shelter.......................

 

I had grown up in a world which, according to Bishop Ussher's reckonings, the one true God had made in 4004 B.C.  It was a great drama, that world.  A drama in five acts, the acts being Creation, Fall, Revelation, Redemption and Last Things.  Having become incarnate in it, the God who created our world had left sacraments and commandments in it.  By receiving the graces made available to us in these sacraments and by keeping these commandments, we could in the end win through to a life of glory.  Alternatively, by rejecting the sacraments and breaking the commandments, we could be running the risk of damnation.  It was in other words a drama that had for issue one or the other of two stupendous possibilities, eternal bliss in heaven or eternal perdition in hell.

     That was the story I lived in.  That was the story that sheltered me.  And now I knew that it isn't only houses that shelter us.  A great story can shelter us.

     It was my calamity that I had fallen out of my story.  I had fallen out of a world into a universe that seemed infinitely indifferent, even hostile to my purposes and yearnings.

     And the killingly lonely thing was, I didn't know of anyone else to whom this had happened.  As far as I could see, it was an utterly unique calamity.  It only deepened my isolation whenever I attempted to talk to someone about it.

     I felt like Job.

-John Moriarty, nostos: an autobiography