0800758722
Hardcover
208 pages
Dec 2002
Baker / Revel

Review  |   Author Bio  |  Read an Excerpt

Excerpt:

The Secret

This book is about discovery—the discovery of a secret. It’s the story of how heaven, which I used to think of as an imaginary realm-in-the-sky, has become more real to me than the ground beneath my feet.

Real in the past, real for the future, and best of all, real right now. And the book is also an invitation. An invitation to us all to look back, to look ahead, and to look around, and keep discovering the secret for ourselves.

Saint Catherine’s Secret

In the Italian city of Siena, I have a favorite place to stay. It’s a small hostel just below the church of San Domenico. The no-frills rooms are small, and you have to go elsewhere even for a cup of coffee. What it offers is the best view in town. From the balcony I look across a ravine at the crenellated walls and towers of the medieval city.

Just below the balcony, however, is the site that means most to me. It’s the birthplace of Catherine of Siena. It’s strange, I think, gazing down at the narrow street where her father had his dye shop, that this Roman Catholic saint should have so much to say to me—not only a non-Catholic, but someone to whom the very concept of “saints” was once an instant turnoff.

I get no help from the birthplace itself; the dye shop with the family home above it was redesigned as a shrine five hundred years ago. Some things, though, remain as Catherine knew them. San Domenico’s is the parish church where she had her visions of heaven. I can still descend the steep-pitched street to the well at the foot of the hill where she went each day for water after her parents turned her into the family drudge for refusing an advantageous marriage. I follow her footsteps as she struggles up the slope with the heavy buckets.

It was only the first of the toils and conflicts that made up her life. As the Black Plague raged unchecked, most were afraid even to come near the victims. Catherine nursed them, consoled them, buried the dead with her own hands.

This was the fourteenth century, when Italian city-states waged bloody war on one another, and timorous popes abandoned Italy for seventy years. As Catherine’s reputation spread, she was drawn into the tumultuous politics of her time, even traveling to the papal court in France to persuade the pope to return to Rome—only to see him followed by a pontiff so avaricious that cardinals held a second election, splitting Europe for decades between rival popes. Grief-stricken over the failures of the church, Catherine fell ill with what may have been infantile paralysis, and after weeks of agony, she died at the age of thirty-three.

A tragic life? On the contrary, said Catherine, her life was heaven on earth. “All the way to heaven is heaven,” she declared, “for he said, ‘I am the Way.’ ”

It wasn’t some carefree soul basking in good fortune who reached this happy conclusion. It was a traveler on a hard and uphill road, who found that the journey with Jesus was heaven, whatever the outward circumstances.

Catherine’s secret was to see her life as a love story. To receive each hour of each day, no matter how thankless and hard, as the perfect gift of the perfect Lover.

What if I could learn to do that! I think as I follow her steps through Siena’s winding alleys. For since I encountered St. Catherine, I’ve met others, people living in today’s world, who have. Who’ve learned to see in the particulars of their lives, even in pain and loss, God’s very

personal wooing.

For fifty years, through books and through articles for Guideposts magazine, I’ve enjoyed seeking out and relating these true romances. Anyone’s but my own. I’ve shied away from telling my own love story, excusing myself because I’m a “private person.” What’s to tell, anyway? Once when my husband, John, and I were living in England, a local paper ran a series on “A Day in the Life.” A day in the life of a Queen’s Guardsman. A day in the life of a Schoolteacher. A reporter interviewed me for A day in the life of a Writer—surely of all daily routines the dullest:

8:10 sit at desk

9:15 put on another pot of coffee

10:12 resharpen pencils

11:26 cross out everything written since 8:10

My work, it’s true, has allowed me to meet people—some famous, some little known—with gripping stories to tell. Some of these are in this book.

But suppose God wants us to tell the everyday stories too!

Nothing is more important, writes Frederick Buechner in Telling Secrets, “than that we keep track, you and I, of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity that God makes himself known most powerfully and personally.”

God making himself known . . . Perhaps this is the purpose of our separate stories in their endless variety. Perhaps heaven is where we will recount, each to the other, millions and billions of us, the story of our individual journey to that kingdom and what we learned of the

King along the way.

The story of my particular journey began, as I suspect most do, long before I knew I was on a journey at all. Least of all did I know its destination. It’s only looking back that I can make out the way I’ve come and see that all along, the way was Jesus.

The Homecoming

Thou has made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee.

