Life Surprises Read online

  And then in May, almost a year and a half after I had launched the site, I finally heard from him.

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  II: Thomas

  That year was one to forget. It was something like a breach of contract. Things go wrong in everyone’s life, but you aren’t supposed to lose everything, especially not if you’re working for the Big Guy.

  I’d put in thirty-four years in four different parishes, and had quit at age fifty-nine, totally burned out. People didn’t want to hear the truth any more. Serving a congregation had degenerated into a gun battle between your own principles and the people who wanted to run you and the church, people who had totally forgotten that the whole point of the exercise was to act like Christ in your daily life. Pastors were not spiritual counselors anymore, they were more like corporate managers where the focus was on budgets and sucking up to the clients.

  That wasn’t what I had signed on for. I guess I still had some childish illusion coming out of Princeton Seminary that I could make a difference, that I could become a change agent, that my parishes might just possibly begin to resemble little outposts of the Kingdom. I graduated in the middle of World War II, but was excused from service because of a rheumatic heart. Our son had been born a year earlier, and we set off with high hopes to a small charge in the boonies of eastern Tennessee.

  I worked my way up through 200- and 600-member congregations until I became co-pastor of a 2,500-member church in Charlotte, North Carolina. At each stop, I laid all my high-falootin’ ideas on them about Stewardship, caring for the least and the lost, and they always mollified me by nodding their heads during the sermon. But then at a board meeting at that last place, they voted to ignore the least and the lost and go into debt for $50,000 so they could install an elevator for the benefit of three rich old members. After a while, it felt like being an accomplice to an ongoing crime. So I got out.

  But God can be a hostile old employer. I can’t imagine that He was in favor of that kind of ecclesiastical self-interest, but just try to drop out in protest and you’ll see how fast the axe falls. Within a month, because I had to give up my church-owned housing, my wife and I were living in a used trailer on the back forty of a farm owned by a friend in the congregation. Within six months, my financial advisor declared bankruptcy and told me that my investments were worth about 10% of what I had given him, so I didn’t even have the money to sue him. A couple of months after that, I developed atrial fibrillation, spent a week in the hospital and had my insurance cancelled. And nine months later, my wife and thirty-year-old son, Donny, were killed in a car crash.

  I had lost everything in this world that meant anything to me. But that wasn’t enough for God. After this last disaster, He finished me off by taking the one thing I had left: my faith. I was working part-time in two churches as a Minister of Visitation, trying to stay off welfare, and one day found myself calling on an old lady who had just lost her husband. I listened to myself talking to her, and suddenly realized that I didn’t believe anything I was saying. It was all just empty words, theological crap that kept people from thinking, from discovering the terrible truth – God couldn’t care less about us. We’re on our own. There is no mercy, no love, no reward for good behavior, no hope of a glorious future, nothing but empty words, empty beliefs, empty tomorrows.

  Three days later, my farmer friend banged on the door of the trailer to ask what was the matter. He hadn’t seen me since Sunday and thought I might be sick. What he found appalled him. I was unshaven, unbathed, undressed, unfed and deep in depression. So, being the take-charge type, he went to work. Within days, I had been to the doctor’s, was on anti-depression medication, and was off to his cottage on the Outer Banks. I walked up and down the waterline for hours, listening to the surf, smelling the saltwater, and asking myself why it wouldn’t be easier just to turn east and keep walking.

  I had never stayed at the ocean before, and I gradually discovered why my friend had sent me there. It was just before the regular season so there weren’t too many people around. Sitting and watching the endless motion of the waves and listening to the mesmerizing sound of the surf began to ease my black mood. Somehow, hours of walking became my therapy, and by the end of the week I was feeling a little less desperate.

  I began to think about what was left of my family. My wife was gone. So was my son. His six-year-old twins had moved to California with their mother, my daughter-in-law, who was in real estate. Her atheistic ideas had always been a barrier between us, to which she had now added the additional barrier of the continent. My daughter, Ginger, lived in Maryland. She and Herm had married late and, though she was thirty-two, she was only now expecting her first baby.

  There were no children for me to interact with anymore, now that my daughter was grown and Don’s twins were out of reach. I had not been prepared for the way in which children leave your life as you get older. I saw families here and there on the beach introducing their little ones to the surf and the sand, and I felt a mild kind of envy at their good fortune. Did they realize how lucky they were? Did they appreciate how beautiful children were, what a blessing it was to be able to care for and teach them, to spend time with them, what joy it was to feel their hugs and share their kisses?

  The next day I would have to pack up and go back to my routine. What had changed? Nothing. How was a week on the Outer Banks supposed to solve anything? Life just had nothing left to offer at this stage. There was only more of the same, day after day, until one merciful morning I wouldn’t wake up.

  After supper, I decided to take one final walk up the beach. By this time, I knew the shoreline pretty much by heart – where you had to walk at high tide to keep your feet dry, when it was safe to walk at the water’s edge. I even began to recognize some of the people, especially the little ones who had been there for most of the week. That was one of the reasons for walking, to see the children. Children could still warm the dark empty place that was my heart.

