Recently I thought about a small treasure of a book, Thornton Wilder’s sleeping American classic, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, written in 1927. Over a 50-year period I have probably read this three times and always find myself immersed in Wilder’s antique language as he describes the lives of people on an important journey. In brief…the book was set in Lima, Peru on July 20, 1714 and involved a rope bridge on the highroad between Lima and Cuzco, a bridge used every day by hundreds of people. Without warning, the bridge collapsed and sent five people who happened to be on the bridge at that time crashing to their deaths…an erratic, rich old woman and her maid-child, a twin whose brother had recently died, a middle-aged man of many talents and a child he was going to tutor. Watching this was a Franciscan missionary named Brother Juniper who immediately jumped to the existential conundrum… "Why did this happen to those five?” Did they somehow have an unseen “divine appointment?” He set out to examine their lives to find this connection, only to discover after much research that he could not, and in fact was burned at the stake for his supposed heretical writings, a spillover from the Spanish Inquisition.
Sudden, exotic circumstances...
Many of us like to make something of sudden, exotic circumstances. Whether it is the unfortunates on the Bridge or a plane that crashes with all lives lost, we are busy trying to second guess the Infinite. We love to bedevil ourselves with questions that have unknowable answers until we, like Brother Juniper, must come to the admission that we can’t reason out everything, that there are not always tidy conclusions to our internal seekings. To the western mind it can be deeply unsatisfying to have to stop wrestling with some questions of being and simply let them play out as we live our lives.
How much we become capable of loving...
Perhaps it does not matter how much we try to crawl inside the Mind of God or how many mistakes we may make. What matters more is how we come to know ourselves and how much we become capable of loving. One of Wilder’s characters, an Abbess, said it well: “All, all of us have failed…but do you know that in love---I scarcely dare say it---but in love our very mistakes don’t seem to be able to last long.”
Let this coming Christmas be our bridge...
And finally…”there is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” We could let this coming Christmas be a bridge.
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