From This Very Moment!

What a sea that night! The islands were black shadow humps swallowing the moonlight. The wind didn’t touch us there, when we passed by them. We knew we were passing by when a dead calm settled on the deck. We knew we had passed when the wind started up again. But, back to the sea: what a tossing marble of black, hiding all, revealing only what was reflected on the surface! The moonlight could not penetrate it. My eyes could not penetrate it, but I was lost in staring all the same, looking down, down at the water but only seeing our little steamer lit up with foggy, dirty lamplight. Perhaps I saw a flash of a whale belly, but no, it was only the moonlight and my poor vision.

Staring, staring, and then the voice from below, a little bit of warm golden light, light that you could hear, light that could talk. That voice had called me down below for two nights and was calling me again. No more murky staring, not anymore this night anyway. I left my post and snuck below deck, following the voice to the corner of the bunk room. There he is, behind the hammocks with the off-duty men ranged all around. A little golden lamp burnt calm and small, safe behind glass. His eyes were twinkles. His fingers were little matchsticks, skinny and red at the tip: if they pointed at you, you burst into flame-maybe you were embarassed, maybe ashamed, but you were warm. And always the voice, golden and lulling like the sun on the blue water of the afternoon. You could bake in that voice if you were not careful. Or you could melt like ice if you were just careful enough to listen and not speak, to be loved and not love back-he would melt you if you would freeze in your place at his gentle rebuke.

So, leaning back on the hammock, I froze, looking at the dark shadow cast on the ceiling by my bulky body. I answered his questions in my heart, or let the other men speak for me. It was not my wish to be seen, but he saw into me anyway.
“Gentlemen, what do you love above all, and what will each of you need to be happy?”
“I want money. Enough money, just enough.”
“Good. And you?”
“One day I will be captain of my own ship.”
“Maybe you will. What about you, sir?”
“She is beautiful, and she is all I think about. Here is her picture.”
“She is a beauty to be sure. May you love her well. And now that you have all spoken in your own honest way about your various loves, are we not brought to one conclusion: that whatever a man approves of, whatever he himself and nobody else considers the highest, the most worthy object of his attentions-that is what he loves?”
“How could it be otherwise?”, one man said.
“It is always otherwise with us. Listen and answer: Is not he who fashioned us, made all of these beautiful things we want and gave us our desire for these things, he who nurtures us, sustains us, loves us because he is love-is not he, our Jesus Christ, the most worthy object of love for any man?”
“Yes!”
“And would you say, then, that you love Jesus Christ?”
“Yes!”
“ ‘Yes!’, you say. May it be as true as it is heartfelt! I myself have been trying to love God for forty years and I still do not love him completely. You are looking at me now. Good! If we love someone we always remember them and what they want-we try to please them day and night and are always picking a flower and sighing or seeing them around every corner. Is this the way you all love God? Do you turn to him with such ease and hope? Do you pray to him and fulfill his commandments with love’s zeal?”
Not one man among us said he did. Perhaps for fear of being refuted, perhaps because he saw what he was for a moment. I was frozen in my hammock. I would not have moved if you had a gun to me. The air in the room was shot through with dangerous thought and teetering wills. What would each of us be in this moment that none of us really wants? Where would we choose to walk when the steamer hit land and we went back to our wandering lives? There is no thought in a moment like this-it is too dangerous-like every thought is a step on a path and every path leads either up or down.
“Then let us look to our own good in this moment! At least promise yourselves that from this very moment we will try to love God more than anything and to fulfill His Holy Will!”