Jesus told his followers: “Be in the world, but not of the world.” Lately, as a church, we haven’t fared too badly in doing that. Since Vatican II we have, more and more, been in the world and, to some extent at least, we have managed to give it a challenge. Where we have failed more is that we have not been enough for the world.

Simply put, we do not love the world enough and it is for this reason, perhaps more than for any other, that the world is not interested in our challenge. Christ said: “My flesh is food for the life of the world.” The church exists for the world. Its life must be for the world and its love must be for the world. Today, in virtually all church circles, liberal and conservative alike, there is too little real love for the world and the church life that is generated is essentially food for the life of our own circles and not food for the life of the world.

Looking at what emanates out of conservative circles, one is at loss to find much love for the world. Too often, in conservative eyes, the world is a huge cesspool of sexual immorality. The conservative looks at the world’s sufferings here – the outbreak of AIDS and the omnipresence of so much pain because of sexual irresponsibility and fractured relationships- and there is a certain glee, which is sometimes not even disguised, that this bad, disobedient world is getting what it deserves. The rhetoric of compassion is there (and sometimes even that is not there) but real compassion is not: “The world is getting what it deserves and we, who have stayed on the straight and narrow, are vindicated!”

But liberal circles do not exactly radiate real love for the world either, despite their claim that they are the great defenders of the suffering. Where the conservative sees a great cesspool of sexual immorality the liberal sees an enormous cesspool of Yuppie values and bourgeois selfishness. The liberal looks at the world’s sufferings here – the disarray of capitalism and the incapacity of Western governments to do much about it – and there is the same barely disguised glee that this bad, capitalistic world is getting its just desserts. Like their conservative counterparts, liberals use a certain rhetoric of compassion, but not enough people in the world feel loved by them – especially if those people are conservative in their economics, sexual values, or in most anything else.

There is a famous story, more myth than fact perhaps, told about a former mayor of New York city: Everyone is familiar with the seemingly insoluble problems that confront New York City – its ghettos, its rate of crime, its congestion, its debt, its traffic, among other things. Well, this story has it that one Friday afternoon, just at rush hour, its mayor (and this story is told about Mayor Lindsey) was up in a helicopter with some of his councillors. He looked down at all the noise, the congestion, and the seeming chaos of it all and, tongue in cheek, remarked: “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a plunger and we could just flush this all into the ocean!”

He was joking, of course, but there is something in our attitude towards the world that is caught by that remark. Too often, in truth, that is how we feel. Be it ever so subtle, there is something inside of us, liberal and conservative alike, that wants to say: “Won’t it be nice if we could flush this all (or at least the parts we don’t like) down the toilet!”

How contrary to the attitude of Christ! He looked at Jerusalem, at its chaos, at its hopelessness, at those very parts that opposed him and his mission, and he began to cry over it, tenderly empathizing with it because could not recognize salvation. His was not the glee of the one whose truth has been rejected and who now stands vindicated because those who rejected it have fallen flat on their faces – “There! Now you know! You should have listened to me!” Rather his was the pain of the loving mother who sees her family falling apart and who then lays herself out – body, heart, soul, mind, life, everything – so that the family might come back together. Christ was for the world in that sense and we should be most careful when we mandate ourselves in his name to be “counter-cultural”.

The world is not listening to us. To my mind, the main reason is because it does not feel loved by us. It does not sense that our life and our love are food that we want to offer to it. Instead it feels itself judged by us and it senses our glee when it falls flat on its face. It is time that we all spent a night or two on a hill overlooking the city we live in – weeping tears of love for those who are not interested in our message.

The church needs a new pentecost and there can be no pentecost unless there is first an ascension. Such are the dynamics of the paschal mystery.

Today, in the church, both the conservatives and the liberals are effectively blocking a new flowing out of the Holy Spirit because both groups refuse to reverently grieve a death and let a certain body of Christ ascend and give us its blessing. What does this mean?

