The September sun is beautiful: bright and cool, it has a (slight) calming effect. I have arrived where I set out to walk: the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, one of the most beautiful in Rome. The newly cleaned mosaics on the outside are gently played on by the sun. Colors all around the piazza, including the colors of people's skin and clothes, seem so graced today, so full of divine play and pleasure. Inside, under the force of the apse's mosaic, I remember with a certain nostalgia my first time seeing it, more than 20 years ago, around this time of the year. I gasped with delight seeing Mary seated on the same wide throne with her Son, seeing his clear centrality but also the clear centrality of them both. When I first saw it, I remember the immediate grasp I had of myself being associated with her on that throne. I feel it still, and it is such a joy to look up and say, "Blessed is the fruit of thy womb." That fruit extends outward from her Son to include me and everybody and everything I saw this morning. That fruit is this morning as I was seeing it. AH of Rome is that fruit. Rome is the unself-conscious celebration of an immense history, the unself-conscious celebration of life itself, the unself-conscious celebration of the Christian mystery. For centuries Rome has been attempting to express beautifully "the fruit of her womb."

Mass

Things have a message. All things do, if only I know how to hear. Cups, lakes, clouds, trucks, dogs, desks - anything. Everything! l have this image: I bend over and put my ear to anything at all - say, to the side of a couch - and I listen very carefully to the quiet stream of the eternal Word of God, holding the couch in existence, giving himself to me in the world that surrounds me. Each thing: a door through which the silence of God breaks into some particular, partial expression.

I am still guided by the experience, many years after it happened. I step into the scene again and live it as if present. I am walking in a forest alone near my thirty-sixth birthday, and I remember again for the first time in years, probably because the way the light falls through the trees is the same or because the sound of the wind in them is similar, the wonderful walks in the forest when I was a boy in ldaho, walks with my big dog in a forest near a lake. She was a wonderful dog, a perfect pal. We must have done a hundred miles together. And now maybe midway through my life I see how much I owe her still. It was something she and I discovered together when I was a boy and I've had it ever since, but I am remembering it more clearly now. I see how it's been in everything since she and I split 25 years ago. I mean this amazing sense of feeling accompanied, of not being alone even when there's no one else around. It was as if the forest herself was Somebody and my dog and I were this Somebody's friends. But not exactly only the forest was Somebody. It was as if everything, the whole world was a Somebody - Somebody who loved me, Somebody who knew all my thoughts and feelings and cherished them. My dog taught me to believe in it.
I'd walk the path, and she'd run wild everywhere this side and that side of it and when she crossed over, sometimes she'd check in with me by jumping up on me quickly before passing on, or lick me maybe, or wag her tail joyfully as she rested for a few steps beside me, but her insistent, regular, faithful returning to me even while running and sniffing almost everywhere was her saying to me something like, "isn't this wonderful, isn't it wonderful that we're here with Somebody and Somebody loves us?" And from her bumping into me I gradual1y carne to believe it and I've been walking on and believing it ever since.
So here I am walking, nearly 36 years old, and I catch myself walking with that same joyful feeling that I had as a boy. I begin to think about all the years in between and what they mean. I have to say that Somebody is still my friend and loves me. I am saying to myself what my dog crashing into me used to say. I say: "Isn't this wonderful? Isn't this beautiful?" Then when I say it, there is a great She in the forest with me: my dog the she, but other shes too, all the other shes and hes of these intervening years. I stand still a moment while the beautiful faces of people I love pass over me through the trees, and I think how many good places I have been, how many good people I have loved and how many have loved me. And I think: I'm always walking. I've walked down streets in cities, lots of them, lots of pretty cities. I've walked on beaches all up and down and on both sides of a couple of continents. I've walked alone and with people I love. I've met strangers and it was good and interesting. I think about my work - teaching - and the special way in which I've come to love my students. In fact, I was studying for them before I went on this walk and what I see now is that I really only want to teach them what my dog taught me, how wonderful this all is. And in all my walking I think I'm just wanting to spend time with Somebody again. I like to walk with people I love because it's like continuing on with what I started with my dog.
I'd like to live another 36 years and be 72 some day. I want to be 72 and still walking as I walked when I was a boy with my dog. A great She tugs on me in the forest and invites me to follow her. I'm going to go. Maybe we're going for another 36 years, maybe not. What I see now is the next step and a little of the path in front of me.
I see the sun setting soon, but She is inviting me up the mountain and the light will be there longer. Right now it's so much gold that I think maybe it will always be light on this mountain. Gold. Somebody is gold. Somebody is light. Somebody who has always loved me - yes. Somebody near and yet far - yes. Here and always - yes. Yes. Yes.