Augustine of Hippo

I stood at the railing of the boat deck, staring through the drizzle as the coast of England drew near. It was 1947. I was nineteen, a college junior headed for the University of Geneva in Switzerland, recently reopened to foreign students after the war. The Queen Elizabeth would dock at Southampton before crossing to France.

All along the railing homecoming passengers were pointing out landmarks through the mist. I took off my glasses and rubbed them again with a rain-soaked handkerchief. Land was on both sides of us now as we glided up the Narrows, the Elizabeth’s deep-throated horn blasting a continual warning to other ships. From fishing boats and cargo ships came answering toots and whistles as the world’s largest ship steamed into home port. The man next to me at the railing, a morose-looking Englishman with the limp right sleeve of his raincoat tucked into his pocket, broke out with the first words he’d uttered: “Couldn’t raise this hullabaloo during the war. She had to creep in after dark. No lights. No horn.”

At Southampton the dock swarmed with stevedores and black-helmeted bobbies. As tugs eased the great ship into her berth, I gazed past the waterfront at the clustered rooftops of the town, war damage still evident in rubble-strewn lots. And suddenly, unaccountably, I burst into tears.

The one-armed war veteran, as I took him to be, turned a startled face to me. “It’s all right, Miss. Civilians were moved inland.” And then, as I continued to sob: “Why, this is nothing, Miss! Wait till you see some of the spots Jerry really got to. Wait till you see London.”

But it wasn’t the bombed-out blocks. For years I’d seen newsreels of devastation far worse than this. I stabbed at my eyes with the useless handkerchief, trying to explain . . . what? A reaction so strange, so totally illogical, that I didn’t understand it myself.

In a well-meant effort to reassure me, my companion launched into an upbeat description of England’s postwar recovery. Below us gang-planks were hoisted into place. Satisfied that he’d stopped the flow of tears, the man left to join the other disembarking passengers.

His kindness, however, was misplaced. The tears were not for sorrow but for joy. I was crying because I was home at last. The sense of coming home to a place I’d never been . . .

Where could such a bizarre reaction have come from? It was my first trip anywhere overseas. What I could see of the town was foreign-looking—small houses, big gardens, cars of unfamiliar make traveling on the wrong side of narrow streets. Yet I recognized the place as though I’d been looking for it all my life.

Or—as though it had been looking for me. In some unfathomable way I had been found. And till that moment I had not known that I was lost . . .

Since then, I’ve returned to England many times, and always with that inexplicable sense of homecoming. Is it the books I grew up with, I’ve wondered—Winnie the Pooh and Mary Poppins, the Brontës, Shakespeare?

Or could it be some kind of ancestral memory—those many-times-great-grandparents who came from England?

How to explain it, even arriving by plane, herded with hundreds of other half-asleep passengers through the anonymous corridors of Heathrow Airport: that swelling of joy, that welling of tears. I belong! I belong! The apologetic demur to sympathetic strangers: “No, I’m all right. Really.”

Really all right, in a way I cannot explain, but which I’ve come to feel has a parallel in the life of the spirit. It was so similar, that spiritual homecoming when it happened to me many years later, so filled with the shock of recognizing a place I’d never seen, that I see my experience on that ship deck as a kind of foretaste of a bigger reality.

Since then I’ve talked to others who’ve had a similar reaction to some unfamiliar landscape. The explanation for all of us, I think now, lies not in the past, in childhood or family history, but in the future. I believe that everyone is given this mysterious affinity for some physical place as a kind of preview of the true journey home. The place is different for each of us, but the promise is the same— you have a home-land.

You will not always be a wanderer. There is a place prepared for you, and when you get there you will say, “I have lived here always.”

The Altarpiece

[They] acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. Hebrews 11:13–14 RSV

“Heaven” is the name seekers through the ages have given to this spiritual homeland. For the first thirty-some years of my life, heaven and the Land of Oz meant much the same to me—fairy-tale places dreamed into being by people whose life in the real world was hard.

Very nice for those who could console themselves this way, but not, of course, for rational people.

How I’ve been drawn—unheedingly, unknowingly, even unwillingly—to a very different view, is the story of this book. Heaven, I believe today, is not only real, but more real than anything else. Real not just in some disembodied postdeath existence—though it will continue to be real then too—but real today, right where I am. Heaven, I believe, has only one time.

Now.

And only one place.

Here.