The pre-Vatican II church is, theologically-understood, the pre-ascended body of Christ. Thus, today, for us to receive the spirit, the Holy Spirit, we must, like the original disciples of Jesus, let the church we once knew give us its blessing and ascend to heaven so that we can receive the spirit for the ecclesial life that we are actually living. And this is not happening. It is being blocked by our failure to understand what has happened in the church and to properly grieve it. Let me try to explain this:

The church that many of us grew up in, the church of the 1950s and early 1960s which was irrevocably changed after Vatican II, was, despite its flaws and imperfections, both a very beautiful and powerful expression of the body of Christ. Indeed it was, as history will show, one of the better incarnations of Christian church, especially as regards its universality and its gathering around the eucharist. It had its shortcomings, admittedly, but it gave life and meditated grace and helped millions of women and men to salvation, most of our own parents included. It gave us the faith and taught us many of the very things which we are now using to criticize it.

But it had its time and eventually it was crucified – by time, by change, by secularization, and by its own imperfections. Vatican II simply recognized this, it didn’t cause it. For its part, mostly it named a death and claimed a resurrection, a new life.

We are already living that new life – enthusiastically or begrudgingly. But we have yet, on both sides, liberal and conservative, to really receive its spirit. Why?

Because none of us has really grieved what we lost. The Catholicism that so many of us grew up on was, in truth, one of the more powerful expressions of Christianity ever incarnated. It died – and nobody grieved it! Conservatives are not really grieving. They’re angry and in denial. They haven’t accepted that something has died. They’re still trying to resuscitate it. Liberals aren’t grieving either. They don’t admit that the pre-Vatican II church is worth grieving! They’re happy that this particular incarnation of Catholicism has died since, for them, it was not a very healthy expression of church in any case. In both cases, there is no ascension, no reverent letting go of the old in such a way that it can bless the present. The conservatives block that blessing through denial, the liberals through self-hatred.

So this is our situation: We are living in a post-Vatican II church, but the body of the pre-Vatican II church remains with us -ungrieved, unreverenced, unascended, and unable to give us its blessing. And the atmosphere within the church precisely manifests this debilitating situation. Thus, for example:

It is no accident that Catholics my age (i.e., those of us who had an experience of the pre-Vatican II church) are, for the most part, more focussed on our own reactions to Vatican II, for or against, than we are with passing on the faith to the world at large, let alone to our own children. As we do all our infighting, and think it’s important, the world and our own children are indifferent to us … and don’t really give a damn about Vatican II! We’ve too much internal baggage right now to have much in the way of genuine focus beyond ourselves. That shows itself too in our hardness towards each other – the rages, the anger, the bitterness, the ideology, the disrespect of others, and the plain lack of charity that emanates from both conservative and liberal circles. What is evident from all of this is that we lack fresh spirit, we lack the Holy Spirit, on both all sides. There is too little of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, mildness, faith, and chastity left. We need a new pentecost.

And that pentecost will happen only when all of us, liberals and conservatives alike, with deep reverence and love, let the old ascend and give us its blessing. But this will happen only when we understand the church of the past for what it was and is, the resurrected body of Christ, waiting to ascend, calling us to the Mount of the Ascension to impart its blessing.

I first heard the name, Christopher Lasch, a dozen years ago when a fellow student gave me a copy of his book, The Culture of Narcissism. Reading it, I was struck by the clarity and honesty of his thought and began to wonder: “Who is this man?” 

In the years since, I have tracked down and read many of his books and articles. My first impression, that there was something extraordinary about him, deepened as I read more of his writings. I knew very little about him, beyond the fact that he taught history at the University of Rochester and wrote things that I considered powerful and, indeed, deeply religious (in a different sort of way). At one stage, I subscribed to the New Oxford Review mainly on the basis that he was one of its contributing editors.  Slowly, piece-meal, from various sources, I learned a little about the man behind the books and articles and my admiration continued to grow. 

