A Big World
By Robert Meyers
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After a long absence I drove one day into the familiar street where years before I had walked and played and bicycled as a boy. I was shocked at the narrowness of the street; it had been much wider when I was a child. There had been ball games with the neighborhood friends and exciting footraces with my fleet sister. Now the road hardly looked wide enough to hold even the memories I had of it.
Within moments I was stopping in front of the house where I had lived. I sat there a long time looking at it. The yard had been boundless when I was small. My sister and I had run over it in happy games and, when we were not cooperating so well, had chased one another around it with cries of dire vengeance. In my memory it had been spacious and green, but as I sat there looking at it I saw that it was only a rather cramped edge-of-the-city front yard surrounded by a commonplace fence. I had remembered that fence as an enormous challenge to a superb jumper, but I saw now that a grown man might almost step over it.
And I had written a poem once under a huge elm tree. The shadows were deep and cool and stretched out endlessly in those lost days. The great branches were splendid for climbing. But I saw that the elm was rather smaller than most and that the shade it cast was mediocre and thin.
One of my chief joys for years has been recalling the truck garden which my father let me cultivate. I had felt like a feudal lord. It seemed there were acres of beets, carrots, tomatoes, okra and corn. I had made fabulous sums of spending money, I told my own children, and why didn't they work like that? Now I saw that it was not a large plot after all, and that the rows of corn must have been only a third as long and high as I had thought.
Hasn't everyone over thirty experienced this? The house is smaller than you had remembered, the lake is not quite so clear as you had told envious friends it was, the schoolhouse is not nearly so impressive as you had believed.
Why does it happen? Isn't it because we saw all those things, and experienced them, in terms of the small world we lived in ourselves? We had so few things to measure them by. They were our all in all, and they grew in size for us cause there were few other images in our minds to compare them to.
Then we went away and traveled, perhaps through the world, even. We saw the horizons expand before us, and the great seas, and the wide prairies and high mountains of the earth. We saw great cities we had half-believed were only fables. Our minds filled with our own complex activities and we learned how to live among those who felt that their activities were quite as important as our own. And so when we went back to the scenes of childhood, that world had shrunk.
Some of us who enjoy Christian studies together talked not long ago about God's fantastically enormous universe. We meditated upon the stunning idea that our solar system is but one of millions of others in our galaxy. Then we read that our galaxy, immense as it is, is thought to be only one of millions of other galaxies. The mind falters before such concepts. It is hard to fathom distances so immense that the light hitting our eyes tonight from some distant star may have started on its journey at the incredible speed of light, millions and millions of years ago! We pondered the strange new theory that ours is an "exploding universe," with the whole awesome creation racing outwards in all directions from a center. Was the stupendous creative activity of our God still going on among worlds remote and lost in space?
It seemed to us that there was an inevitable relationship between all this and
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It seemed possible to us, in this mood, to separate the trivia from the eternal, and to know with as much certainty as any human being is ever granted that what ultimately matters to the Eternal is a contrite spirit, a chastened and humbled heart, willing to obey to the best of its limited knowledge and ready to walk in fellowship with all who are doing the same.
So one's religious awe should grow, treasuring every precious legacy from the mind's childhood but relinquishing without a regret the narrow and blind ideas which time has shrunk. It may be poignant, upon reflection, to see how little one's world was once, but the wonders of a bigger world can assuage the pain.
-------------------------- Robert Meyers, formerly a Professor in the English Department at Harding College, is now Associate Professor of English at Friends University, Wichita, Kansas. His Wichita address is 867 Spaulding Avenue.