The Solace of Leaving Early Read Online Free PDF Page B

herds by running at the sheep and nipping at their heels—he commands, he stands apart, he declares his authority with his teeth, if you will—while the other simply pretends to be one of the sheep.” His father sat back in his chair, a scarecrow of a man, all angles and laugh lines, his head tilted slightly to the left, as it did when he was either genuinely taken with a notion or wished to appear so. “It put me in mind of my own profession,” he then announced with his rueful smile, which brought instant relief to Amos and his mother. The punch line had been delivered, the analogy successfully revealed. The meal was concluded with good feeling all around, because the Elder Townsend was no heel-nipper; absolutely not. He was the sort who patrolled the edge of the herd, pretending to be one of the sheep.
    *
    “When we consider the universe, we believe we’re encountering a dualism: the material and the ephemeral, or the seen and the unseen, but in fact, all we see and all we know are One in the mind of God.” Amos wrote at night, in his study where two tall windows faced Plum Street. His desk sat in front of one of the windows, and the streetlight cast shadows of the old maple tree on the wall beside him. “The wall, and the shadow on the wall. Plato’s cave. Memory. Immortality. Image. Which is causal; which the initial aim?” Gibberish. He marked it out.
    As a child he had loved
The Dick Van Dyke Show;
years later, in seminary, he had watched the reruns and found, to his delight, that he loved it just the same. He chose his favorite episode unwittingly, the way children do: Rob Petrie, trying to write a novel, found himself with writer’s block and decided to go to a mountain cabin alone, to get some work done. He needed space, freedom from disturbance. The only scene Amos could remember was toward the end: the wooden crate on the cabin floor overflowing with discarded sheets of paper; Rob wearing a cowboy hat, smacking a ball on a string against a paddle over and over. Rob didn’t put on the cowboy hat or pick up the paddleball at the beginning—oh, no. He tried hour after hour to get something written. The cowboy hat came on by degrees. Amos laughed aloud in his study, thinking of the scene. The
slipping down
of it was so delicious, so cathartic. Because for that half hour the slide was happening not to Amos, who thought himself a humble man edging toward some everyday lunacy, but to Dick Van Dyke, who could take it. A man of rubber. That wide, sweet smile.
    “Perhaps I have suffered some right-brain injury,” he wrote, “because I look at my hands and they don’t appear to belong to me.” It was true, Amos’s fingers were so long they seemed comically unfamiliar. Each knuckle had a will of its own. What he wanted to explicate (in his unwritten sermon) was Amos’s favorite, most fundamental understanding of God—it was Whitehead’s idea, but he was trying to avoid Whitehead’s language because it simply didn’t, well, it didn’t
preach
—namely: the Primordial and Consequent Natures. What might be, what is, what has been. In God’s Primordial Nature there exist all the pure possibilities for every moment (every actual occasion, Whitehead would say) of concrescence; in the Consequent Nature is the world as we chose to make it: every actual occasion and every actual entity,
every single moment,
rendered objectively immortal. Amos still felt a chill when he considered the reach of this idea, and how he felt when he first heard it discussed in seminary.
    “Whitehead’s not for me,” Mike had said, shaking his head with great skepticism. “I’m an Aquinas and Luther sort of guy. Anybody who takes God’s thumbprint off the world? Huh-uh, no way.” Amos had smiled at him, unable to respond. God’s thumbprint on the world? It was an inelegant description, but if Mike couldn’t see it in Whitehead, he was dreaming.
    The fine people of the Haddington Church of the Brethren, newly designated,