What company have light and love with darkness and folly?

What company have light and love with darkness and folly?  Isn’t this a marvelous phrase? I mean that literally. Doesn't it make you stop and wonder? When I read things like this I get on to my computer and Google or Bing the phrase, to try to find its author. I want to know to whom to credit such wonderful quotes, and I’d like to know more about their authors. But this author is a personal friend, this elegant phrase a kind of transfiguration, a sudden surprising glimpse of his true beauty.

We correspond, Scott and I, writing back and forth the old fashioned way, by letter. His letters come to me hand-written on lined notebook paper, in ink or sometimes in pencil. Mine go to him on multi-purpose plain white paper from my printer. Without the use of telephone, getting to know each other was a very gradual process. There is an old joke about the monks who lived in complete silence, but on Easter morning were given five minutes to talk with the brother monk sitting next to them at breakfast. The abbot rings the bell to signal this annual time for talk. One monk turns to the other and says, “As I was saying….”

Acquaintance like this grows like a tree: slowly, branches toward the light, roots toward the water, and eventually, very strong. Over these five years I have come to realize that Scott's has gradually grown to be among my strongest friendships. As I have come to know his depth of heart and mind, I have shared my heaviest concerns with him, and my greatest joys. He uses the word the word “company” in his marvelous phrase. The word is powerful. From the Latin root PAN for bread, it means someone with whom we share the same loaf, the same source. The daily stuff of life, the basic stuff, is what we share with our companions, those with whom we keep company. So Scott knows about my brother’s death on the street in St Paul. He knows about our grandchildren’s birth and growth, Kathy’s heroic struggles with health, my work with the homeless, and my consideration of retiring from the university and relocating 250 miles away. And during these last three months of facing my own mortality, and especially the weeks of concern about sudden death, my letters from Scott have been richest and deepest of all.

I’ve defined this forty day journey: “Lent is a time of unwrinkling, returning to our whole-iest selves, by engaging our desire and our will within the sacredness of the Jesus story.” Will. After a week looking at desire, we’ll look this week at will. Two months ago, when my will was weakening as the imminence of my death receded, Scott called me to task with this phrase. Light and love, he was telling me, deserve not to be sullied by darkness and foolishness. Stay on the path, he was telling me. Don’t let your mind wander. He was challenging me to be form of will, and not waver. Don’t even GO there, he was saying.

The Gospel story (click for a link) for next Sunday is about a land owner who wants his gardener to cut down a tree that is not yielding fruit. The gardener asks for the opportunity to give it one more year, a year to nurture it, to give it encouragement and a chance to redeem itself.  As you consider Jesus' Good Story of the landowner and the gardener and the plight of the tree, consider that Scott lives in a cell. He is not one of those monks who speak to each other on Easter morning; he never sits at table with others. He is on Death Row, a tree that has been sentenced to be cut down. In what ways are you the landowner? In what ways are you the gardener? In what ways are you the tree?

Scott is seeking other “pen-pals”. If you might be interested, I’d be happy to tell you more. Click to e-mail me.

Tomorrow - more about fasting and will
Wednesday: the two feet of the Lenten Journey: Examen and Imagining the Good Story

Thursday: The gift of Sudden; the gift of gradual: doors within doors



FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.