For just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life. —1 Corinthians 15:22
Just beyond the backyard of my childhood home, a secluded section of railroad tracks overlooked a small pond teeming with lily pads, turtles and sunfish.
Part of the old and fading Providence & Worcester freight line, the tracks were strictly off limits to my brother and me when we were very young. But by the time we finished elementary school, our father had eased the restriction. This was a good thing, because the pond would become my favorite place to disappear to when I needed a quiet place to think. I'd always loved to think. And the deeper into junior high school I got, the more of it I found myself doing.
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When he was a 13-year-old kid, Karol Wojtyla had a thinking spot very much like mine.
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Alone in that place after school one drizzly day, as I scratched the dirt for rocks to throw into the water, I came upon a smooth, flat stone. Perfectly triangular, about the size of a silver dollar, it may or may not have been an ancient arrowhead. Either way, being an imaginative child, I started to wonder if maybe, 500 years before I got there, the item had belonged to a Wampanoag brave or maybe even a Narragansett chief. With meticulous care I rubbed it clean. Facing the pond, I crouched down and set the discovery on the wet rust of the track. Then I began to think about what its story might be.
How many deer did the tool bring down for dinner in its day? How many enemies did it fell? What was the situation when its owner last laid hands on it? How old was he? Could he have been 13, like me? At some point in his life, I decided, he surely was. Like me, he must have looked out over that same pond—my pond—and thought about things. Small things, like where the frogs and mosquitoes go when winter comes. Medium things, like how to find out if a girl likes you without losing face if she doesn't. And big things, like how everything came to be and why everyone has to die.
Not long after I began mulling the maybe-arrowhead that one gray day, a troubling question came to my mind. It arrived not all at once, but in stages, as if delivered by a ghost train slowly making its way through the mist along the tracks. It went like this. Not only had the pond long outlived the young Indian, but every trace of him had disappeared, too, along with everyone he loved and everything he cared about. Just so, the pond would long outlive me and all that was real to me.
Five hundred years from now, will some futuristic kid come upon this spot, find something of mine and wonder if I ever lived?
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I panicked. Death, it suddenly seemed, was not only inevitable but imminent.
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For some reason this question caused me to tune in, with meditative acuity, to the sights, sounds and scents around the pond. Maybe it was the gloominess of the day. In any case, for a long minute I drank in the sensory stimuli of those surroundings like I'd never taste their sweetness again.
No, it was even more melodramatic than that. I panicked. Death, it suddenly seemed, was not only inevitable but imminent. At that point I decided the artifact was nothing more than an accident of nature. I chucked it into the water and ran home.
Many years later, I spontaneously recalled this little incident while praying before the Blessed Sacrament. It surprised me to find it still so vivid in my mind's eye. Then this: If not for the strange stone turning up by the railroad tracks that moment long ago, I might not be in the good graces of the Lord of Life today. For the find surely brought on the first real restlessness I ever had for He Who Thought Me Into Being.
'When the Time Comes'
This week, as we mourn the loss of our irreplaceable Holy Father, I find myself reminiscing about that unusual day by the pond once again. But this time, heavy with the sorrow of the present moment and anxious over the uncertainty of what comes next, I am calling on the memory so as to be consoled. And so I am, by a very present fact: When he was a 13-year-old kid, Karol Wojtyla had a thinking spot very much like mine.
How do I know this? I've been basking in (USCCB, 2003). In this, the only verse he both wrote and published during his pontificate, the poet-pope doesn't spell out the coordinates of any such place or time in particular. But to read these lyrical reflections on nature, life and God's self-sacrificing love for man is to be taken to an old, foundational corner of this great man's heart. And it is to recognize the place as a quiet, secluded retreat—one in which a chance scratch of the earth turns up unexpected artifacts that point, indirectly but tangibly, to Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is human life itself.
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It is in his poetry that we get a glimpse of his interior thought life as he experienced it through the 26-1/2 years of his pontificate.
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If it sounds like I'm stretching to make John Paul's experience my own, so be it. For so spontaneous are the thoughts recorded here, so softly refracted through the filter of this Apostle's expansive intellect, that reading the book is like taking a stroll with old Dr. Wojtyla, your favorite philosophy professor, on his day off. You walk along, pausing at a few points of interest along the way. At each, he surprises you by expressing, with startling transparency, a childlike sense of wonder. Who could resist the implied invitation to relate in kind? (And can't you just see him demonstrating longsuffering patience with your ill-timed interruptions?)
The book, published in English and Spanish by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, contains three poems. In "The Stream," the Pope guides us along a mountain stream, representing life, in search of its mysterious and unseen source. In "A Hill in the Land of Moriah," he admires the biblical story of Abraham, called by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, and what it reveals about God's immeasurable love for us. And, intriguingly, in "Meditations on the Book of Genesis at the Threshold of the Sistine Chapel," he looks at, among other things, what—and whom—will come after him in that historic place:
"The colors of the Sistine will then speak the word of the Lord: Tu es Petrus (You are Peter)—once heard by Simon, son of John.
'To you I will give the keys of the Kingdom.'
Those entrusted with the legacy of the keys gather here,
letting themselves be enfolded by the Sistine's colors,
by the vision left to us by Michelangelo—So it was in August, and again in October, in the memorable year of the two Conclaves,
and so it will be once more, when the time comes, after my death."
Song of Solitude
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The best traveled, most closely observed priest, evangelist and Apostle in Christian history loved nothing more than simply getting alone with God.
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Here, as in his earlier poetry, Wojtyla transitions from detached, ontological abstraction ("how can we break beyond the bounds of good and evil?") to private, first-person openings of the heart ("Let me wet my lips in spring water")—and back again—without so much as a stanza break. We saw this in the verse he wrote as a young man contemplating the silence of his mother's grave and, later, as a seminarian seeking God's will amid the violence and chaos of Nazi-occupied Poland.
His new poetry, in other words, is so him. We knew, from his 14 landmark encyclicals alone, that this Holy Father was as gifted a thinker and as devout a disciple of Christ as ever sat in St. Peter's chair. But it is in his poetry that we get a glimpse of his interior thought life as he experienced it over the 26-1/2 years of his pontificate.
And oh, how intensely he experienced it. One literary critic, commenting years before this collection came along, put it like this: "Thought itself seems to be the most vivid and authentic experience for him. His poems are really about solitude to a large extent, and the self being known, one on one with God in the act of contemplation."
Talk about a sign of contradiction. The best traveled, most closely observed priest, evangelist and Apostle in Christian history loved nothing more than simply getting alone with God.
Well, okay. Maybe he loved, just as much, proclaiming God's Gospel.
In Roman Triptych: Meditations, he does both. Just as he did everywhere he went.
Glorious Sadness
And now it hits. The Holy Father is gone from among us. Gone from this place, gone from all the particular places he loved to go.
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And now it hits. The Holy Father is gone from among us. Gone from this place, gone from all the particular places he loved to go.
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Not that the places remain forever, either. My old thinking spot, for one, has already dissolved. The railroad tracks were ripped up years ago to make way for a paved bike path. I went back recently and hardly recognized the place. I couldn't find a rock to throw into the pond and I had to dodge a couple of speeding cyclists and inline-skaters. All I could think was: The pavement's days are numbered, too.
In these sad but gloriously hopeful days, how reassuring I find it to know that, from now until my own time comes, at least three of Karol Wojtyla's favorite thinking spots are mine to disappear into. And to know that, when I go there, I don't go alone.
If I ever make it to the place he's in now, I pray for an eternal pond and, on its banks, two bottomless stockpiles of stones for the tossing. One for me and the other for John Paul the Great.
