Author: Peter Watkins

In Search of Peace and Solace

On By Peter WatkinsIn 2001Leave a comment

Dear Will:

I recently found myself shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers as we gathered on the National Day of Prayer in search of comfort.  The awful events of September 11 left the world and its inhabitants changed forever, and I felt within myself the need to be near familiar things.  Maybe it’s ironic, then, that I found a seat near the back of someone else’s chapel (mine for the day, I suppose), but it was close by my office and served my purpose.  Hymns, prayers, a distant bell, a collective silence all gave me strength and perspective.  It helped.

Although I knew just one person in that congregation of 400 or so, I found strength in numbers.  I wondered as I sat there in silence if you felt a similar need to be a part of a community gathering, and I hoped, if you did, that you had a place to go.  I regretted that time did not allow me to invite you to a local service if you were interested.

In the face of these tragic events, I don’t have any great pearls of wisdom to offer.  Much has been said already more eloquently than I could ever say it.  I pray that you were not touched directly . . . but I misspeak.  We all were touched directly—this I know.  Perhaps I should simply say that my hope is that you knew no one personally who died that day, and that you had the good fortune of being near those you love as you watched the events unfold.

As I have contemplated the deaths of so many innocent people, my mind has returned again and again to a wonderful hymn which has comforted me and helped me draw upon reservoirs of faith.  I pray that these words may provide you some comfort too as we all search for peace and solace in the face of tragedy:

Where can I turn for peace? Where is my solace
When other sources cease to make me whole?
When with a wounded heart, anger, or malice,
I draw myself apart, searching my soul?

Where, when my aching grows, where when I languish,
Where, in my need to know, where can I run?
Where is the quiet hand to calm my anguish?
Who, who can understand? He, only one.

He answers privately, reaches my reaching
In my Gethsemane, Savior and Friend.
Gentle the peace he finds for my beseeching.
Constant he is and kind, Love without end.

“Where Can I Turn for Peace?,” by Emma Lou Thayne

PW

Footprints All Around Us

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20011 Comment

Dear Will:

I recently took my kids to the San Diego Zoo.  What a crazy collection of creatures that place has!  Once you stop gawking at the lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), there are all these other critters running around that you never heard of or imagined.  I keep expecting them to erect a Dr. Seuss wing one of these times.  There was even this one thing that seemed to have come straight out of the bar scene in Star Wars.  Goofy little body.  Ugly, throw-away-the-mold face.  A name you couldn’t pronounce.  From a place you never heard of.  Unbelievable.  Fascinating.  Marvelous.

Some can wander through a place like that and see Charles Darwin all around them.  Not me.  Everywhere I turn I see the handiwork of God.  Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have the faintest notion how to make an Okapi or a Lemur.  For all I know you’ve got to go through millions of years of modifications to get it just so.  But if you try to tell me that a gazelle or a Macaw or even a warthog happened by chance, I say “No way.”  (Well, maybe the warthog.)

Likewise, I am fascinated by how the human body is able to repair itself.  If I cut my finger today, within moments the body goes to work on repairs; within hours there is visible evidence that healing is underway; and within days it is as if nothing even happened.  Amazing.  Wonderful.  Miraculous.  And definitely not happenstance.

One does not have to go very far or work very hard to see evidence of a loving God: in the leaf of a tree, in a billowy cloud, or in a snow-capped mountain peak; in a bug that skitters or a hawk that soars; in the shape of the human ear, the back of your own hand, the ripple of muscle, a giggle, a sigh, a smile.  Everything we see or touch or hear or taste allows us to feel God’s presence if we will attune ourselves to Him.  If the world is, indeed, His footstool (Isaiah 66:1), is it really all that surprising that we should see his footprints all around us?

That great Book of Mormon prophet Alma (son of Alma) put it this way: “. . . [All] things denote there is a God;  yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator” (Alma 30:44).

He didn’t specifically mention the Okapi, mind you, but I’m pretty sure that, had he  seen one, he would have agreed with me and cast a grateful eye toward heaven.

I close with the words of the poet:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—  
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;  
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;  
  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;  
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)  
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                  Praise him.  

“Pied Beauty,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

PW

From a More Exalted Sphere

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20011 Comment

Dear Will:

I think I may have mentioned that I spend a pretty good chunk of my time hanging out with a two-year-old (that would be Seth, our youngest).  Every day, it seems, he finds a new way to charm and delight us.  Partly that’s due to the fact that we are his unabashedly subjective parents.  Partly that’s due to the age, that brief period of life in which a everything a child does seems to sparkle.  But much of what delights us about him is innate—divine, even—the sort of thing we would love to take credit for but cannot possibly.

Each of us has within us a spark of divinity, and that spark seems to burn brightest when we are still but a short time removed from “that God which is our home.”  Wordsworth’s familiar verse comes immediately to mind:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
That soul that rises with us, our life’s Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting:
And cometh from afar
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

(From: “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”)

That well-loved poem speaks of “Intimations of Immortality,” those ineffable, deep-down hints of our divine heritage.  Although Heaven may indeed lie “all about us in our infancy,” I believe that even as we age we retain within us clues of whence we came.  Another poet put it this way:

For a wise and glorious purpose
Thou hast placed me here on earth
And withheld the recollection
Of my former friends and birth;
Yet oft-times a secret something
Whispered, “You’re a stranger here,”
And I felt that I had wandered
From a more exalted sphere.

(From: “O My Father,” by Eliza R. Snow)

All of which brings to mind the words of my own mother, who never failed to send us out to play with a mandate that echoes in my mind to this day: “Remember who you are.”  Which I offer now as my simple message to you.

PW