First Days

My soul is at home.  And before my wife my countenance shines with the peace of it all.  In my case, the nearness of death has relieved me of the need to strive toward goals and triumphs.  No need to prove myself.  I walk a level plain.  Today is today.  Tomorrow will come.  And though I continue to plan activities well in advance, living doesn’t depend on their accomplishment, nor would any of them define me.  I am already defined.  Today is today.  Tomorrow is enough.....

And a lesser blessing, regarding my writing ..now time, rather than diminishing, has grown expansive.  I can solve problems as slowly and as fully as I please.  A problem is not a drudge; its solution is discovery, which discovery tastes as good as corn grown and plucked and shucked and eaten.                                  

How fortunate I am that my disease is lingering and that death comes a-creeping.  A quick death would cancel this next blessing:  that slow time grants me the opportunity to realize a quality of my faith I had not known before.  “Quality”—not necessarily its “strength.”  Believing is trust.  Believing is a relationship whose weave is too complex to be calculated by “strength” alone. " 

Walter  Wangerin Jr: ‘ Half a Lung Onwards’

New York City – April 19th 2012

This morning, I have been looking for quotes from one of my favourite authors, Walter Wangerin Jr, about what he calls “life in the city”. 

His books describe well some of the things I have been thinking about, as I wander around New York City, trying to make sense of all the things which are going on around me.

I didn’t find the quotation that I was looking for, but I did discover that Walter is dying of lung cancer and that his writing is now focussed on the quality of faith that he has discovered as life has slowed down and away from the business of ministry and teaching.

I met him once at Greenbelt Festival and thanked him for the way in which his writing about that life of ministry among an inner city congregation had lifted me up into a vocation which was every bit as costly, as real and as wonderful as he had promised it would be.

I probably won’t get the chance to tell him how timely are his insights about time at this very moment..

This amazing city is constantly moving around me.

In Central Park a man sits on a bench with a fully grown labrador on his lap.  Nobody bats an eyelid.

Looking for the famous ‘Amy Ruth’s’ diner in Harlem I nearly wander into the local mosque by mistake. The man standing on the step helpfully points out that I have got my numbers mixed up. 113,W116th St is not the same as 116, W113th St and nobody ever said it was.

He asks me if I am Australian. I say, “Yes”.

I ask the man in the grocery store for some crab cakes. He doesn’t get me the crab cakes but tells me instead to “come in on Friday, we’ll have salmon then” as if my request for crab cakes has marked me out as a stranger.

I walk from Harlem to the Upper West side along the side of Central Park, as far as The Dakota Building. It’s the place where Mark Chapman shot John Lennon and the only landmark which comes to mind in my jet lagged, foggy brain. I don’t think I’m all that bothered about John Lennon but when I get there I feel the need of someone to mark the moment with…

I find these plaques on three benches at the entrance to Central Park.

It seems incredible that in the middle of the city, the bustle and the madness, is a comment straight from Thoreau.

Like Walter I am contemplating being out and about in a different sort of time.                                                                       

Unlike him I am not dying, but I am moving around in a city which doesn’t need me, which is a kind of dying in itself, but one that Jesus might have approved.  The kind of dying in which you lose yourself, to find yourself  again properly.

Some of it feels like London except that in London I am always thinking about the ‘next thing’; what I am doing tomorrow and who needs 'what' from me today. It all feeds me the idea that I am in the middle of something  important which matters in some way and of course it does. It's the  normal stuff of life which we all get on with.

But Walter's insight, as ever, is profound. To have the time and space to just 'be' is so extraordinary I don't know what to do with it yet. My shoulders are still holding tension, waiting for what's going to come next. But nobody bothers me and nothing comes next. They don’t know I am here and even if they did they wouldn’t mind..

"No need to prove myself. I walk a level plain.."

That feels very unfamiliar..

Walter Wangerin Jr.org