Tucked In
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On a quiet suburban street on a Sunday evening, just as it was getting dark, I saw a car pull into a driveway, and then the silhouette of a man walking from the car to the front door of the house, carrying a sleeping child. The child’s head lay on the man’s shoulder, his arms and legs dangling like the limbs of a puppet. They went in the door, and my imagination filled in the rest of the story.
I imagined that the family had been on a day trip in the car. During the warm summer day the boy had run, played, jumped, shouted, eaten. On the way home, he had fallen asleep in the back seat.
My mind went back twenty-five years, to a time when I was that Dad, driving home from a picnic and a hike in the mountains, singing songs in the car, at last seeing the familiar neighborhood in the car lights, pulling into our driveway, and finding one or more of the kids sleeping so soundly that even carrying them in and dressing them for bed did not disturb their slumber.
And then my mind went back fifty years, to when I was that boy, and I remembered how safe I felt in the darkening back seat, with my parents up front. I could put my head down and doze off, trusting that nothing bad would happen. And I would wake up in bed, thinking, “How did I get here? The last thing I remember is being in the back seat of the car.” And I realized that my parents had carried me from the car, put me to bed, and tucked me in.
The early Universalists believed that the fate of a human being was like that. No matter how rough the trip might have been or how badly you might have behaved, at the end you would come home, and it would be a place of trust, safety, and love. Two centuries ago, many people were amazed to hear this message, because most churches told them that at the end of their journey they were more likely to face punishment for all their failings.
So is the Ultimate Truth that our souls will be taken care of in the way a loving parent takes care of a child? I don’t know. Certainly much of life is not like that. I was lucky. Many children do not have happy homecomings.
I have no answers for Ultimate Questions, but I do have some Partial Truths that I’m quite sure of. Here is one: There is love in this world. There is trust, and there are places of safety where a person can lay down his or her head for a while. The world is not entirely so, but I’m absolutely certain that the world is partially a place of love. And wherever that love comes from, it is manifested in this world by human beings. We are the agents of that love.
From Stone Blessings: Meditations, by Robert Walsh. Published by Skinner House in 2010, and available through the UUA bookstore or 800-215-9076.