Christopher Lasch came out of a Marxist background, though some of what he valued most in life – a monogamous marriage, four children, sex only within marriage, a pro-life stance, and a commitment to speak the truth even when it doesn’t fit liberal theory – did not make him a darling in liberal circles, even as these circles could not help but respect his social criticism. The conservatives didn’t know quite what to make of him, though they liked his personal values and his courage in challenging some of the sacred cows within liberal ideology. But every time conservatives were about ready to embrace him, he would declare something to the effect that neo-conservativism is more interested in capitalism than in traditional values and that it fears hedonism and moral disorder mostly because these undermine productivity. Then the conservatives would complain that he was an agnostic and a wolf (liberal) in sheep’s clothing. 

He was a complex man because the truth is complex and he refused to lie. No ideology was ever able to seduce him. For this reason he never fully at ease with the church, even when, at considerable cost to himself, he often defended what it stands for. Thus, for example, he would defend the social teachings of popes before anti-Catholic intellectuals and he was dropped from the pages of the prestigious The New York Review of Books partly because of his stance against abortion. He was a Christian the way Simone Weil was – in heart, in sympathy, and in courage. Like her, he never found a home within a denomination mostly because he was afraid of breaking the first commandment. He worshipped God by smashing golden calves – and he didn’t discriminate as to whether these were liberal or conservative, ecclesial or secular. He, non-Roman Catholic and publicly thought of as an agnostic, was the first to point out that, today, it is politically incorrect to make jokes or cutting remarks about anyone, except catholics. 

He was a critic in the true and best sense of that word. Critic comes from the Greek, kritus, meaning a judge. A judge’s role is to make sure that the trial is fair and that all the evidence is heard. Hence, a good judge must have equal sympathy for both sides, wide loyalties, and the courage to make his or her decision solely on the basis of the evidence and not because of any predisposition or prior feelings. And a good judge must risk being unpopular. Christopher Lasch was such a critic. If I were on trial, or if the church were on trial, he would be the judge I would want. He stood out among intellectuals for his fairness, honesty, and his willingness to say what needed to be said even at the risk of offending the politically correct.

He stood out for other reasons too. Dale Vree, the editor of The New Oxford Review, says this in his obituary of him: He was a certified “elite intellectual”. But that is hardly a rare breed. More importantly, he was a great intellectual who was also a great man, and that is a rare breed. … He was also a kind man. He was good to his friends, and, though the target of countless vitriolic attacks, gentle with his enemies. He travelled in circles where arrogance and haughtiness are of epidemic proportions, but refused to succumb to those diseases. He was brilliant, but felt no need to advertise that fact. When he came to dinner, he was happy to enter the world of our younger children. He had a rich sense of play and a keen sense of humour. He was not wrapped up in himself. And he loved his wife and children profoundly. It is haunting that a man who knew so much of what love is about left us on St. Valentine’s Day.     

Christopher Lasch died on in February 14, 1994, at age 61, of cancer. The church lost a great friend, the world a valuable critic. His passing should be noted. A truly honest, God-fearing man, has died. We are a little more orphaned.

Recently a young high school student wrote a letter to the editorial section of our local city paper. In her youthful idealism, she was profoundly disappointed that we, as a country (Canada), cannot come to an agreement on a new constitution and are in danger of breaking up. Her comment was most interesting. She didn’t, as do most, simplistically blame the politicians – “How can we keep this country together if we have incompetent politicians? What can we, good people, do when we are led by bad leaders?”   She suggested something else: “I suspect that we will never agree on anything in this country – but what can you expect in a nation of pampered people!”

Her comment puts its finger on one of the major reasons why so much of our peace-making is ineffectual, despite our sincere intentions and efforts. We are too blind to the fact that the greed, the wars, and the violence that we see being played out on a world stage (and which we blame politicians and world leaders for) are, to a large extent, merely a magnification of what is happening inside of our own hearts and among us in our private relationships. When we watch the news at night, most of what we are seeing is a reflection of what is inside of ourselves.

Today almost all groups that work for peace, both liberal and conservative, do not take this seriously enough. There is an intrinsic, never-to-be-neglected connection between what seems radically private and what’s political and social. Thus there can be no peace on the big stage when there is greed, jealousy, unwillingness to forgive, and unwillingness to compromise within our private hearts. When the outer body gets sick, it nearly always signals a breakdown in the internal immune system. Hence given the state of our world today, one can be pretty sure that there is not much in the way of antibodies (charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, mildness, gentleness, and chastity) within the body of humanity, namely, within our private lives.