From Romano Guardini I have this huge and useful insight about a subtle but deadly mistake in the modern way of viewing things. We view Nature, the Subject, and Culture as domains independent of God. God in effect does not exist, or more accurately, God has been killed by man. And yet Nature, the Subject, and Culture are what is distinctive in modern man and all these are potentially an advance over the medieval worldview, which referred this world so radically to the next that it did not take this world with sufficient seriousness. In any case, these three as they could be positively conceived would look like this:
Nature: the reality of that which is given and the seriousness of its objective determinations. Only not to take it as the ultimate reality.
Subject or the concept of Personality: this indicates the possibilities and the limits of human beings. Something wonderful! Indispensable new concepts. Only not to presuppose a presumptuous autonomy.
Culture: this affirms that the world is confided to man in a special way, to an almost terrible degree. Only not to think that man is master of himself.
When we human beings view God as another, as the Other par excellence, we cannot bear God's presence, which is too overwhelming as other. Understandably we rebel. We must kill God, eliminate him. God is dead. But - again, Guardini's insight - God is not the Other. God is God. Of all other beings, we can say, one by one, "That one is not me, therefore it is another." But this does not work with God. In fact, that this does not work with God mysteriously expresses the essence of God.

Czeslaw Milosz died in August 2004. I was having a little vacation in north Idaho at Priest Lake when news of his death came in an e-mail from a friend in Poland. I had read Milosz voraciously for the last four years, had met him just the year before, and had been writing to him in the months before his death.
Priest Lake is one of my most favorite places on earth, filled with memories of my happy boyhood there, and for this reason I suddenly experienced it as one of my strong connections with Milosz. (I have always found myself moved by his poems and essays about himself as a wide-eyed boy discovering the beauty of the world in the river, the copse, the fields around his home.) The evening of the day the news carne - in ldaho it was still the day of his death - some friends and I took a long ride in the boat at sunset and talked mostly about "Inheritor" and the great author of this poem. I was holding forth about how this short, 20-line poem is quintessential Milosz. We were also drinking whisky, which I imagined would have somehow pleased the aged poet.
As we moved quietly along the smooth-as-glass surface of the lake, we saw in the near distance a large moose, crowned with a stunning rack of antlers, swimming from one side of the lake to the other. We slowed our boat so as not to frighten him and waited to watch him come ashore. What had been only a large, peculiar head moving through the water, suddenly loomed as a towering beast, shook itself, and then disappeared calmly into the woods. I took it as a little parable, enacted by nature, of the great poet's passing: strange, huge head, moving from one shore to another, towering figure, shaking something off, slipping away into the dark thicket.
After that, I found that I could not read him anymore. Often in the coming weeks and months 1 would try again, but 1 could not connect. Every time I would pick up the poems, I was reminded that there would be no more of these. Never mind that I had hardly begun to sound the depths of the thousands that he left behind. I somehow found it unbearable to face the fact that there would be no more coming. I could only remember that moose, that antlered head, disappearing into the forest. A disappearance sudden and definitive.
The spell was broken at last in the final days of June 2005. As I was leaving Rome for three days in the Umbrian countryside, on an impulse I put a volume of Milosz poems in my bag. Unaccountably, I found I was able to read him again and did so for hours of each day. I had broken through something. I don't know how or why. It was like the sudden appearance of a moose.
Perhaps the lull had been a kind of period of mourning imposed by the nature of things. Not that I was mourning for Milosz personally all this time. I did not know him well enough to suffer his passing in that way. But now that I am back to reading him, I feel something appropriate and proper about the nearly 12 months that passed in which I was unable to read him. Re needed to lie still in death, all his poems silent for me; and I needed to absorb this huge fact, so much a subject of his writing.
I see a difference now in how I read the poems that I have read so many times before. They still stand in their own right whether the poet is dead or not, just as any great work of art has to be great whether we know its author or not. But I am helped somehow by the perspective of his death. I experience it as a strange redoubling of the perspective I gained in reading him after my several long meetings with him and the intensity of our discussions. Re is gone. It's final. There are no more poems. But there is still his voice: I hold our conversations in my hand.

Muzzle

The dog I had as a boy stood at a height where her muzzle was level with my bed. This made for effective early morning communication. I could easily be informed when she wanted me awake and up. Her wet muzzle would be jabbed into my face accompanied by the dog equivalent of what we humans call whining. Then she would step back slightly and move her feet rapidly up and down, making a clicking sound with her claws on the tile floor. The first jab would inevitably wake me, and she would observe closely the telltale signs. Then I would always feign sleep, and the evident lie frustrated her. The next jab would be preceded by whines and the clicking paws. She would come in harder this second time and also begin to lick. I would shift a little, trying to lend some credibility to my fake sleep. But she knew, and she knew that I knew she knew. Suppressed whines, continued clicking. I would eventually turn and look her in the eye. Her entire being would begin to wiggle with the joy of a new day and of our being together.
This has had a profound effect on my life, and I want to bear testimony to it. One of my earliest strong thoughts and insights into the world is admiration not only of the dog and her humor but also of the divine Creator's ingenuity and humor. I am, among other things, placed in relation to all kinds of animals who inhabit this earth with me and want to live here too. They are full of delightful traits, and by means of some of their emissaries, I am united to them all, enjoying the differences and marveling at the possible points of contact. The wet nose on the snout of a dog and her lively eyes at the end of it - the whole animal kingdom comes and calls me awake for another day in this our place.