Orion Magazine - November-December 2008

prelapsarian thinker. The world needs no justi>cation. It simply is. Sitting in my canvas chair, staring out at calm blue lake, I feel this 2,500-year-old observation to be profoundly contemporary. More to the point, I feel it to be profoundly necessary.

After a breakfast of instant grits and Vermont sausage, I paddle from island to island, looking for other wild orchids, hoping maybe to see a moose along the shore. Clouds cast blue shadows into the pockets of green ridgesides that surround the lake. Now and then the wind sweeps up a small chop on the open water and my canoe cuts across the blue waves with a cleaving rock of the bow. Then everything settles down again. The loons issue their seemingly random calls from the middle of the lake. A couple of mergansers lower their landing gear and settle down on the water not far from my canoe. We all just ?oat.

There is a quiet intensity to a day like this. It almost makes you shaky. I lie down ?at in my canoe with my head on my life jacket and close my eyes. I imagine myself as a seed inside its pod, a violin lying quiet in its case.

Thoreau wrote that, when ?oating on Walden Pond, he sometimes stopped existing and began to be. I think it is a crucial transition, that move from merely existing into an experience of clarity and intensity that truly deserves to be called being. Here I can read the wind and the water from the stern seat of my canoe. While I experience and observe Heraclitus’s tenet that only change is unchanging, I sometimes feel as if I inhabit a moment with neither a past nor a future. I feel as if I inhabit both time and space with an intensity that in some way erases the distinction between the two.

On the way back to my island around dusk, I notice whirligig beetles that look like little black seeds spinning across the surface of the water. According to my >eld guide, each one’s eyes have two parts, enabling it to see above and below the surface of the water at the same time. It is as if these beetles inhabit two worlds.

“Eyes are better informers than ears,” wrote Heraclitus. When I grew into adulthood, I often felt I would have been better served as a child if I had spent more time in my grandfather’s canoe, observing the ducks in the marshy coves around his parsonage, and less time in his church, listening to dire sermons about my woeful inadequacies before God. My grandfather was really two di=erent men outside, in the unroofed church of his canoe, and

inside the whitewashed walls of his sanctuary. And since his death >ve years ago, I have struggled to reconcile the master paddler, the man who loved the mountains and rivers of Virginia, with the man who preached that we live in a fallen world from which we are in desperate need of salvation.

About >fteen years ago, shortly after he retired from the ministry, my grandfather admitted to me something I never thought

I’d hear him say: he might have been wrong. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night,” he confessed, “stricken with the fear that, all these years, I might have been preaching the wrong thing.” Speci>cally, he might have been wrong to preach such a punishing message of guilt, sin, and blood sacri>ce. Perhaps he had been too hard on his congregation. Perhaps he had emphasized the Apostle Paul’s gospel of fear at the expense of Jesus’s teaching of love and forgiveness. This admission both shocked and relieved me. Finally, I thought, my grandfather and I might talk honestly about religion and the inevitable doubts that accompany one’s faith. I had my share of doubts, compounded by a secret sense of guilt that I had betrayed my grandfather’s religion, and so betrayed my grandfather. And for a while we did have interesting conversations about whether Paul had really understood Jesus’s message, or whether he had distorted it into something Jesus himself would not have recognized.

But gradually, as my grandfather’s health failed, as his relationship with my only uncle deteriorated into a tense, ugly silence, and as my grandmother drifted slowly into a quiet dementia, I watched my grandfather return to his earlier conviction that this world is a realm of disappointments, a toilsome proving ground where we strive to earn admittance into heaven.

Late in life, he would bring himself to tears at the dinner table when, during a rambling blessing of the food, he began contemplating the pain Jesus must have su=ered to save him, my grandfather, from this sinful world.

By then, I had come to believe, as it says in the Gospel of Luke, that “the kingdom of God is before us,” spread gloriously across the natural world; but my grandfather had wholly abandoned that idea and was hoping desperately for a kingdom on high, something better than the mortal pain of this earthly realm.