Many years ago I first read Margaret Craven’s I Heard the Owl Call My Name, a small novel set in the Canadian Northwest about a terminally ill young priest serving an Indian village on a coastal inlet. There is only one other white man in the village, the government-hired teacher (who hates the village and his assigned post). When the priest is killed in a landslide, the villagers wait for his body to be found and returned for burial:
The village was waiting and listening, and it was the children who heard first the canoes coming up the river, and they ran down the main path calling “They come now. They bring him now.”
In his tiny house the teacher heard the running footfalls on the path to the riverbank, and he went quickly to the door and could not open it. To join the others was to care, and to care was to live and to suffer.
I once had lunch with a very good friend who questioned my volunteer commitments. Why did I waste my time when I could be earning money? Why bother? I paraphrased the above passage, then said “I can't not open the door. I have to open that door.”
Opening a door is a magical act. A door separates you from “here” and “somewhere else.” There is that wonderful, hold-your-breath moment in the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy opens the sepia farmhouse door to see the Technicolor of Oz outside.
Regardless of where the door is, or what it is, we all choose to open the door at one time or another in our life. Sometimes it does mean caring and living and suffering. Sometimes it is just a door.
And sometimes we step into Oz.
1 comment:
Excellent. You make me want to retry I Heard the Owl Call My Name. You make me want to open doors.
Much more of that and you might make me want to join the priesthood.
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