American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  Carolyn poured out three more cupfuls.

  “We have faced some difficult things in our lives too, James,” she said when she had resumed her seat. “Would you be interested in hearing how we have discovered meaning and purpose through our grief?”

  “I would, indeed. Though I have been around you both enough to suspect what you will tell me.”

  “If you think I am going to say that we discovered that meaning in God, and found in him the answers to the puzzle not the cause of the grief… then you are right. The more we understood God and his ways, the more everything that had happened to us fit into a wonderful pattern of purpose. In him we found peace rather than the frustration I seem to detect in your voice.”

  “A fair enough observation,” nodded Waters. “And probably an accurate one.”

  “My wife has hit upon the most crucial point of all,” interjected Richmond, “in what she said a moment ago—understanding God.”

  “It was my husband,” said Carolyn, still speaking to their guest, “who taught me the importance of such understanding. I was like your wife. I was raised in church, my father being a supply preacher. But when tragedy hit my life, the church was not enough. It did not sustain me or comfort me, and in fact had little to offer. I understand completely some of what you must have felt. I experienced those same doubts and emotions when I lost my first husband.”

  Waters took in the words with surprise. “I… I had no idea,” he said.

  “Like you,” Carolyn went on, “I lost my faith for a time. But then I met Richmond.”

  “You were a Christian, I take it?” said Waters, turning toward his host.

  “Oh, no,” answered Davidson, “I had just been through a terribly tragic divorce. To have associated me with the word faith could not have been more inaccurate. I was a mess in every way. I don’t think I believed in anything.”

  “But even in his unbelief,” Carolyn now went on, “he showed me the pathway back into faith.”

  “An intriguing thing,” said their guest. “How did he do that?”

  “It was Richmond’s insatiable spiritual curiosity, and his curiosity about God himself, that were, in a sense, the sustaining force in his life… in both of our lives, I should say. It helped us come through our difficult times to the place where you see us today where we are at peace with who we are and with life as it has come to us.”

  “I am more curious than ever,” said Waters. “Would you care to explain further?”

  Carolyn thought a moment. “Ever since the day I met him,” she began, “Richmond has been on a quest, a mission, to understand God. So many merely accept what they have been taught, never pausing to ask whether it makes sense or whether it rings true with the world around them, or, for that matter, with the world inside them. I suppose it was one of the things that so drew me to him—his spiritual curiosity.”

  “You were not that way yourself?”

  “Not really. I had to learn how to ask questions, and how to ask the right questions. Most Christians like myself do not learn it. They are not taught the value, even the necessity of spiritual questions. As I said, I had grown up as the daughter of a pastor. I had been taught much about God. But I had never been taught to be curious about God and his ways. A short time after losing my first husband, Richmond walked into our church full of questions about who God was and how he could be a good God who always sought our best. I can still remember the tone of his voice and that wide-eyed expression on his face—”

  Richmond broke out in a roar of laughter.

  “To listen to my wife, James,” he said, “you might think me a lunatic! I was as despondent as she. In the process of the divorce I mentioned, certain very painful charges were leveled against me.”

  “But in your grief, Richmond,” Carolyn persisted, now turning to her husband, “you wanted to understand… you were driven to understand. You didn’t want merely to react, and vent your wrath on the gods, so to speak. You wanted to know what it all meant. That’s what set you apart from anyone I had known in the church. You were hungry for truth. You weren’t willing to simply wallow in your grief and rail against God or life or fate for making you its victim. You stood up and said, ‘God, I want to understand you! How can you be my good Father who wants and does your best for me when suffering exists, and when I am suffering myself?’”

  “I suppose that is true,” nodded Richmond. “I wanted to understand. I still do.”

  “Maybe it is the lawyer in you,” laughed Carolyn, “always trying to dissect truth into its smaller and smaller parts in order to arrive at big-picture truth in the end. Or…” she added, pausing reflectively, “perhaps it is like your profession, James. That is the calling, too, of a journalist, is it not, like the attorney… to find truth, to investigate, to probe, to question, so that in the end, truth emerges.”

  “Actually, Carolyn,” said Waters, “that is not how I have been accustomed to viewing my profession. Just the opposite, in fact. But I had no idea you were an attorney, Richmond. I thought you were…”

  “Just a farmer?” added Richmond.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Think nothing of it.”

  “But, James,” said Carolyn, “I don’t understand what you mean by what you just said about your profession.”

  “I view myself as a reporter, not an investigator,” Waters answered. “My job is to report things as they are, not try to figure out what they mean. That is best left to the philosophers!”

  “Ah… I see. Yes, that makes sense, in contrast to what I said about Richmond trying to find meaning.”

  “Right. Have you heard of photography?” he asked, looking back and forth between the two Davidsons.

  “I have read an article or two about it,” replied Richmond. “As I understand it, the process involves the reproduction of images using emulsified silver on paper, which, depending on the degree of light it is exposed to, will turn varying degrees of black—the more light the darker, the less the lighter.”