When we cannot get along with each other within our own marriages and families, we should not be surprised that countries do not get along with each other. When we cannot move beyond past hurts in our own lives, we should not expect the issues causing violence in Northern Ireland, Israel, Bosnia, Iran, and Africa, can resolved simply by better politics. When we spend billions of dollars a year on cosmetics and clothing that serve to build up our appearance so as to be less vulnerable, we have no right to self-righteously demand that governments cut their budgets for defense. Finally, when nearly all of us have borrowed money so as to have, right now, the things we cannot yet afford but want, then we should have some understanding of why our countries have all overspent and are hopelessly in debt.

There are many aspects to waging peace. The social justice literature of the past decades has given us a crucial insight which should never again be lost, namely, that private virtue and private charity, alone, are not enough. There is sociology as well as psychology, systemic evil as well as private sin. In the face of unjust systems and corrupt governments, Christians cannot get away with simply practising private virtue and saying to their less fortunate neighbours: “I wish you well. (Stay warm and well-fed!) I’m a good and honest person, I did nothing to cause your suffering!” There are real social and political issues underlying war, poverty, oppression, and violence. Peace-making must address these.

But there are real private, personal ones as well. Hence, waging peace requires more than simply confronting the powers that be. What must, ultimately, be confronted is our own greed, our own hurt, our own jealousy, our own inability to forgive, compromise, and respect. More than we need to convert bad systems, we need to convert ourselves. We, in the Western world at least, are not a bunch of good, generous, forgiving people who have the misfortune of being governed by a small group of bad and selfish individuals who in no way reflect us.

There is a story told about a Lutheran pastor, a Norwegian, who was arrested by the Gestapo during the Second World War. When he was brought into the interrogation room, the Gestapo officer he placed his revolver on the table between them and said: “Father, this is just to let you know that we are serious!” The pastor, instinctually, pulled out his bible and laid it beside the revolver. The officer demanded: “Why did you do that?”

The pastor replied: “You laid out your weapon – and so did I!”

In waging peace we must keep in mind what our true weapons are and who the real enemy is.

Recently I was invited by a young couple to bless their new home.

This custom, blessing houses, is not exactly fashionable today, both because we move so often that we rarely see our houses as something worth blessing and because blessings in general are often considered as something overly pious, a near-superstition left over from a former religious time.

Former generations used to have their houses blessed as a form of protection. A blessing, it was then believed, helped ward off the devil, lightning storms, prowlers and every other kind of evil.

Today we tend to get other kinds of insurances against these things. So why bless our houses?

That question was on my mind as I set out, complete with a ritual book of blessings in hand, to bless my friends’ house.

But there was something else on my mind too, something that invariably appears in my mind whenever I am asked to bless a house, namely, the house that l grew up in. From the way that house has blessed me through the years, I have some dim sense of what kind of blessing a house can give us, if we, first of all, bless it.

I grew up in an immigrant farming community. We were a large family and lived in a small two-storey farmhouse. Soon after marrying and setting out on their own, my parents had bought an old shack-type farmhouse and then, as finances allowed, twice enlarged and re­modelled that house until it took the shape that it had when I was a young child.

It wasn’t a luxurious house by any stretch of the imagination. It had no indoor plumbing, bad central heating and barely enough space for so large a family. But it was snug, real snug, and as a child, surrounded always by so many family members, I always felt secure in that house.

It was indeed a home, our place, my place, a place where I was away from the world. Perhaps that phrase best captures the feelings of that house, of any real home—it’s a place where you’re away from the world. It’s your place—to be comfortable in, to be sick in, to fight with your family in, to cry in, to dream both night and day­dreams in, to be snug in. That’s what it means to be at home and the house I grew up in gave me that security.