  Since that week was the first time I’d ever stayed at the beach, I’d had no experience in shelling. So to help pass the time, I had collected some unusual shells during the previous six days. I stored them in a couple of old bean cans on a shelf in the kitchen, but I knew they had no place back home. They would only remind me of the fleeting pleasure of that week gone by and of the fact that nothing had changed. So I emptied the cans into my pockets, took the shells with me, and ceremonially threw them all back into the ocean, as though I was scattering the ashes of some old friend.

  I kept walking, reluctant to end my final visit to the ocean, quite certain that I would never see it again. But I couldn’t break the habit of looking down for shells – and that is when I saw the feather. Throughout that entire week, I hadn’t seen a single feather lying on the beach. But now there was one at my feet. I didn’t plan to pick it up because I was through collecting things, but the tide was coming in and the feather was going to be washed away. Also, it looked pristine, as though it had never been used, even by the bird who shed it. So I picked it up. It was pure white except for a hint of bluish gray along one edge. Not sure what I was going to do with it, I stuck it in the band of my hat.

  I walked to the breakwater which had been the limit of my northward wanderings, then turned back toward the cottage. My mind was now on packing and making the long trip back to Charlotte, to a future I didn’t anticipate with pleasure.

  It was then that I first caught sight of her. It surprised me a little because there were two of them on a portion of the beach which had been uninhabited all week. They appeared to be a mother and daughter, and I stopped because in a few steps I would be past them; something about the scene made me want to extend the moment.

  It was a lovely sight, the two of them on their knees working on some joint project, the mother nearer the water, the little girl higher up on the beach industriously shoveling sand. The girl was wearing a light blue bathing suit with a frilly skirt, and was facing my direc
tion. I knelt in the sand, pretending to look for shells, hoping to be less noticeable. The mother had her back to me and was intent on making some kind of large hole in the wet sand.

  The little girl – about six or seven years old – had masses of curly strawberry blond hair. The sun, low in the western sky, lit her hair from the rear so that it absolutely glowed. She looked like a tiny angel, beautiful beyond description. When I couldn’t delay any longer, I rose and walked toward them, trying to get a clear view of her face. But she was looking downward, putting the finishing touches on some sort of ditch which ran clear down to the water where her mother was working. Studying her as I approached, I focused on her profile and her hair, ablaze with the setting sun.

  As I reached the point where they were kneeling, I noticed her right shoulder blade. It appeared and disappeared as she worked her shovel, like a tiny wing slowly waving back and forth. She is an angel, I thought to myself, an unfledged baby angel. And at that moment I thought of the feather in my hat. I held it out toward her and dropped it as I said, “Here, you need a feather.”

  But instead of falling to the sand, the feather caught a breeze and wafted gently to her side, landing by her knee. She looked up briefly as I stepped across the ditch they were digging, and then she picked up the feather and looked at it. I desperately wanted to stay, but I was afraid the mother would think I was acting inappropriately around her child. As I moved beyond them, I heard the mother say, “A feather!” I looked back once and saw the two of them studying it, but they had their backs to me and that was the last I saw of them.

  I couldn’t get the vision of that little girl out of my mind, though. She inhabited my dreams that night and I woke thinking about her, wondering if I might catch one more glimpse of her before I left. I drove down to the same place the next morning, walked through someone’s yard and searched the beach, but it was deserted. She was gone. One more loss, and I was a little surprised at the pain I felt knowing that I would never see her again.

  Eventually, I moved in with my daughter, Ginger, in Maryland. Herman, her husband, was a sales manager for Allis Chalmers and was gone most weeks. So I provided company for her and helped out around the house when Herm was gone. I had always been able to talk to Ginger about the deeper things of life. She had been raised in my churches, of course, but had never really believed any of the things she heard me saying from the various pulpits. She had always been a doubter, a free thinker, someone with the depth to formulate her own beliefs about the spiritual world.

  She had recently gotten into new age thinking, and we often had conversations late into the night in which she wondered how I could still hold to my old ideas about God. She listened as I struggled through the pain of my lost faith. I was in mortal agony, but she kept assuring me that my pain was therapeutic. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear, but she was certain I would come out on the other side a new man.

  Ginger’s pregnancy was proceeding well, and we were excited about the prospect of a new baby, her first, my third grandchild. Later that fall, about a month after I moved in, Ginger had a sonogram and found out that the baby was a girl. She was due around Christmas. We often spoke about the baby, imagining her future and suggesting names for her. Like all mothers-to-be, Ginger spent a lot time shopping for little girl things, and the baby became a real and tangible member of our family long before she made her appearance. Herm and I developed little rituals of patting Ginger’s expanding tummy and talking to the baby whom, in the absence of an official name, we called Angel.

  One night, sitting around the kitchen table, Ginger and I got to talking about my loss of faith again, and she used the image of a snake for me, which I thought a bit unflattering. She told me that I had to shed my old theology, to wriggle out of the hard shell of my calcified ideas and discover a new me in a smooth, fresh skin. She promised that when I went through this process, the lights would come on again, and that some event would trigger it.