  “You are remarkably well informed!” laughed Waters. “That is it exactly. Well, perhaps in a similar vein, I see my job as that of a photographer—to record what is, not speculate on what might be, or what any given photograph means. Mine is not to find truth but to record facts.”

  “But facts have meaning, James,” put in Carolyn.

  “Of course. But as I say, that is a job for the philosophers… or perhaps, if one is so inclined, for the theologians.”

  “Let me pose you a riddle, then,” said Richmond. “Say you take a photograph of a man standing beside a tree in a wood. Your job as a reporter, as you see it, is to record that fact, to write for your readers: A man is standing in a forest beside a tree. This is what he looks like. This is what the tree looks like. This is the expression on the man’s face. Is that a fair representation of your role in the affair—presenting the facts as revealed by the photograph?”

  “Exactly. You could not have stated it better.”

  “All right, then, let me pose a further conundrum. Suppose the photograph does not reveal the most important of all facts concerning the man? You say the facts as we see them are enough. But what if they are not enough? What if the most important fact of all is one the photograph does not show, and that, therefore, by recounting only what you see, you actually are unable to accurately represent the facts at all, and your description is at best a misleading one, or at worst, a false one?”

  “Go on,” said Waters, for the moment intrigued.

  “What if, for example,” Richmond continued, “just beyond the range of the camera, an enormous grizzly had charged at the very moment the picture was taken, accounting for the look on the man’s face, and that twenty seconds later the man lay dead on the ground and the photographer was running for his life? My question is: How accurate is the mere photograph of the man standing beside the tree in conveying either truth or fact? To omit mention of the bear seems less-than-adequate journalism?”


  “I see your point. It would all depend on whether I, as a reporter, knew about the bear or not. But in a way it is merely academic. The facts of the photograph can never in and of themselves reveal the bear.”

  “But perhaps further investigation can. What if the photographer survived? What if there were other witnesses? What if a great deal of additional evidence indeed exists that would enable the shrewd journalist or investigator to get to the bottom of the mystery of the photograph? Would it not be well to find out, to look into that evidence to see what it had to say?”

  Waters smiled. “You would indeed have made a cunning attorney,” he said. “Your analysis is keen. You plug the holes of possible objection before your adversary has the chance to poke his finger through them! But it all still sounds merely theoretical to me. What does any of this really have to do with you and me and your wife as we sit here in your garden right now?”

  “Everything, James,” rejoined Richmond. “It has everything to do with us.”

  “In what way?”

  “We have all been handed a photograph of ourselves standing in the midst of the world. But we don’t know very much about that world just from looking at the photograph. It is sometimes a confusing world, and we are sometimes part of that confusion. And stare at the photograph as we might, we just cannot make sense of it. We need to know more. Now there are rumors that the world we are standing in has no meaning or purpose and all came about by accident. Some say the world is an intrinsically cruel place. There are rumors, too, of goodness and happiness and eternal purpose. There are rumors of various gods who had some role in the creation of the world that may or may not have anything to do with us. There are other rumors of a God who does have to do with us and who will share his paradise with us if we are good and believe certain things about him, and will punish us forever if we don’t. There are all kinds of such rumors. But they all exist beyond sight of the photograph. Some people don’t care, and just put the photograph of themselves in a drawer and never bother to look at it or ask what it means or what might exist past the edges of it if only we could see a little further.”

  Richmond paused and looked intently at their guest.

  “But I was not such a one, James,” he said. “When I walked into that church and heard Carolyn’s father say, ‘God knows each one of us personally, really knows us, and wants the very best for us if we will just let him give it to us,’ something within me was suddenly no longer satisfied to look at a photograph of myself standing in the midst of a life that was complex and confusing and, in my case at that particular moment, painful. I wanted to know things about the forest and the trees and the landscape around me that the photograph didn’t reveal. I wanted to know if there were bears about, or perhaps if there was a good God about, unseen in the photograph, incapable of being caught as an image on the paper but there nonetheless. From whence comes the light surrounding the entire photograph? What else existed that the raw fact of the photograph could never in itself fully reveal? I wanted to know what that photograph of me standing in the forest meant. I wanted to know why I was standing in that wood, who had put me there, who had taken the photograph, and who was the one who had made such a thing as trees and men and bears and photographs capable of existence in the first place. Furthermore, having made them capable of existence, what might he be doing now, and how might he still be involved with them?”

  “You were full of many questions.”

  “I suppose, though I didn’t formulate them all at once. But that’s how it began. And a lifelong quest that has consumed me ever since—to know and understand the source of the light which enables such things as photographs to be taken at all. It has been my experience since giving my life to God some months after Carolyn and I met, that most who give to themselves the name ‘Christian’ have never investigated the source of light either. They call themselves by that name only because they have been told a great many things about the photograph. But they have never researched the matter for themselves. But such a policy could never satisfy me. I had to know… I had to understand.”

