great loveliness in her. When you love someone to the degree you love her, you see her as God sees her, and that is an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of Being itself. That is why the Fifth Commandment belongs on the first tablet. I have persuaded myself of it.
***
I slept decently. I stay at home Mondays when I can — my day of rest — so I had the morning to think and pray and also to do a little reshelving, and while I was doing that, it came to my mind that I should consider what I would say to myself if I came to myself for counsel. In fact, I do that all the time, as any rational person does, but there is a tendency, in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other more or less algebraically — this is true, but on the other hand, so is that, so I discover a kind of equivalency of considerations that is interesting in itself but resolves nothing. If I put my thinking down on paper perhaps I can think more rigorously. Where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible. Not deciding is really one of the two choices that are available to me, so decision must be allowed its moment, too. That is, as behavior, not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act. If I were to put deciding not to act at one end of a continuum of possibility and deciding to act at the other end, the whole intervening space would be given over to not deciding, which would mean not acting. I believe this makes sense. My point in any case is that I must put special, corrective emphasis on the possibility of doing the thing I dread doing, which is telling your mother what I think I ought to tell her.
Question: What is it you fear most, Moriturus?
Answer: I, Moriturus, fear leaving my wife and child unknowingly in the sway of a man of extremely questionable character.
Question: What makes you think his contact with them or his influence upon them will be considerable enough to be damaging to them?
Now, that really is an excellent question, and one I would not have thought to put to myself. The answer would be, he has come by the house a few times, he has come to church once. Not an impressive reply. The truth is, as I stood there in the pulpit, looking down on the three of you, you looked to me like a handsome young family, and my evil old heart rose within me, the old covetise I have mentioned elsewhere came over me, and I felt the way I used to feel when the beauty of other lives was a misery and an offense to me. And I felt as if I were looking back from the grave.
Well, thank God I thought that through.
And while I am being honest, I will add here that for perhaps two months I have felt a certain change in the way people act toward me, which could be a simple reflex of the way I act toward them. Maybe I don’t understand as much as I should. Maybe I don’t make as much sense as I should.
The fact is, I don’t want to be old. And I certainly don’t want to be dead. I don’t want to be the tremulous coot you barely remember. I bitterly wish you could know me as a young man, and not really so young, either, necessarily. I was trim and fit into my sixties. That was one way I took after my grandfather and my father. I was never rangy like them, but I was very strong, very sound. Even now, if I could trust my heart, there’s a lot I could do.
I don’t have to fault myself for feeling this way. The Lord wept in the Garden on the night He was betrayed, as I have said to people in my situation many times. So it isn’t just some unredeemed paganism in me that I dread what I should welcome, though clearly my sorrow is alloyed with discreditable emotions, emotions of other kinds. Of course, of course. “Who will free me from the body of this death?” Well, I know the answer to that one. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” I imagine a kind of ecstatic pirouette, a little bit like going up for a line drive when you’re so young that your body almost doesn’t know about effort. Paul couldn’t have meant something entirely different from that. So there’s that to look forward to.
I say this because I really feel as though I’m failing, and not primarily in the medical sense. And I feel as if I am being left out, as though I’m some straggler and people can’t quite remember to stay back for me. I had a dream like that last night.
I was Boughton in the dream, for all purposes. Poor old Boughton.
This morning you came to me with a picture you had made that you wanted me to admire. I was just at the end of a magazine article, just finishing the last paragraph, so I didn’t look up right away. Your mother said, in the kindest, saddest voice, “He doesn’t hear you.” Not “He didn’t” but “He doesn’t.”
That article was very interesting. It was in Ladies’ Home Journal, an old issue Glory found in her father’s study and brought over for me to look at. There was a note on it. Show Ames. But it ended up at the bottom of a stack of things, I guess, because it’s from 1948. The article is called “God and the American People,” and it says 95 percent of us say we believe in God. But our religion doesn’t meet the writer’s standards, not at all. To his mind, all those people in all those churches are the scribes and the Pharisees. He seems to me to be a bit of a scribe himself, scorning and rebuking the way he does. How do you tell a scribe from a prophet, which is what he clearly takes himself to be? The prophets love the people they chastise, a thing this writer does not appear to me to do.
The oddness of the phrase “believe in God” brings to my mind that first chapter of Feuerbach, which is really about the awkwardness of language, not about religion at all. Feuerbach doesn’t imagine the possibility of an existence beyond this one, by which I mean a reality embracing this one but exceeding it, the way, for example, this world embraces and exceeds Soapy’s understanding of it. Soapy might be a victim of ideological conflict right along with the rest of us, if things get out of hand. She would no doubt make some feline appraisal of the situation, which would have nothing to do with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat or the Manhattan Project. The inadequacy of her concepts would have nothing to do with the reality of the situation.