Gravity And Grace Revisited

Sometime after midnight I awoke and went out on deck.  The deck was deserted.  I could faintly hear a piano from one of the lounges; someone was playing, Plaisir d’amour:

Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment:

Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie.

                                                                                                            Jean Paul Martini

From where I stood at the rail, I could see the dark, mysterious sea rise up and then flow away in whispering swells beneath the ship’s hull.  The sea, I thought, was a living thing, breathing as living creatures do in rhythmic breaths, punctuated every now and then by phosphorescent crests of wind-blown froth.  Suddenly I remembered Ellen – she in her solitude, and I in mine.  Our love for one another like the phosphorescent sea had swelled to a crest of joy and then ebbed away, lasting for only a moment like the cresting waves.  I wondered what Ellen was doing at that very moment.  I wondered what would become of her and her child.  I wondered.....

The dark sky above me was peopled with stars.  There was no moon.  Curtains of delicate shining starlight seemed to glow in endless waves across the vast, uncharted regions of space, illuminating the restless sea.  I suddenly realized that these same stars undoubtedly had been seen by generations of my own ancestors.  My grandmother may have seen them while standing at the rail of the ship that took her to America.  Abraham and Sarah perhaps had noticed them from the pitched shelter of their tent.  Buddha and Jesus and Mohamed at one time or another may have stood transfixed beneath the same fall of starlight that now enraptured me.  These stars, perhaps, were the same stars that John of the Cross had seen from his prison cell.  And they were the same stars that even that same night would light the sky over the Monastery of Gethsemane where Thomas Merton would then be sleeping.     

This was a new discovery for me, something that I had never thought about before: The stars that my eyes were now privileged to see in the night sky of my brief lifetime on earth, had been seen as well by all of those long dead generations of human beings who preceded me.  I was strangely comforted by this thought.  It gave me one common thing that I could share with them, and they with me.  I wondered, too, if Ellen at that very moment somewhere in Germany or in England by some strange happenstance might be looking at them as well.  Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie...

The Jews at Auschwitz no doubt had also seen these same stars.  This thought filled me with a sadness which exceeds all human expression.  These same stars were perhaps the one remaining thing they still possessed which they now shared with me on this dark and luminous night.

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