I remember especially the feelings I sometimes had on certain winter days, when it was too cold and stormy for the school bus to operate and we would stay home from school.

Few of my memories are as warm and precious as those. The cold wind raging outside, all of the elements so fierce and hostile, and me inside, secure and surrounded by family, warm and snug, smelling the wood stove and my mother’s cooking as I lounged on my bed or pushed my face against a frosted window to stare at the blizzard.

What was happening outside, the cold, snow and wind, highlighted the warmth and safety of that house, I was as warm and safe as a baby inside the womb . . . and, on those stormy days, almost as peaceful and secure.

Curious thing. Our family still owns that house—which has now undergone a third re­modelling—and through my adult years there have been many times when I have left my present home and place of work and set out for that house, full of tension, dissipation, insecurity, and every kind of restlessness, and soon after arriving there found myself slowly, imperceptibly, growing steady and calm.

It’s nearly infallible, when I walk into that house, I grow steadier, gain calm, become more sure of who I am. Such is its magic. A good house can do that for you.

And it is for this reason that we should bless our houses and it is for this kind of grace we should ask when we do bless them.

When I blessed my friends’ house, I didn’t ask, first of all, that this blessing ward off the devil, lightning storms, natural catastrophes and prowlers.

It’s not that these aren’t real or important or that I believe our age to be above praying for help of this kind. No, it is just that these things are secondary to what really needs to be asked for when one blesses a house.

What do you ask for when you bless a house? I asked that God make this house for them, precisely, a shelter from storms, a place of calm, of peace, of steadiness, a place within which they and their children can comfortably rest, eat, sleep, fight, get sick and enjoy themselves in when a blizzard keeps them home.

I asked too that it be a place where they could smell warmth . . . like people used to smell the wood burning in their kitchen stoves. I asked that it be, for them, a home, a safe place, warm and snug, safe as a mother’s womb.

To believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to be comforted, comforted at a level so deep that nothing in life is any longer ultimately a threat. In the resurrection, the hand of God soothes us and the voice of God assures us, frightened children that we are, that all is good and that all will remain good forever and ever.

The resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus two thousand years ago and will happen to each of us some time in the future, after we die, when our own bodies will be raised to new life. It is that, but it is much more. The resurrection is something that buoys up every moment of life and every aspect of reality. God is always making new life and undergirding it with a goodness, graciousness, mercy, and love that, in the end, heals all wounds, forgives all sins, and brings deadness of all kinds to new life.

We feel this resurrecting power in the most ordinary moments of our lives. A sense of the resurrection, understood in its deepest sense, manifests itself unconsciously in our vitality, in what we call health; in the feeling, however dimly it is sensed, that it is good to be alive. Allow me an illustration here:

Sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, outlining what he calls “rumours of angels in everyday life”, gives us the following reflection:

Consider the most ordinary, and probably the most fundamental of all – the ordinary gesture by which a mother reassures her anxious child. A child wakes up in the night, perhaps from a bad dream and finds himself surrounded by darkness, alone, beset by nameless threats. At such a moment the contours of trusted reality are blurred and invisible, in the terror of incipient chaos the child cries out for his mother. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, at this moment, the mother is being invoked as a high priestess of protective order. It is she (and, in many cases, she alone) who has the power to banish the chaos and to restore the benign shape of the world. And, of course, any good mother will do just that. She will take the child and cradle him in the timeless gesture of the Magna Mater who became our Madonna. She will turn on a lamp, perhaps, which will encircle the scene with a warm glow of reassuring light. She will speak or sing to the child and the content of this communication will invariably be the same – “Don’t be afraid – everything is in order, everything is all right.

The mother’s comforting reassurance, “Don’t be afraid, it is all right”, is, in fact, a profession of faith, in God and the resurrection. When she says these words, she is making an act of faith just as surely, even if not as explicitly, as if she was saying: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty … and I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.”