  “And what has been the conclusion of your quest to understand these things?” asked Waters.

  “That the light behind the photograph comes from the overarching goodness of a loving Fatherhood.”

  As Seth and Cherity set off together, neither was in a competitive mood and they rode side by side, talking casually.

  “Can we ride up the same mountain we did last time?” asked Cherity. “What was it called… some Peak or another?”

  “Harper’s Peak.”

  “That’s it!”

  “Sure—are you thinking…” Seth added, glancing over with a twinkle in his eye.

  “Of racing?” said Cherity. “No. I want to enjoy every inch of the way, and see everything. I can hardly believe I’m actually here again! I don’t want to miss a thing!”

  They entered the woody region above the pastures, whose trees were wet with the leftover sparkles of the day’s rain. Neither said much as they made their way through pine and oak and fir, gently ascending the ridge. Forty minutes later they emerged into the meadow where the race had begun at Cherity’s last visit.

  “It’s so beautiful,” sighed Cherity. “I remember it like it was yesterday.”

  “Maybe not a race, but how about a little canter?” suggested Seth.

  “Why not!”

  They urged their horses on and broke into an easy gallop across the green sward. They reached the opposite side, slowed, and continued up again, more steeply now over uneven terrain, in the direction of Harper’s Peak.

  “Did you ever get a horse of your own?” asked Seth.

  “I did,” replied Cherity. “And a beauty!”

  “A horse but no saddle?”

  “The right horse came along, but the right saddle hasn’t yet. Until it does, I am content to borrow one from the stables where we board him. It is a couple of miles from where we live so I’m not able to ride any time I happen to want to. I can’t believe that you have such a stable full of so many beautiful horses right outside your door!”

  “What’s your horse’s name?”

  “Whiteface.”

  “I don’t need to ask where that came from! What color is the rest of him?”

  “He’s a Spanish Andalusian, mostly gray with speckles of black, one black foot, a light mane and tail, almost white actually, and a pure white nose.”

  “He sounds stunning, just like Babieca.”

  “You know horses!”

  “Doesn’t everyone know of El Cid’s famous Andalusian who lived to be forty?”

  “No, not everyone does! I’ve never met anyone who did!”

  “What’s his temperament?”

  “My Whiteface is both gentle and fast. My only regret is not being able to completely give him the rein and let him run until he can run no more.”

  “Do you find that riding clears your mind, helps you think straight?”

  “Oh, yes—there’s nothing like it. You’re out in the fresh air with a companion who maybe doesn’t understand things the way people do, but still who is regal and maybe a little understanding in his own way, at least I like to think so… there’s nothing I love so much.”

  “I know the feeling exactly. You’re alone, but not alone. A horse won’t bother your thoughts or intrude, yet gives a feeling of friendship at the same time.”

  “It’s not like having a human friend, but it’s almost as good in a different kind of way. I don’t think I could ever be bored or be altogether sad if I was with my horse.”

  “Do you remember the last time you were here,” said Seth as they reached the plateau and continued toward the peak. “You said you thought that including God in your life would be stuffy and boring.”

  Cherity chuckled at the reminder.

  “Have you had any new spiritual realizations since then,” Seth added, “or do you still believe that?”

  “I don’t know if you’d call it a realization or not,�
�� said Cherity, “but I’ve decided that I’m an atheist.”

  Seth began to laugh. His tone was not a mocking one, but one rather of humorous incredulity.

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

  “No, I really am… I mean it.”

  For a moment Seth could not stop chuckling. Gradually he realized she was serious. He slowly stopped and looked over as their horses walked slowly along beside one another.

  “You think it’s funny?” asked Cherity.

  “I don’t know—maybe not funny,” replied Seth, “if that’s really what you believe. I’ve just never before heard anyone make such a straightforward admission. Why do you say you’re an atheist?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I tried going to church once. I suppose I was curious about my mother and her faith. There were some ladies, friends of my mother’s… they were intent on getting me saved, I guess you would say. All they could talk about was sin and hell and nothing that sounded appealing to me. Actually, yes… they struck me as stuffy and boring, and what they said made little sense anyway. It was like they had their own little private language. I don’t think they cared if it made sense to me, they just wanted me to admit that I was a sinner and then pray and turn my life over to God or something. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like them. If Christianity made people like those three ladies, then I wasn’t interested. Sometime after that I decided I didn’t believe in God at all.”

  “Because of those three ladies?”

  “I suppose in a way.”

  “I’d like to meet them!” laughed Seth.

  “Why!”

  “Your description fascinates me… although they’d probably try to get me saved too. I’m not sure I’d like that any more than you did.”

  Seth thought a moment, then turned toward Cherity.

  “So you think that if people who profess something don’t live by it,” he said, “it makes the thing itself untrue?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it quite like that,” said Cherity. “Do you think that’s what I did?”

  “It sounded like it.”