“Place” of course isn’t the right word, just the only one we have. A place suggests a fixed location where—however distant—I can imagine someday arriving. Above the altar of our church in Mt. Kisco, New York, is a painting of the Mount of Transfiguration. Against a sky of gold—in Christian art the symbol of heaven—Jesus holds celestial discourse with Moses and Elijah, while Peter, John, and James look on. As these three recall it later, their rabbi’s wind-tanned face began to shine with glory, “and his clothing became dazzling white, far more glorious than any earthly process could ever make it!” (Mark 9:3 TLB).

At that transcendent moment it must have seemed to the three fishermen that their days of homeless wandering were over. After years of trudging the dusty roads behind their footloose leader, hadn’t they reached the very courts of heaven? This was it! They’d arrived!

“Shall we put up shelters for you and Moses and Elijah?” Peter asked excitedly. Move in, stay right here?

But of course they hadn’t “arrived” anywhere. Heaven is nowhere that can be fixed on a map. On the Mount of Transfiguration, the journey for Peter, John, and James had just begun.

The Picture Frame

Heaven is nowhere. But it is also everywhere. At any moment the mist may lift and we may find ourselves in that unknown, well-known land. “So it was here I was headed, all along!”

From heaven we can look back and see the changes and chances of our lives as the pathway leading straight to where we stand in joyful wonder. The losses, the seeming detours, the things that most puzzled and distressed us—why, they were the very route by which we came.

And still the way, Jesus’ Way, leads on. Away from the mountaintop where we seemed so close to heaven, down into the valley of shadow and struggle. Why must it be like this? we  wonder. Over the years I’ve asked hundreds of spiritual pilgrims about the hardest moment of their journey. And for most of them it’s been the period immediately following some glorious revelation of God’s love.

Why? Why can’t we live always in the peace and joy we tasted so briefly? Why should we have to keep stumbling on, forever led away from the heavenly vision?

I believe it’s because the heaven to which Jesus the Way is taking us is so very big. From earth we can see so little of that eternal landscape, and he wants to show us so much. “Don’t stand there gazing. You haven’t seen anything yet!”

Probably because I have no artistic ability of my own, I love going to museums, letting the perceptiveness of artists show me beauties I would otherwise miss. Some years ago I was at the Johnson Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina, when a group of children from a school for the blind was shown through. Curious, I followed along behind. What could these sightless youngsters enjoy in an art gallery?

The sculptures! For this tour, Don’t Touch rules were suspended; with murmurs of discovery, the children ran sensitive fingers over shapes in marble, steel, wood. One curly-haired little girl, seven or eight years old, was full of questions. “What’s over there?”

“Paintings,” the docent told her.

“What’s a painting?”

How, I wondered, would her guide answer? Taking the child’s hand, the docent led the little girl behind the rope that cordoned off an enormous canvas by Morris Louis. It was a starkly abstract composition: bold streaks of blue, orange, green, against a white background. What could colors mean to this inquisitive young mind? How do you describe “orange” to someone who’s never seen a pumpkin?

As I watched, the docent placed the child’s hand on the frame at the bottom of the painting, then slowly led her the length of the picture.

At the far end, the youngster gave a nod of satisfaction.

“Big!” she said.

I think often of that scene. I am that child, it seems to me. For a lifetime I’ve been doing as she did, tracing the lower rim of heaven, guided by the One who sees the picture in all its vivid color.

“Until you can see,” he tells me, “I cannot show you what’s inside the frame. But if you will take my hand I can bring you close, let you touch the border and learn that heaven is large enough to encompass all that ever happens to you—yesterday, today, tomorrow.”

The past, the present, the future—heaven enfolds them all. Heaven behind me ... All the way we walk before we know that the road itself is God. For me this part of the journey lasted more than thirty years. I was given hints of the truth aplenty, but I could not read them. It’s only in retrospect that I know that every event of my life was a step on the Way that’s been heaven all along.

Heaven around me ... It’s that part of the journey when dimly, wonderingly, always imperfectly, we catch sight of those streets of gold right beneath our feet. It’s the strange, contradictory world of grief and joy, despair and hope, where I’ve lived these last forty years.

Heaven before me ... This is the landscape where we’ll spend longest, and about which we now know least. It’s the heaven we’ll experience after death, where all we can now be sure of is that Jesus has gone ahead to prepare a place.

Heaven behind, around, before . . . no time or place that is not heaven.

Used by permission of Fleming H. Revell, a division of Baker Book House Company, copyright © 2002. All rights to this material are reserved.  Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Book House Company.