A Sheltering Tree

Inspirational Stories of Faith, Fidelity, and Friendship

Peter C. Wilcox

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625646651
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630872229
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

When we think about the lives of the saints, we can easily forget that they were people just like us--with all the same struggles, temptations, joys, and sorrows we experience in life. They were not born saints; they became saints. And in the course of their journeys through life, other people helped them become the people that God wanted them to be. A Sheltering Tree offers stories of faith, fidelity, and friendship from both Christian and non-Christian writers that explore the importance of friendship to psychological and spiritual development. These stories show how friends became "special graces," special gifts given to us by the Lord to help us grow in holiness. Contemporary stories of "ordinary people" illustrate fifteen lessons about friendship in our own time to help us understand the "grace of friendship" in our lives. These stories are a source of encouragement and inspiration for each of us on our personal journeys, leading us closer to each other and to the Lord who has called each of us his friend.

1

Two Graced Moments

Caryll Houselander:
“Underground Train Vision”

In 1955 Caryll Houselander described an experience of grace that had a profound impact on her life:

I was in an underground train, a crowded train in which all sorts of people jostled together, sitting and strap-hanging—workers of every description going home at the end of the day. Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that, not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them—but because he was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too, here in this underground train; not only the world as it was at that moment, not only all the people in all the countries of the world, but all those people who had lived in the past, and all those yet to come. . . . I came out into the street and walked for a long time in the crowds. It was the same here, on every side, in every passer-by, everywhere—Christ.1

Later on, sometime around the end of World War II, author and publisher Maisie Ward had an appointment to meet Caryll. Until this time she had only known her through correspondence and her published works. With her husband Frank Sheed, she had, in fact, been responsible for the publication of some of those works. However, unlike him, she had never been in the author’s presence. The first meeting between Maisie Ward and Caryll Houselander is both intriguing and poignant. She recorded it some years after it happened in the biography Maisie wrote about her friend:

It is always interesting to meet for the first time someone known intimately by correspondence. My husband had prepared me for Caryll’s appearance—as it had seemed to me in an exaggerated fashion. Yet as I stood waiting outside the door of her flat and she came up behind me laden with parcels, I was conscious of a genuine shock. The dead white face, the thick glasses, the fringe of red hair, a touch somehow of the grotesque—it was so surprising as to take one’s breath away. But we had hardly exchanged a word when we felt (both of us, I could swear) the perfect ease of long intimacy, and began a conversation to be picked up at any moment thereafter. It was not until much later that I found she had used the word grotesque about herself.2

Grotesque or not, Maisie Ward had met a remarkable woman whose entire life was animated by her profound sense of the presence of Christ in everyone. While she had the particular grace of receiving this understanding in her “underground train vision,” Caryll struggled at times to keep that realization alive, often able to do so only through what she called “a deliberate and blind act of faith.”3 Her success at holding fast to her conviction of Christ’s abiding presence is evident in her spiritual writings and in the work she did with the psychologically wounded of all ages, whom, as one doctor put it, “she loved . . . back to life.”4 She herself wrote at the end of her autobiography: “The realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.”5

Despite her outward eccentricity, Caryll Houselander was a docile and willing instrument in the hands of God. She was one of those “weak” and “foolish” things (1 Cor. 1:27)6 that God delights in using in a variety of ways. Motivated by the certainty of Christ alive in her and everyone else and acutely aware of the touch of God’s grace in her own life, Caryll was an open channel for the outpouring of that grace to others. She was a true friend. Maisie Ward remembered the easy intimacy she felt with Caryll on her first meeting. Both her devoted circle of friends and the many others to whom she ministered were enduring testimonies of her faithfulness to the great commandments of loving God and one another. She knew that human life was the arena where God made himself known, even to the point of becoming one with us. Maisie Ward called the task of discovering God in ourselves and in all those we meet “the main testing of the Christian life,” and her friend Caryll understood this significance of that test very well.

Thomas Merton: “Fourth and Walnut Experience”

Three years later, in March 1958, Thomas Merton had an experience that profoundly changed his attitude toward people and the world, allowing him to “occupy himself critically” with it.7 He was walking through the shopping district of downtown Louisville when, in the middle of a crowd of people, he had a vision that he later recorded in his journal:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. . . . It was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.8

The world Merton returned to was a world transfigured by his contemplative vision. It was a world he now saw through the eyes of compassion. This new and profound sense of compassion led Merton to take a second look at people and the world, and, interestingly enough, what he saw was not very different from what he himself had experienced in his seventeen years as a Trappist monk. What Merton saw was a world of human beings, vulnerable, confused, desperate, hopeful, just as he was. Reflecting on this experience, Henri Nouwen wrote, “Merton knew . . . that the sin, evil and violence that he found in the world, were the same sin, the same evil, and the same violence that he had discovered in his own heart through solitude, silence and prayer. The impurity in the world was a mirror of the impurity in his own heart.”9 It was only when Merton had found the image of God within himself—his true self––that he could then begin to truly and unselfishly love others.

Merton had come to discover that true solitude enabled him to find his authentic self and others as his brothers and sisters. In this sense, true solitude for Merton, became all inclusive. It never closes its mind or heart but continually expands in love and compassion towards others. It is through true solitude that Merton found healing, because in this solitude he experienced the love of God. In Disputed Questions, Merton writes: “This solitary . . . seeks a spiritual and simple oneness in himself which, when it is found, paradoxically becomes the oneness of all men.”10 Merton believed if each person could find his own solitude, especially amidst the confusion of daily life, only then would a healthy, love-filled society result. He came to join solitude with love, showing the true unity of the solitary life is the one in which there is no possible division. The true solitary does not seek himself but loses himself. Therefore, for Merton, when we become one with our true self we become one with all.

William Shannon notes the irony that this mystical experience took place, not in the monastery chapel or in the monastery’s woods, but in the very center of a shopping district. It was when other human beings surrounded him that he had th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Two Graced Moments
• Chapter 2: An Ache in Our Soul
• Chapter 3: The Grace of Friendship
• Chapter 4: Teachers on Friendship
• Chapter 5: Treasured Earthen Vessels
• Chapter 6: Fifteen Contemporary Lessons on Friendship
• Conclusion
• Bibliography