For more than forty years, Robert Raines’ devotional book, Creative Brooding (Macmillan, 1966), has been a source of inspiration and challenge along the way of my journey–both personally and professionally.
If today, I read from it less, I find myself more often sharing a selection, here and there–as I’m doing in this week’s blog–with others.
A United Methodist/United Church of Christ minister, the Reverend Raines published prolifically during his active ministry, his books relating primarily to personal moral and spiritual growth in the most practical and expansive of ways.
Creative Brooding consists of thirty-some daily devotions which include a short literary selection–however ostensibly secular, sacred or both–followed by appropriate scripture lessons and a brief prayer.
As we Christians, in these days, dramatize the Advent of Christmas–this season of four Sundays meant for waiting and longing, in expectation–hardly priortized values in a commodified culture as anxious as ours: this particular Creative Brooding selection seems somehow appropriate. It comes from the playwright, the late Moss Hart.
It’s entitled “Two Lonely People.”
“We hurried on, our heads bent against the wind, to the cluster of lights ahead that was 149th Street and Westchester Avenue, and those lights seemed to me the brightest lights I had ever seen.
Tugging at my father’s coat, I started down the line of pushcarts . . . I would merely pause before a pushcart to say, with as much control as I could muster, ‘Look at that chemistry set!’ or ‘There’s a stamp album!’
Each time my father would pause and ask the pushcart man the price. Then, without a word we would move on to the next pushcart. Once or twice he would pick up a toy of some kind and look at it and then at me, as if to suggest this might be something I would like.
But I was ten years old and a good deal beyond just a toy; my heart was bent on a chemistry set or a printing press. And there they were on every pushcart we stopped at. But the price was always the same. And soon I looked up and saw that we were nearing the end of the line.
Only two or three more pushcarts remained.
My father looked up too, and I heard him jingle some coins in his pocket. In a flash I knew it all. He’d gotten together about seventy-five cents to buy me a Christmas present, and he hadn’t dared say so in case there was nothing to be had for so small a sum.
As I looked up at him I saw a look of despair and disappointment in his eyes that brought me closer to him than I had ever been in my life. I wanted to throw my arms around him and say, ‘It doesn’t matter . . . I understand . . . this is better than a chemistry set or a printing press . . . I love you.’
But instead we stood shivering beside each other for a moment–then turned away from the last two pushcarts and started silently back home.
I didn’t even take his hand on the way home, nor did he take mine. We were not on that basis.
Nor did I ever tell him how close to him I felt that night–that for a little while the concrete wall between father and son had crumbled away, and I knew that we were two lonely people struggling to reach each other.”
