June 9, 2019

Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.
(from W. H. Auden, Leap Before you Look)

Dear St. Martin of Tours Family,

I have been reading a very fine book by David Brooks, a regular op-ed columnist for The New York Times (perhaps the only columnist worth reading). His book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life chronicles and analyzes the social phenomenon of men and women who, after climbing the first mountain of life to achieve success at a career, discover that their lives are joyless; so they embark on a climb up a second mountain – a mountain of meaning and value, which causes them to refocus their lives from self to the service of others.

In chapter 16 of the book, Brooks deals with an essential element in the ascent of the second mountain: the achievement of commitment.

When you commit yourself to another person – in marriage or friendship, sonship or daughtership, motherhood or fatherhood – your commitment, if it is to be real and if it is to endure, will require a leap from the security of yourself into the unseen depths of the world of the other. I share a passage from Brooks’ book that I particularly like:

When the American writer Sheldon Vanauken (August 4, 1914 – October 28, 1996) fell in love with Davy, the woman who would become his wife, they adopted a mutual code of courtesy. Courtesy is a word that has lost its meaning, especially as the daily currency of love. But for the Vanaukens it meant that whatever one person asked of the other, the other would do. Thus one might wake the other in the night and ask for a cup of water, and the other would peacefully and sleepily fetch it. “We in fact define courtesy as ‘a cup of water in the night.’ And we considered it a very great courtesy to ask for the cup, as well as to fetch it." (From David Brooks, The Second Mountain)

“A cup of water in the night.” I have been meditating on those seven words all week. Imagine to be awakened suddenly in the night by a child, a spouse, or a parent. You are very tired. Yet you are asked to do something which, maybe, the other person could easily have done for herself. Yet you find that instead of being frustrated or annoyed, you are happy and you smile. You do what you are asked because it is so very wonderful to love another soul, and it is so very wonderful to be loved.

In Christ,