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April 25, 2007 The Parish Minister’s Column The Rev. Barbara J. Pescan The week before Earth Day, which Worship Associate Ann McCallister and I planned to make a joyous lyric on being part of earth’s vast symphony, both of us struggled with events around us in the world, distracted by human meanness and by the murders at Virginia Tech, our poem turned into a longing and a lament. It is a gift to be able to work closely with someone else to create worship for Sunday morning – with the worship associates, with Bart and Gregory and Sue. When we can do it while needing and wanting to acknowledge harsher realities, it is a real blessing.
And sometimes the universe conspires to help. Because Ann Tyndall remembered a particular story in the book, I went looking on my shelves at church and at home for Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey. Our paperback copy is somewhere … who knows where, though. I couldn’t find it. So, I went to Bookman’s Alley. I asked the woman at the front desk if she knew of a copy (her father, the owner, has been ill and she is helping out). She went looking with me. Also in the store were a couple of men, one a professor at Northwestern. He overheard me ask and murmured, The Origins of Man. I said, No, The Immense Journey. We all went looking.
It turns out that he had seen that very title a few minutes earlier (his first time in the shop, just noodling around among the offerings), beside a copy of the other book. “It’s green?” he asked. I didn’t remember what color it was. He didn’t trust himself at first to go back to the spot where he’d seen it, and accompanied us to the natural history section. The book wasn’t there. But, after a few minutes, the professor’s friend spoke from across two rooms, “Here it is!”
Indeed, there it was, right beside The Origins of Man, more blue than green, and in hardback, no less, and only five dollars. As we walked to the front of the store, amazed by the coincidence [I am sure Kurt Vonnegut would have had a great name for it in Cat’s Cradle], I got out my wallet to pay for it. I asked the professor his name: Oka is his name. I shook his hand. I asked the woman’s name: she is Susan Carlson. I shook her hand. And, then, while I was juggling the book and my wallet to get out the money, she said, “Obviously you are meant to have this book. No charge.” I shook her hand again.
I walked out of the store and down the alley laughing and uplifted. After a week of sad, mad murder and human meanness, “when despair for the world” had grown in me, there was a kindness, and a recognition among all four of us that something lovely had happened, a coincidence of being present and aware and generous all at the same time.
The reading, by the way, should you have or find a copy of The Immense Journey, is titled “The Judgment of the Birds.” It is a teaching about how earth repeatedly teaches us how it is possible to heal in the midst of mourning, in the shadow of death, even in the presence of evil. I recommend it as one tale of a small miracle, one of the moments that redeem us from being overcome by sadness and cynicism. Some days, it is simply a gift to be alive and able to know it.
Unitarian Church of Evanston
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