Pearl Buck - Bridge for Passing

And here I tell a story that has nothing to do with the picture, except that it provides a closing scene for myself. When I was looking for the new apartment a daughter helped me by sorting out the impossibles and bringing me at last to see the two or three possibles. It was night, I remember, when I looked at these places. I was in haste and it did not seem to matter much where I lived. We entered bare un-painted rooms. I saw a wide window and through the darkness I discerned dimly a building whose roof faced my window, a school, my daughter said, and fortunate for me, for there would be no high building to cut off the view. I did not care very much about that, either, for when do I have time in New York to look at a view? Besides, I have plenty of view in my Pennsylvania home. So I decided upon impulse.

“I’ll take it.”

The choice was haphazard, I would have said, a chancy thing. But I am beginning to believe that there is no such thing as pure chance in this world. For here is the preliminary to this closing story:

When I was a child and often reluctant to do my duty, my father used to say to me firmly but gently,

“If you will not do it because it is right, then do it for the greater glory of God.”

For the greater glory of God then, and for my father’s sake, though still reluctant, I did do what had to be done, at least as often as possible.

Now to return to the apartment. I did not once see it while it was being decorated. When all was finished I opened the door and went straight to the big window. It was a bright day, I remember, one of New York’s best, the air fresh from the sea and the sky blue. And facing me, across the building, under the eaves and along the roof, I saw these words carved in huge stone letters:

AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM

They face me now as I write. To the greater glory of God! What does it mean, this voice from the grave, my father’s grave? He lies buried on a mountaintop in the very heart of a China lost to me. I am here and alive and thousands of miles away. Are we in communication, he and I, through my father? It is not possible.

How dare I say it is not?

Some day we shall know. What day? That day, perhaps, when saints and scientists unite to make a total search for truth. It is the saints, the believers, who should have the courage to urge the scientists to help them discover whether the spirit continues its life of energy when the mass we call body ceases to be the container. Faith supplies the hypothesis, but only science can provide the computor for verification. The unbeliever will never pursue the search. He is already static, a pillar of salt, forever looking backward.

There are no miracles, of that I am sure. If one walks on water and heals the sick and raises the dead to life again, it is not a matter of magic but a matter of knowing how to do it. There is no supernatural; there is only the supremely natural, the purely scientific. Science and religion, religion and science, put it as I may, they are two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until these two, focusing together, reveal the truth.

On the day when the message comes through from over the far horizon where dwells “that great majority,” the dead, the proof will reach us, not as a host of angels in the sky but as a wave length recorded in a laboratory, a wave length as indisputable and personal as the fingerprint belonging to someone whose body is dust. Then the scientist, recognizing the wave length, will exclaim, “But that’s someone I know! I took his wave length before he died.” And he will compare his record with the wave length just recorded and will know that at last a device, a machine, is able to receive a message dreamed of for centuries, the message of the continuing individual existence, which we call the immortality of the soul.

Or perhaps it will not be a scientist who receives, but a woman, waiting at a window open to the sky.