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THE DWELLING PLACE OF WONDER
Harry L. Serio
THE DWELLING PLACE OF WONDER
Copyright © 2016 Harry L. Serio. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-9157-6
hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-9159-0
ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-9158-3
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
PREFACE
I am not certain whether in some pre-existent state I made the decision to enter this life and confront all the variables that determine one’s course through all the years of living. Did I pre-select my parents or where I would be born or the world in which I would live? Were the events that filled my earlier years somehow chosen in order to lead me in a particular direction and to shape who I would become?
Life is not accidental, but it is nevertheless filled with events that astonish and amaze as well as the ordinary routines that everyone moves through. Heredity, environment, relationships, and so many other factors add to the beauty and wonder of life. Ralph Waldo Emerson was right when he observed, “Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.”
What I have written in this book are some of the events that have given meaning and texture to my life. Every time I revisit my past I find new meaning in what has occurred. We are always in the process of becoming, and continual reflection contributes to that process. The past is indeed a dwelling place of wonder.
I am grateful to many people whose lives have intersected with my own in meaningful ways—family, friends, associates, parishioners, and those with whom brief encounters have also influenced and changed the direction of my life. I owe much to them—in particular to my wife, Mary Ann, and children (Stuart, Tasha, and Matthew). I also appreciate the contributions of friends and colleagues who read this manuscript, made helpful suggestions, and offered encouragement, especially Maren Tirabassi, John Morgan, Byron Borger, and Mary Ann Serio.
The journey continues and every event is meaningful and filled with purpose and wonder.
THE PLAY IS MEMORY
We create the worlds we inhabit.
I can sit on my swing in the backyard and look toward the line of trees two hundred feet away. Squirrels cavort nearby. Birds eat out of our feeders. Groundhogs scurry around the fringes of our property. They are part of my world as I observe and think about this one-acre universe of my perception.
I could narrow my field of vision to the bit of grass at my feet and see in miniature a tangled environment of various strains of grass, twigs, stones, and seed pods—rugged terrain for the insects that crawl about or hover slightly above. If I look no farther than this patch of turf and allow it to be my world, it becomes a vast plain inhabited by thousands of life forms, some so small as to be barely perceptible to the human eye.
Though I cannot see it, I know that there are an infinite number of microscopic worlds around me with billions and billions of micro-organisms living and dying within their own life cycles.
The silence of my world is penetrated by the distant sounds of laughter coming from beyond the trees. Though I cannot see what is happening, I recognize the sounds as human, and with the sound of splashing water I deduce that there is a pool party going on. My senses now incorporate a larger world. The neighbor’s dog barking expands my world in another direction. My short-term memory gathers these divergent sensory stimuli and my mind creates the world that I am experiencing.
I can probe other memory banks to recall conversations I had earlier in the day, the trip to Philadelphia yesterday, a conference I attended last week, people I had known a decade ago, an incident from childhood.
A television series in the eighties, St. Elsewhere—a medical drama set amid the staff of a Boston hospital—had a unique ending to its final season. It was revealed at the conclusion that all of the episodes were fragments in the impenetrable mind of an autistic child. It was the writer’s way of saying that all is illusion, that we create our own worlds, our own separate realities, and then we determine how we will react to the perception of the events around us. I create my world new every day, and then re-create it.
Is my world only what I experience at the moment or is it the accumulated memories of a lifetime? Are the lives we live no more than memory and illusion and interpretation? Of course they are all, for as Anaïs Nin has said, “We see life, not as it is, but as we are.”
The novelist Anne Sexton once said that it didn’t matter who her father was. What mattered was how she remembered him. Perhaps Woody Allen said it better in his film, Deconstructing Harry: “We all know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.”
Our lives are shaped by the experiences of our past. Not so much by what has happened to us, but by how we continually remember those experiences and perpetually revise them in the replaying. The Apostle Paul may have put away childish things, and we may put the past behind us, but we never stop learning from who we were and what we did. The events of our lives continually reshape our present and our future. The child is indeed father to the man.
Tennessee Williams in his autobiographical play, “The Glass Menagerie,” has the narrator, Tom Wingfield, open with these words: “The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.”
How we remember our past shapes our reality, our perspective, our framework for understanding persons and events. Our lives are a work in progress, and we are continually rewriting the script. I imagine heaven to be a wonderful welcoming party where I will be greeted by those I’ve known in life who have gone before me, as well as by familiar persons whom I have never known in this life. As we sit down at the banquet table, they will gather about and ask, “So, what did you learn?”
What I do in life is never as important as what I learn from it. And if I learn my lessons well and become a better person because of them, I will have been a blessing to others in their journeys.
What I have written is memory—a life not necessarily as I have lived it, but as I have remembered it. I have spent my days slipping over the surface of life, seldom probing its depths. I have learned a little about everything, but never quite gaining the wisdom that comes from living out the true essence of one’s being. Like an old phonograph needle that skims across a plastic landscape producing only endless sounds, I have not valued the ups and downs, the peaks and valleys of life. Yet, it is on the slopes and depths that the music is heard. It simply took a lifetime to play it back and hear it.
I have created