  I thought about that idea for a long moment, and then started to tell her about my time at the beach. I hadn’t talked about it before because most of that week had been spent wandering aimlessly up and down, out of touch with everyone, even as I watched families enjoying their connectedness. For a whole week, I never spoke to another soul.

  Except for that one moment.

  I pondered whether or not to tell her the story. There was really nothing to it – I had picked up a feather, given it to a little girl, and walked on. But there was another reason I hadn’t shared the story with anyone. That insignificant little speck of time in my sixty years had taken on an importance way out of proportion to its reality. I felt foolish telling anyone about my love for a little girl whom I had encountered for less than a minute, whose voice I had never heard, whose face I had not really seen. It was too delicate a memory to trust anyone else with.

  After mulling it over for a bit, I said to Ginger, “I think I may have experienced that trigger event you were talking about.” God bless her, she listened to my story with real sympathy and understanding, and she even teared up as I talked about the halo of strawberry blond hair lit by the sun, the tiny shoulder blade, and the passing comment, “You need a feather.” There was a long silence, and then she whispered, “If you can feel all that, you can find your way back to the light again. And maybe that’s why your little angel was there at that moment, to show you the way.”

  The months passed and December came. On the 20th, less than a week before Christmas, Ginger gave birth to her little girl, and our lives changed dramatically. Our pre-natal adoration of this tiny person apparently had a lasting effect, because Ginger and Herm named her Angela.

  As the baby grew and was less reliant on her mother, I did more and more of the babysitting. Angela was a healthy child who laughed a lot and brought an incredible amount of sunshine into our home. She had been born with quite a bit of straight brownish hair, but by her first birthday it had turned curly and strawberry blond!

  Angela was the perfect name for her. She was happy, curious, tolerant of all our adoring nonsense, willing to go to anyone, perfectly at home in the world. Yet, there was also a kind of solemn depth to her that was unusual in a little kid, a profound knowing that could be seen in her eyes. It was like she harbored some special wisdom and was merely waiting until she developed speech to share it with us.

  When Ginger went back to work part-time after Angela’s first birthday, I ended up doing even more of the babysitting. I had been given an opportunity to be a parent again, and it made a huge difference in my attitude. She was a gift from heaven who could unlock the pearly gates, even for an old pagan like me. You couldn’t watch her without believing in God.

  My conversations with Ginger steered my thinking in the direction of new age ideas. I read all the stuff she recommended, and after a while it began to make sense. It was a way back into the divine presence that avoided all the rubbish I had been taught in seminary. But then the memories would come rushing back in, and I would remember that God was either an illusion or the devil in disguise.

  I became Angela’s primary sitter when she started school. I would take her to the bus, meet her at the end of the day, sit with her while she had her after-school snack, listen to her while she debriefed, and help her with her homework. I taught her to play the piano and we studied Spanish together. Everyone talked about G-pa’s angel. She had invented that nickname for me because, as she said, it saved time, words and ink. Family and friends were aware of this special connection between the oldest and youngest members of the clan. There was something charming and inspirational about it.

  One day, when she was about seven, we were sitting on the back porch after school talking about deep matters. She had always been able to hold her own in a serious discussion, and often had something startling and insightful to offer. We got to talking about angels and she asked me if I believed in them. I said I wasn’t sure. She looked at me, perplexed, and said, “Well, they believe in you.” I had to smile.

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p; “Do you think they’re real?” I asked.

  She looked at me as though I was a child who needed some basic instruction. “If God is real,” she said, “then angels have to be real. You do believe in God?” I could hardly keep from laughing. She was so grownup and I loved her so much.

  “I used to,” I told her. “I used to tell people about God every Sunday. But now I’m not so sure what I believe.”

  She pushed out her lips and wrinkled her nose, hunting for the proper response to someone like me, someone who should know better than to think such silly thoughts. “Well, I came from God. Do you believe in me?” I burst out laughing. It was like she was gazing into my soul. “Well, do you?”

  She had me. “Of course I do,” I confessed.

  “Well,” she went on, “I’m your angel, so you’ve seen me. And you once told me that you had seen another angel. I don’t know anyone else who has actually seen a real angel. Tell me that story again.” She already knew it well, but something in her seven-year-old mind knew that retelling it would be therapeutic for me, might even ease my doubts.

  So I told her the story again. This time, she was even more excited about the similarities between herself and that nameless little angel in the sand – their strawberry blond hair, the fact that I called them both my angel, and the realization that she was now the same age as that other little girl had been. We pondered the images for a while, and then she said, “I wonder what she’s doing now. Right now. Do you ever wonder about that?”

  I nodded. “All the time.”

  Angela asked, “How old do you think she is now?”

  “Well, if she was seven when I saw her and you were born almost a year later, and you’re now seven, that would make her fifteen.”

  She shook her head. “Wow!” she whispered softly. After a moment, she switched subjects. “You know,” she said, “I was your angel even before I was born.”