When she assures the child that there is nothing to be frightened about, she means it, and she means it (without her even realizing it) not so much on the basis that there are no immediate dangers to the child or because she is herself able to protect the child as on the basis that, ultimately, everything is all right. What she senses which makes here able to comfort the child is that there is nothing to be afraid of, even if something should kill us or we should kill ourselves, because at the deepest level we are all in the hands of graciousness and love and not in the hands of maliciousness and terror. To say: “Don’t be afraid”, and mean it, is to say that, in the end, the power of goodness is stronger than the power of malice, that dead bodies come out of graves, that all our mistakes will be forgiven, and that all terrors are phantom.

That is the power of the resurrection! That is what we mean when we say: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” The resurrection means more than just the fact that God raised the body of Jesus from the dead. It means that God’s power to raise death to life buoys up every moment of life and every aspect of reality. The very atomic structure of the cosmos feels and knows that resurrecting power. That is why it (like us, when we are healthy) pushes forward blindly, buoyed up by a hope that it cannot understand.

Do you want to understand the power of the resurrection? Meditate Michelangelo’s Pieta: A woman holds a dead body in her arms, but everything about her and about the scene itself says loudly and clearly: “Don’t be afraid. It’s all right. Everything is all right!” 

There are different kinds of loneliness, just as there are different visions of intimacy. We ache in many places, just as we dream various dreams of consummation.

I remember as a young priest, just ordained and barely beyond the loneliness of adolescence, saying mass and feeling very deeply these words from the Eucharistic Prayer: “Grant that we, who are nourished by his body and blood, may become one body, one spirit in Christ.. I would say those words back then and they would excite my romantic imagination and incite feelings and fantasies that had to do with the fulfilment of my own personal loneliness. To become one body in Christ connoted, for me, that embrace that would put an end to my endless aching, restlessness, and sexual inconsummation. The need for unity in Christ, as I felt it then, had to do with my own personal distance from others.

That was the loneliness I felt then and that was what, by and large, I most wanted from the Eucharist (which I have always believed to be an embrace). I’m no longer a young priest and, although I cannot confidently state that I am beyond the loneliness of adolescent (who is?), I feel those words of the Eucharist quite differently now. When I now pray that Christ should make us one body, it is not so much my personal loneliness that I want overcome as it is something much wider, something beyond just me and my own aches and inconsummations. What I now feel more strongly is how painfully separate, and separated, we all are from each other and how seemingly hopeless are the divisions among us.

I pray the Eucharistic prayer now and what I feel, first of all, is not my own romantic and sexual separateness but how torn is our world and everything in, myself included. How separate we are! How divided!  So much makes it difficult, seemingly hopeless in fact, to ever be one body, one spirit – history, circumstance, background, temperament, ideology, gender, race, geography, and religion, among other things. There is a loneliness and inconsummation in the whole world. The world aches, as did my adolescent self.

Moreover, the older I get, the more I despair of any simple solution to this. There will not be world community, world peace, and one body simply because we sincerely desire it. The divisions among us, like the issues that separate a man and a woman who can no longer fight through the things that divide them and are asking for a divorce, are too overpowering. We too, as a world, cannot find a way any longer to embrace that will heal all the hurt and stop the divisions. We need an embrace from beyond, a vision from beyond, an intimacy we cannot give to ourselves.

Jesus, dying on the cross, is that embrace, that vision, that intimacy. We look at a cross and we see the secret. That is what real reconciling embrace looks like. We don’t understand it, we see it. And what do we see there?

A man, a God, hangs naked, exposed, vulnerable, defenceless, silent, with his arms stretched wide, open for an embrace, and with his hands also stretched open with nails driven through them. Yet strangely, in all that, we don’t see bitterness, defeat, and anger. Paradoxically, we see their opposite. This is what real trust, love, and metanoia (which means un-paranoia) look like.

And I say “look like” because we don’t understand this, we see it. We don’t understand intellectually how giving oneself over in betrayal teaches trust and how vulnerability and powerlessness are the real powers to bring about intimacy. But we see this when we look at the cross of Jesus. It is no wonder that so many people, millions of people literally, wear a cross as a symbol of love, trust, and hope. Unconsciously, they know, however dimly, what theology can never quite make clear to us, namely, that what divides us from each other can only be bridged by the cross of Christ and that our hope for intimacy and community is not in ourselves but in an embrace that is beyond us. In a cross this is not understood, it’s seen – mystically, not rationally.

