Brothers+ The paragraphs below arrived in my mailbox from a blog. These lines are perhaps the beginning of a book. The author shared a few lines on a blog. Charles+ ALL BECAUSE OF YOU (Terry Veling, Australian Catholic University) “ALL KNOWLEDGE BEGINS WITH FEELING” I was sitting on a country road, admiring the sun-lit valley, listening to the wind. A stranger came up to me and we started talking. At first he was suspicious, and I felt myself under scrutiny. He came to inquire into this strange scene, this stranger sitting by the road. I commented on the beauty of the valley, asked him whether he lived in the house nearby, and if it was alright for me to sit a while. He smiled and I saw his suspicion ease. We began to talk and I suddenly found myself involved in a personal and friendly conversation. He discovered that I taught theology at a Catholic university, that I had come to the mountains to sit and write a while. He said he had lived in this valley for 25 years, since his retirement. He was now 82. He spoke with a noticeable Czech accent, and I learnt that he had immigrated to Australia just after World War Two. Maybe it was because I was sitting there writing – I’m not sure – but he said, “I am a sculptor – would you like to see my work?” At first I thought of politely declining, but then I felt the wind’s breath prompting me. So we walked up the road a little, talking about art and religion, his life and his work, until we approached the front gate of his property. I stopped in my tracks. Stunned. Before me was a huge granite stone with these words chiseled into it: All knowledge begins with feeling I immediately wanted to rush back to where I had been sitting, take up my pen, and practice this saying. We followed the tree-lined pathway that led to his house, and along the way there appeared various statues – like ancient ghosts, with singular dignity, carved from solid rock, yet filled with fluid forms: women, dancers, dolphins, birds, children. In another part of his garden, where he set himself to work, I saw three or four solid masses of raw rock. From one of these emerged a half-formed figure as if breaking free from the stone. I felt quite spell-bound. I had ventured into a stranger’s home. What was I doing here? I stood in this sculptor’s garden full of bewilderment and marvel. He then opened the door to a large shed. He asked me to take my off my sandals, as his wife liked to keep the floors clean. The shed was filled with examples of his work. In his hey-day, he had received various prizes. It seemed like quite an intimate moment to me. He was sharing his memories, his treasure. “This is holy ground,” I thought. I commented on a carving that caught my eye, the face of the suffering Christ. He said, “Well there’s quite a story behind that . . . I carved it in 1955, and someone purchased it. Then, a few years ago, I was visiting a market fair, and there it was! Someone had found it while cleaning out a house, and now they were selling it. Fifty years later, my suffering Christ came back to me, as if resurrected.” What was it, I wondered, that brought these two strangers together? One trying to write, another trying to wrest shape and form from stone? Was it the wind? The strange and wandering Spirit that blows where it will? Did this stranger come to me as a teacher? When he first arrived, I did not know he was a sculptor, nor less that he would invite me to his home. I didn’t know about the words carved in stone at the front of his gate. Did he come to tell me something? How is it, I wondered, that a person who deals in rock and granite, in hard and solid forms, nevertheless inscribes at his gate: All knowledge begins with feeling To carve feeling from rock, to let shape and form emerge from solid mass, to trust the chisel, to love, rather than fear, the raw beauty of ancient stone. Perhaps he really did come to teach me, perhaps the wind was right: latent in every aspect of life, even in the difficulty of rock, there is spirit and there is friendship – if only we could but feel. ALL BECAUSE OF YOU This is a rather simple event, yet I was quite taken by it. I had come to the mountains to do some writing, with a simple pen and pad, and a glorious view. Though I enjoy these small moments of retreat and solitude, I often wonder when I write: to whom am I writing? Another way of asking this question is: to whom is my life addressed? It seems to me that there is always an “other” to whom and for whom we live our lives. Of course, this question – “to whom or for whom do you live?” – will invite as many different responses as there are people. Yet the personal tenor of this question – “who is my life for?” – strikes me as having a different tone, and inviting a different quality of response, than the more abstract and impersonal question, “what is your life about?”