More Light Than Darkness
My Dear People,
"The Gospels were written by simple men who earnestly and with a miraculous eloquence tried to report events which they themselves had never witnessed but of which they had been told. Even what these writers of hearsay set down we have never seen in the words they used, but only in the later Greek translations. Consequently the narratives of the four Evangelists as we read them are full of misunderstandings and contradictions and inaccuracies--as every lawyer knows any human testimony aiming at truth is sure to be--yet they throw more light than darkness on the heart-shaking story they tell. They are pitifully human and misleading, but drenched in a supernal light and their contagion changed the dreaming world." -- William Alexander Percy (1885-1942)
Will Percy was many things: a memoirist; a poet, with a hymn text to his credit (see The Hymnal 1982, Hymn 661); a lawyer; a planter; and the adoptive father to three of his younger cousins, one of whom was the novelist Walker Percy.
He was also a person of deep, and deepening, faith. In time, Percy grew beyond many of the conventions of the Roman Catholic faith in which he had been raised. Nevertheless, to the end, his faith was at the core of his life and, indeed, his being.
The passage above comes from a chapter in Percy's memoir Lanterns on the Levee. The chapter is entitled "For the Younger Generation." In that chapter, he, essentially, relays to his young cousins his faith and his hope. His hope for them, and his hope for the world.
More light than darkness. The heart-shaking story. Drenched in supernal light. The contagion that changed--and changes--the dreaming world.
Changed. And changes.
Amen, amen, amen.
Your brother in Christ,
Wallace+
