Four Encounters





The Four Encounters were first published in 1976, and, although the exact date of their writing is unknown, it is thought that they were written between 1945 and 1950.

First Encounter:
A CHRISTIAN

I have met a Christian, and now I must tell you about him; for you are always the touchstone.

He was no typical Christian, nor yet one of outstanding saintliness. He was his unique self, but also a Christian, and to me, arresting.

Sitting in the cathedral, I thought how strange that stone should live and praise, while in ourselves faith lies dead. The columns stand so confidently, joined in their upstretched hands like dancers waiting for the music. They have waited for centuries.

Today, more formidable columns, sudden, fungoid, springing from land and sea, threaten all of us.

In the cathedral choir, masons were repairing war damage. I heard metal strike the stone. The windows were pallid, for the warm glass had all been treasured away. Near me in the knave, two spinsters with guidebooks devoured information. A youth in shorts, a peroxide girl, a bunch of trippers, stared vacantly; sheep lost in a desert. Yet a cathedral is a sheepfold. Or so it was intended.

Presently vergers were shepherding out the sight-seers; for a service was due, and a mild bell tolling. I retreated. But as I was nearing the door, the Christian touched me, and said, "You looked unhappy. Perhaps I might help." My resentment was quietened by his face, where peace was imposed on some still restless grief; a face carved heavily, the eyes, dark holes, dark gleaming wells; the nose a buttress; the mouth, mettlesome but curbed.

I said, "If I was unhappy, it was for the world, not for myself." He answered, "The world is indeed unbearable; unless we are given strength. Darkness is everywhere; but there is a light to lighten it." Brutally I said (for you were not with me to temper me), "You want to add me to your converts, but my scalp is not for your belt." His hand reached toward me but withdrew. He turned to leave me. Ashamed, I said, "Oh, forgive me! Please come with me and tell me about your light."

But even as I spoke, there flashed on me a memory. I was a freshman returning to Oxford by train, reading in my corner. A godly woman opposite me laid a hand on my knee. "Are you saved?" she said. Startled and crimson, I answered, "No! At least I don't think so. But I don't think I want to be. Thank you all the same." With knit brows, I stared at my book, incapable of reading.

And now, half a lifetime later, here was I asking this other Christian to tell me about his light. We emerged from the cathedral into the sunshine and the town's roar. Beyond the lawns of the close, how the shops, banks, hotels impended! As though a lava flood had been by miracle congealed to save God's house,

We paced, and neither spoke.

Presently, he said, sighing, "I was obtuse. Why am I still so often insensitive? I was spiritually arrogant." Again he fell silent, so I said, "That is the danger of the light; a little of it goes to the head, and makes one spiritually arrogant." "Yes," he answered, "but it was not for myself I was proud; it was for the light. In myself, I am only a little lens to catch a sunbeam and focus it." Smiling, I interrupted, "What is spiritual arrogance ever but pride of the lens in its office?" At once he answered, "And intellectual arrogance is pride of the knife in its blind dissecting ."

Again we walked silently. Then he said, "Watching you in the cathedral, I saw in your face what I had recently laid bare in my own heart, the unacknowledged, the quite unconscious, hunger for salvation. And at once I knew that I must speak to you. To have kept silent would have been a betrayal of the very thing that had recently given me-blessedness."

The word jarred on me. I found myself saying inwardly, and how foolishly, "Oh God, please save me from being saved!" But immediately I was drawn toward the Christian, for he said, "Why, why can't I say these things without spoiling them, without making them sound pompous?"

He told me that by profession he was an engineer; that he had spent the years of the war far away in the East without his "dear wife"; that he had returned to find her a stranger, loving another, yet still dutiful to him, and anxiously willing to be at one with him again.