So, as a priest, I stand daily before an altar and pray the words: “Grant that we, who are nourished by his body and blood, may become one body, one spirit in Christ.” What I pray for is precisely that what we see in the cross of Christ might be actually given to us, namely, an embrace from beyond ourselves.

In the cross lies the answer to our loneliness.

Every so often a book comes along that deeply touches the romantic imagination. Twenty­-five years ago, Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull did this.

Now, in North America at least, we have roughly the same phenomenon with Robert Waller’s book, The Bridges of Madison County (Warner Books, New York, 1992).

In the wake of this story, many a person, married and unmarried, will be restlessly searching for that one-in-a-million soulmate and daily scanning the horizon with burning eyes that ask:

“ls that her? ls that him? Might this finally be my soulmate, my destiny, the person with whom my true life can begin?”

Waller’s book is the true story of a love affair between Francesca Johnson, a farm wife from Madison County, Iowa, and Robert Kincaid, a free-lance photographer. In 1965, when he was 52 years old, Kincaid went to Madison County from Bellingham, Wash., to do some work for National Geographic magazine. His assignment was to take pictures of the covered bridges there.

Searching for one of those bridges, he stops by a farm house to ask for directions and his life and the life of Francesca, a married mother whose husband and two teenage children are gone for the week, change forever.

Instantly both sense that this meeting is not an accident but destiny. Both, too, instantly realize that life will never be the same again, that this meeting will leave a scar, of joy and pain, that will relativize all their joys and pains for the rest of their lives.

They spend just five days together, talking, drinking beer and brandy, smoking Camel cigarettes, dancing in the farmhouse kitchen, making love, sharing deeply their mutual loneliness, and taking pictures of the bridges of Madison County.

For them, however, those five days constitute a life-time, more than a life-time in fact. Both of them go to their deaths (Robert in 1982 and Francesca in 1989) believing that those five days were really their only real life and that in those five·days, they experienced something that, arrogant though this might sound, perhaps nobody has ever experienced as powerfully.

Waller’s book, based largely upon Francesca’s journals, found after her death, focuses mainly on those five days.

When Francesca’s husband and children return she is forced to make a choice—go with Robert or return to her life? Her whole being aches for Robert but her sense of duty wins out and she stays with her husband and children.

Except she doesn’t stay, really. From that day on, until she dies, even though she and Robert never see each other again and never, save for one small postcard, contact each other again, her heart and soul are with Robert and his are with her.

When, after his death, his will is opened, it contains a letter for Francesca within which he says: ‘I live with dust on my heart . . . There have been women before you, a few, but none after. I made no conscious pledge to celibacy, I’m just not interested.”

When he was leaving he had said to Francesca: “In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.” For Robert Kincaid and Francesca Johnson, that was true.

Perhaps it is not true for some of the rest of us, but the fact that this book has stirred such a restlessness within so many people suggests that a good number of persons believe that it could be true for them . . . if only they would meet that one special person!

What’s to be said about this? ls there some one-in-a-billion person out there, some soulmate, who, if we could only meet, would make us whole and make the world real in a way that nothing within our lives now can ever approximate?

There is something lodged inextricably inside the heart that wants to say “yes” to that. But one wonders: If Romeo and Juliet had lived, would the spell have broken? If Francesca Johnson had gone to live with Robert Kincaid, would this one-in-a-billion romance have eventually become a one-like-everyone-elses?

Neither the naive romantic nor the cynical analyst, to my mind, can answer that question correctly.

But irrespective of our own answer, whether Waller’s story deeply stirs our romantic imaginings or leaves us shaking our heads cynically at two people who felt they had invented the wheel, we must, I submit, deal with this longing for a soulmate more by filtering it through Augustine’s dictum, “you have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” than with restless eyes that assess every new person with the question: ”ls this finally her? ls this finally him?”