To Know
My Dear People,
Beau Gumb--a memorable name for a memorable person--was a year older than me and had, it seemed to me, a sophistication that I simply couldn't pull off. Furthermore, while I was from Columbia, he was from Charleston (where, by the way, the Ashley and Cooper Rivers come together to form the Atlantic Ocean). Is there anything more that needs to be said?
Anyway, among the things that Beau knew more about was any and everything religious. Years later, he would invite me to chapel with him, one Sunday morning, when we were freshmen at Sewanee, and that would turn out to be my first step down the road that would lead me into a genuine Christian faith and, in turn, into the priesthood. But that's getting ahead of the story. The moment I've found myself thinking about this week came from the first days of our friendship, when I was a freshman in high school and Beau was a sophomore.
It's not the moment when I discovered that he was very much afraid of snakes. (On a walk in the woods, I had innocently picked up a snake skin and held it out to him.) Though that's another moment I'll never forget.
Nor is it the moment that he fell through the ice on a frozen lake. (After we got him out of the lake, the walk home was a long one, and there wasn't much talking involved.) Though that's still another moment I'll never forget.
The moment I'm thinking about is when Beau told me what seemed like dangerously and deliciously precious information: that when the Bible says, "Now the man knew his wife Eve," that the "knowing" involved there was--breathe deeply--a carnal knowing.
Yes, there is knowing. And then there is knowing.
There is knowing that is relational, and then there is knowing that is about facts. The French even have two different words for it, connaitre versus savoir.
The "knowing" of knowing God, for instance, is of a fundamentally different character than the "knowing" of knowing whether it's raining.
Some knowing has the power to change our lives, some knowing doesn't.
Yes, there is knowing. And then there is knowing.
Gena and I were at a hip café in the Del Ray section of Alexandria, just after I had graduated from seminary, sitting outside, on a bright sunshiny day, when a Sewanee friend called to tell me that Beau had stepped off a curb in San Francisco and been run down by a car.
I don't think I wept for him until Gena and I were sitting in a pew at Grace Church, Charleston. And when it came, it came.
I think about Beau often. And I pray for his parents, his brother Jack, and his sister Brooks.
And I'm glad I knew him.
He changed my life.
And he taught me about knowing.
Your brother in Christ,
Wallace+
