BLOGGING TOWARD SUNDAY…

I don’t know what you might think of Oscar Wilde, but as a playwright, novelist, and author of short stories, he has a reputation for  being among the best.  His life, however, was troubled, and a part of that struggle was with his sexuality.  Arrested and imprisoned for 2 years, he had plenty of time to think on his life and how he had lived it, and some of his writing during that period is extremely powerful.  I recently read his account of being taken back to prison after a trip to court, and how the simple action of an acquaintance touched him deeply.  Here is the way he told it:

Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground. Some day people will realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do, – and natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, -  (a man)waited in the long dreary corridor so that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that. 

It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay…. When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world.

 I nearly weep every time I read that last sentence.  What power we have to do good!  As someone far wiser than I once said, “People never forget how you make them feel.”  We have a responsibility, as followers of Jesus Christ, to make them feel, even in the worst of circumstances, that they are loved and valued by God.  That’s what Jesus did, and that’s what changed the lives of so many.  Oscar Wilde, by the way, was received into the Roman Catholic Church on his deathbed.  Perhaps it was because of his memory of one man’s kindness.

Filed under: Blogging Toward Sunday